[Perry] The Future of Science Fiction

Do you ever wonder what the future will hold for books and stories?

I mean, in some respects, things will largely be the same. There will still be those biography pieces (Miley Cyrus Clone #227-4 does something scandolous!), and there’ll still be historical fiction (How I Survived the Great Walmart Closure of 2172) and all…but what about fiction?

Do you think fantasy will change at all? I don’t think it will, after all, fantasy usually takes place in a make believe world, and unless we discover an alien race with magical powers out there among the stars, I doubt that the realm of fantasy will change all that much.

You know what I really wonder about, though?

Science fiction.

I’m a pretty avid science fiction reader. I enjoy the little glimpses of the future that might be and I love looking at the way people imagine how things will turn out.

Books like Love Minus Eighty shows us what the future of social media might looks like.

Old Man’s War, The Legion of the Damned, and The Lost Fleet shows us the future of warfare.

Books like Vacuum Diagrams and Dune shows us what things might look like, far, far, far into the future, past our comprehension and biases…

But what will science fiction look like fifty years from now? One hundred years from now? Five hundred?

These thoughts kicked off as I re-watched an old episode of Firefly.

There’s a bit where everyone’s chatting and then this happens:

Wash: Psychic, though? That sounds like something out of…I dunno, science fiction.

Zoe: …You live in a spaceship, dear.

The quote stuck with me because…because that quote? It implies that science fiction hasn’t changed, in however far into the future the show is set at. It implies that spaceships travelling around the galaxy is STILL science fiction…

And I don’t think it will be.

I think that as our technology advances to the point that the things we see in sci-fi now seem commonplace? Science fiction as a genre will have advanced and evolved to take advantage of new possibilities that are just over the horizon.

…Or will it?

If you look at the fantasy genre in the past few centuries, has much of it really changed? Look at something like Tolkien’s work compared to something like The Wheel of Time.

Other than advancements in literary techniques, I don’t really see much that’s different or stunningly new in fantasy NOW as there was fifty or sixty years ago.

Science fiction, though? Has evolved.

Look at something like John Carter of Mars and the science fiction of the time compared to some of the sci-fi novels I’ve mentioned above. The science has a tendency to feel more real as our understanding of the universe changes, doesn’t it?

It makes me wonder how science fiction will change in the future…whether we’ll still be reading about robots with the Three Laws in their positronic brains…while we’re simply brains embedded in a titanium alloy casing to prevent aging.

Or maybe?

Maybe we’ll suffer a cataclysmic world war, go back to the stone age and be able to have the science fiction stories we have now be just as good hundreds of years down the line.

You think?

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