Speculation, Fact and Fiction

Over on The Times Online, Brian Aldiss tells it like it is in his inimitable fashion. The journo, Bryan Appleyard is clearly a man of much good sense as well, analysing the relationship between SF and science.

The big problem with being sniffy about SF is that it’s just too important to ignore. After all, what kind of fool would refuse to be seen reading Borges’s Labyrinths, Stanislaw Lem’s Fiasco, Orwell’s 1984, Huxley’s Brave New World or Wells’s War of the Worlds just because they were SF? These are just good books, irrespective of genre. But they are also books that embody the big ideas of the time – both Wells and Lem were obsessed with human insignificance in the face of the immense otherness of the universe, Huxley with technology as a seductive destroyer and Orwell with our capacity for authoritarian evil. Borges, like Lem, suspects we know nothing of ourselves. Interested in these things? Of course you are. Read SF.

For this is where it excels. It is the most vivid and direct chronicler of our anxieties about the world and ourselves, what Mary Shelley called “the mysterious fears of our nature”.

Just a shame that Brian Aldiss indulges himself in a crack about fantasy that merely serves to perpetuate the outdated misconception that it's a literature of consolation. Ho hum. Still an article worth reading.

Right, that's enough Monday morning displacement activity. Back to work!