X-Message-Number: 7181
From:  (Thomas Donaldson)
Subject: Re: CryoNet #7163 - #7175
Date: Wed, 20 Nov 1996 19:30:18 -0800 (PST)

Hi again!

I was very interested by Charles Platt's posting about science fiction. I had
come to feel the same way, and kept wondering whether the change was in me
or in science fiction or in both. I don't read much of it any more, though I
still read some and like a few authors, mostly as light reading on long
airline flights or other such trips.

One problem I see with lots of sf, a persistent problem, is that the characters
are basically 20th Century Americans dressed up in funny hats. AS an

extrapolation to the future, that's clearly wrong. The way people think and feel
has changed a great deal in only 100 years: only 100 years ago it was quite
acceptable to discriminate between races, women were felt widely to be
incapable of thinking as well as men, education was restricted (with the idea
that it SHOULD be so restricted) to a much more limited class of people, people
were much less willing to accept foreigners of any kind (and "foreigner" then
often meant someone from 100 miles away!), religion was much more highly
respected, scientific research got only a very small portion of the US budget
(as with other countries, too), and so on and on. A show such as Star Trek
itself would be seen by many communities as not only a violation of morals but
so far out of the range of possibility as to seem like the ravings of a madman.

In fact, even 50 years has changed a lot. 

I don't mean that such attitudes and ideas were universal, just that they were
quite common. And yes, someone of 1900, with a careful eye, might have seen
the core of our present ideas in a few people of the time --- though it would
be much harder to do so than might seem. Lots of ideas must have existed 
among small groups then just as they do now; to find the ones which might 
someday become dominant could not be easy.

We will not find our future in science fiction. Moreover, Charles' comments
make me wonder if perhaps it really is sf which changed, not me. Some ideas 
about the future cannot be easily explored just in discursive prose: fiction
and even poetry has a role. But where once a big proportion of sf tried 
somehow to see the future, even if vaguely, most sf now just doesn't even
try. As literature I think it is much the weaker for that.

And of course the audience for sf has changed. Perhaps the feeling of some
cryonicists that sf is a good field for recruitment comes because they think
that all the sfans they see out there are really like them, as they were when
they first started reading sf: people with an interest in IDEAS and what they
mean for real life. 

				Best and long long life,

					Thomas Donaldson


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