12 September 2004

The announcement of the death of Sci-fi is premature

The Globe and Mail: "'Science fiction has never been about the future, it's always been about the present day whether it's Victorian England that Wells was writing about or the post-9/11 era that I'm writing about,'"

That s why. Sci-fi at its best is about thought experiments about the effects of technology on the human social psyche and/or about a way to put magic back into storytelling without it seeming to be too childish [plausible magic: it's interesting to note Asimov's dictum that any sufficiently advanced technology would appear to be magic to someone unfamilier with it]. Sci-fi is an important tool in our kit for negotiating cultural change. Emergent church leaders should read more of the right kind of sci-fi stuff just to flex their social imaginations....

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