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You may already know this — in fact, if you are any kind of SF fan, I know you know this — but Arthur C. Clarke has passed away. He was 90 years old. That’s how old my maternal grandpa was when he died.

I’m not sure why I made that connection, but I did. This leads me to the idea behind all good stories. You know the ones I’m talking about. Those stories that you remember for years after reading them, almost as if you read them last week.

Why is that?
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I think I talked about this before, but a lot of what was once far-out science fiction is common place today. Yes, we’re not all driving flying cars and we don’t have colonies on the Moon or Mars, but there is still much about life today that was pure imagination yesterday.

Here are some articles I found around the ‘net that talk about this subject:

Life … but not as we know it
By Richard Watson, The Sydney Morning Herald

Hunter: Technology keeps own pace
By David Hunter, KnoxNews.com

One Giant Leap, Followed by Decades of Baby Steps
By Dennis Overbye, The New York Times

I recently read Mike Treder’s Aug. 14, 2007, post at ieet.org about “Post-Millennial Malaise in SF?” and it got me to thinking about the link between future thinking and science fiction.

I can’t remember if I mentioned this before, but there is a pretty good theory about the rise of science fiction that says science fiction couldn’t exist until people realized that the future was going to be different than today. Basically, people’s lives were pretty much the same as the lives of their parents until the Industrial Revolution brought rapid change to society.

So, fast-forward to today where change is so fast, and so constant that people’s lives can change radically — several times even — within their own lifetime. Now its not just my grandchildren or children who will live their lives differently, but myself.
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Guest Writer: Sunil Tanna

Alternate histories are stories or scenarios which consider the question of what if the events of the past had turned out differently. For example, what if the Confederacy had won the American Civil War, what if the Germans had won World War II, what if Al Gore had won the 2000 US Presidential Election, or what if Michael Portillo had become the British Prime Minister.

In most (but not all) alternate histories, these history is generally assumed to have gone the same way as our actual history, until some specific point (known as the “Point of Divergence”) when a particular event has a different outcome. Sometimes the event may be important, and seen as such as the time, (for example, a battle going to other way), whereas in other alternative history stories, even subtle changes can result in profound changes to history because of the butterfly effect. Read more »

Back in 1941, Robert A. Heinlein proposed the initials “SF,” which at the time was a common abbreviation for “science fiction.” But he had another idea. He felt it should stand for the broader term “speculative fiction.” To this day, there are passionate debates about which term to use.

Is is all semantics? Here’s what I think.

Science fiction is a subset of speculative fiction, which also includes fantasy, magic realism and sometimes even horror. Speculative fiction encompasses all fiction that speculates on something that isn’t accepted as fact today (an outpost on Mars, sorcery, magical coincidence, ghosts, etc.) and treats it as a fact within the story.

Science fiction is more specific. It is a fiction that speculates on scientific concepts and theories, or at least pretends to. There is a fuzzy line there. The Barsoom novels are kind of science fiction, but are also purely fantasy (I mean really, a placental human successfully mates with a monotreme Martian?).

Now, just to let you know where I’m coming from, I tend to be a very tolerant, easy going person. I don’t like fighting and tend to find common ground when I can. Maybe that’s why I just don’t see what all the fuss over “science fiction” vs. “speculative fiction” is all about. I think they can coexist peacefully. What do you think?

It seems to me that quite a lot of science fiction — in fact speculative fiction as a whole — is used to comment on the current political climate when it was written. On television, Star Trek, Babylon 5 and the re-imagined Battlestar Gallactica are good cases in point. In literature, I could probably list thousands, if I took the time. Top of mind are Stand on Zanzibar by John Brunner, The Dispossessed by Ursula LeGuin, and Brave New World by Aldous Huxley. Read more »

Science fiction, unlike so many other genres of literature, has a unique culture. And so, it is not difficult to find opinion pieces and essays about the state of the genre. Once recent example is “The future of futurism” by Amy Biancolli of the Houston Chronicle. Read more »