A brief post today, after a long afternoon/evening watching the Oscars. (On the West Coast, what with pre-shows, it ran from mid-afternoon to nearly 8pm.)
So instead of noting news or opinion items today, let me just note a nascent thought of mine that’s emerged in recent weeks. I’ll begin with a reminder that every post like this, every post other than objective linking and quoting, is a first draft of sorts, a record of today’s thoughts that might undergo rethinking tomorrow, or next week, or next month. Just as what I opined yesterday, or last month, or five years ago isn’t necessarily what I’d say today. (Usually, when I look back at old posts, I’m bothered only by inexact wording, not ideas I’ve completely abandoned. For some of these ideas it’s important to state things precisely, lest people read into them things I didn’t mean. You know the examples.)
So then. Context: back in the 1960s and ’70s Harlan Ellison published two anthologies of never-before-published stories by a wide variety of sf and fantasy writers, anthologies he called DANGEROUS VISIONS (1967) and AGAIN, DANGEROUS VISIONS (1972). His notion was that publishing at the time, even in the ’60s when culture was loosening up from the prim 1950s, still had many strictures on what could be written about (e.g. race relations, or homosexuality) or what words could be used (see George Carlin). Ellison wanted his contributors to write stories that could not be published, or perhaps had not been published, in the conventional science fiction magazines at the time, or in mainstream magazines that would occasionally run genre stories.
(Ellison planned, back in the ’70s, a third volume called THE LAST DANGEROUS VISIONS, which he bought stories for and tinkered with, writing his trademark introductions, for decades, until he died in 2018 without the volume being published. An associate, J. Michael Straczynski, eventually assembled the fragments left (many of the contributing authors had “bought back” their stories over some 40 years and published them elsewhere) and issued them under the originally intended title, if rather disingenuously indicating it as “edited by Harlan Ellison.” But that’s another story.)
The point is that the phrase “dangerous visions” will forever be associated with those Harlan Ellison anthologies.
And yet, I’m thinking I have an even more dangerous vision, that I can’t help using that description for. It’s this: that virtually all the speculations of science fiction, intended as plausible extrapolations of scientific understanding or of future cultural developments, will turn out to be fantasy, driven by the biases of human nature, and not reflective of actual possibilities in the natural world. Science fiction will turn out to be a sham. It will turn out that humans cannot escape their psychological biases, their blinkered view of reality. We’re not doing a very good job of maintaining the progress we’ve already made in understanding the real world outside of human experience, as conservative biases reject knowledge in favor of intuitive superstitions. MAGA, MAHA. And this idea is dangerous because it removes the conceit that science fiction is somehow superior to fantasy in its respect for the real, objective world, while fantasy is elaborate indulgence into things human imagine to be true, or wish to be true. So, perhaps that difference does not exist.
Over the decades, there’s already been the realization that things like time travel and extrasensory perception (telepathy, precognition, etc) do not stand up to the tests of real science. More recently, ideas of faster-than-light travel have fallen away, and with them the fantasy of interstellar empires; these ideas survive only in “pop sci-fi”, like Trek and Wars and most TV and movie science fiction, in which spaceships still arc like jet fighters and explode in fireballs. But not in honest science fiction, which is becoming increasingly rare.
If legitimate science fiction still exists, it’s better called “philosophical” science fiction, in which some counter-factual notion is entertained for the length of story in order to examine its potential impact on human life and human culture. But such notions — see works by Ted Chiang and Greg Egan — are not intended as realistic speculations of possible realities. That’s why their stories are ‘difficult,’ counter-intuitive, and thus nowhere near as popular as the space opera fantasies of pop sci-fi, in which intuitive, common-sense ideas of how the universe works are projected onto the cosmos at large. (Much as intuitive, common-sense notions of human experience are the foundations of religions’ supernatural claims.)
This notion is a fear, not a definite conclusion.
And that’s as much as I can do in 30 minutes or so. No doubt I’ll refine this post in the morning.
