Refocusing Science Fiction – Part 1

I guess strictly speaking, science fiction starts with Jules Verne and evolved into H G Wells and then expanded into a plethora of subgenres that include every imaginable kind of story that involves “science” in some aspect of the story.  And the types are endless and the mixing of the types with each other make the number of different subtypes equal to the cardinality of the continuum (a very big number they say).  You have space travel, time travel, dimensional travel, multi-verse reality.  There’s solar system colonization (with and without terraforming), interstellar exploration with and without colonization), there’s first contact with different alien species, there’s interplanetary war, interstellar war, there’s the human galactic empire, there are galactic civilizations made up of many species.  There are stories about the origins of the human race that involve older races either creating it or influencing it (with or without monoliths and xenomorphs).  We have futures that include artificial intelligence as our servant or as our master or locked in a mortal combat with us.  There are stories about our future that involve evolution either natural or induced that change us in any number of ways; physically, mentally or supernaturally where we develop abilities that give us almost godlike powers.  There are comic stories, love stories, war stories, literary stories that concentrate on the psychological effects of technology and stories that try to extrapolate what the future of technology and science will do to humans in the future.  There are even stories about our extinction.

But almost all of these stories have been terribly far from reality.  Even the “hard” science fiction writers who have tried to base their stories on science fact have for the sake of making an interesting story, diverged very far from what the future will really look like.  For instance, interplanetary space travel.  What has been imagined about exploration of the solar system for the last hundred years or so has been mostly wrong in several aspects of the science.  The only exception has been manned travel to the Moon.  Looking at Heinlein’s Moon landing in the movie “Destination: Moon” it really wasn’t that terribly different from the reality of the Apollo missions.  Now granted he used a single vehicle and not the orbiter plus lander arrangement, but the overall effect was pretty close.  Three or four Americans rocketed to the Moon and came back just as quickly as they could to avoid the difficulties of carrying enough rocket fuel for the return trip and air to breath for a few days.  But every other space flight in science fiction history has ignored things like micro-gravity health hazards and cosmic and solar radiation damage to the human body.

And as for interstellar flight they’ve hand waved themselves past the realities of just how insanely far away even the closest stars are in terms of travel time.  I won’t even begin to talk about anything like time travel.  There just isn’t any scientific evidence that it can even possibly exist.  As for Skynet deciding to kill off humanity using a cadre of cyborgs that look like Arnold Schwarzenegger, well I won’t say it can’t happen but I think maybe liberties have been taken with the likelihood.

So, what should science fiction be about?  Let’s talk about that in Part 2.