Insistence of Vision Read Free

exploring the minutia and vast sweeping trends of times and generations that led up to ours.
    Indeed, I’ve long felt that SF should have been named Speculative History, because it deals most often in thought experiments about that grand epic, the story of us. Sending characters into the past, or exploring alternate ways things might have gone. Or else – most often – pondering how the great drama might extend further, into tomorrow’s undiscovered country.
    Oh, we can make do with “science fiction” as the term for what we do. But time remains the core dimension, vastly more important to our stories, our passions, our obsessions, than technology or even outer space.
    Where/when is your Golden Age?
    Elsewhere I contrast two perspectives on the Time Flow of Wisdom.
    By far dominant in nearly all human societies has been a Look Back attitude... a nostalgic belief that the past contained at least one shining moment – or Golden Age - when people and their endeavors were better than today. A pinnacle of grace from which later generations fell, doomed forever to lament the passing of Eden, or Atlantis, or Numenor…. You find this theme in everything from the Bible to Tolkien to Crichton - a dour reflex that views change as synonymous with deterioration. The grouchiness of grampas who proclaim that everything - even folks - had been finer in the past.
    Compare this attitude to the uppity Look Ahead zeitgeist: That humanity is on a rough and difficult, but ultimately rewarding upward path. That past utopias were fables. That any glowing, better age must lie ahead of us, to be achieved through skill and science, via mixtures of cooperation, competition and negotiation… along with (one hopes) greater wisdom. And if we cannot build it, then our grandchildren might be worthy of the task.
    The paramount example of this world-view would be - of course - Star Trek , though authors like Iain Banks and Vernor Vinge carry the torch of long-term optimism very well. Neal Stephenson’s Hieroglyph project attempts to coalesce more writers around this tradition, encouraging belief in the potential of tomorrow.
    Indeed, the notion of improvability used to be much more popular than it is now. Golden Age science fiction fizzed with belief in a better, hand-made tomorrow, a motif that has nearly vanished in the last decade or two.
    Oh, don’t get me wrong! The stylish rebels of the New Age SF movement were right to wield brilliant metaphors and splash cold water over the unabashedly uncritical, too-deferential worship of technological progress. If criticism is the only known antidote to error, science fiction (as we’ll see) must be a veritable cauldron of criticism! By poking sticks into the path ahead, SF is a major source of error-detection, providing its greatest service.
    Still, the genre retains this notion. That it is possible – perhaps just barely – that our brightest days may lie ahead. Indeed, that is science fiction’s greatest trait, distinguishing it from almost all other genres.
    The Fundamental Difference
    No, I do not claim that all fantasy is about the past, nor does all sci fi explore the future. Certainly, a story or film’s tools and furnishings don’t decide whether a tale falls in one category or another. Star Wars is filled with lasers and spaceships, yet it is fantasy in every way that counts. The novels of Anne and Todd McCaffrey contain dragons and medieval crafts, yet Anne maintained, with vigor and great justification, that she wrote science fiction.
    Putting aside superficialities, what difference flows much deeper than the choice of vehicles and weapons? Is there something basic?
    Fantasy is the mother genre, going back to campfire tales and epics of knightly chivalry, with deep roots in the font of our dreams.
    We’ve already commented that Science Fiction is the brash offshoot emerging from this ancient tradition. SF retains the boldness and heroic imagery, only then delivers a twist , having to do