It’s true that many of the old dreams of science fiction have been fulfilled, or bypassed. And it does feel as if we’re living through a time of accelerating change. But science fiction has – rarely – been about the prediction of a definite future, more about the anxieties and dreams of the present in which it is written. In H. G. Wellsâ€ČŮ day the great shock of evolutionary theory was working its way through society, so Wells’s 1895 classic The Time Machine is not really a prediction of the year 802,701 AD but an anguished meditation on the implications of Darwinism for humanity.
As science has moved on, a whole variety of science-fictional “futures” has been generated. In 1950s and 1960s we had tales of nuclear warfare and its aftermath, like Walter Miller’s . The 1980s saw an explosion of computing power that led to “cyberpunk” fantasies such as . Today we have the possibilities of a trans-human future opened up by information technology and biotechnology – see books like as a response. And the great issues of climate change are explored in, for instance, Kim Stanley Robinsonâ€ČŮ Science in the Capitol series and my own Flood. Science fiction is a way of dealing with change, of learning about it, of internalising it – not so much prophecy as a kind of mass therapy, perhaps. Of course nowadays you get a book like , a disaster story of the near future, published without any reference to the genre at all. I don’t particularly think this is bad. In fact it shows the success of sci-fi and its methods. Science fiction has been assimilated, but it’s still there, still serving the same function.
In the coming years, whatever else we run out of – oil, fresh water, clean air – change itself will not be in short supply. So there will be no shortage of raw material for science fiction, and a need for it, however it’s labelled in the bookshops.
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- â€ČŮ latest book, , came out in July
