The old joke goes that you can always tell science-fiction readers because, whilst other people say they live in the world, science-fiction readers say they live on Earth. Indeed.
Every Wednesday, though, I now get to visit another world: it has no formal name as yet, so Planet B-17 will do. "It's University, Jim, but not as we know it". Not as I know it thus far, anyway; it certainly is different to anything else I'm doing. Without getting too solipsistic, it's as if someone designed this course just for me: It's about science-fiction; it's about the books AND the films; it's about how science-fiction interacts with our reality; oh, and it's in english. And there's no other medical studes on it. Bliss.
So, big shout-out to the teachers who dreamt up this course: thank you for this breath of fresh air; I hope you're getting as much from this as I am.
And so, let the musings begin...
First of all: I hate calling it Sci-Fi, or SF. Yes, it may take a little longer to write 'science-fiction', but in Chile it's practically subversive not to turn everything into an acronym straight away, so, I plan to fight the machine by giving it the dignity it deserves, and use its proper first and last name. No trees will be harmed in the use of this longer label; only several billion electrons will be mildly inconvenienced.
We have spent a couple of classes trying to define what is science-fiction; we had fun, but got nowhere. It is easier to say what it is not; this at least gives borders to our undiscovered country... True, science-fiction features technology, and biotechnology - usually, this is existing science and technology taken to the n-th degree, extrapolated to a point where it is still recognisable, if not quite immediately attainable - but, for me, it is never about the hardware: it is about how we use that n-th degree technology to create our brave new worlds. Jules Verne never fetishized the Nautilus; he used it to open up the oceans. The Starship Entrerprise was not about the Warp Drive; it was about pushing the envelope on syntax and space exploration.
So, for me, the fun in science-fiction is the spaces it opens up in fiction - it unfetters us from the soap-opera of the everyday, but still grounds us in the real, in the human. Unlike the opium that is all-out fantasy-fiction, it still has something to teach us about ourselves.
We have so far looked at Solaris, and Minority Report: top choices, as the common ground between them is perceptions of reality. What is reality, when we can change it just by imagining it differently? The process of reality creation that these stories' protagonists go through is almost a meta-commentary of the process that science-fiction itself has on us, I sometimes feel.
For what it is worth, then, I find it useful to think of science-fiction as neither about the science or the fiction, but about the reality it creates in its wake.
