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 \u201cscience\u201d in some aspect of the story.\u00a0 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).\u00a0 You have space travel, time travel, dimensional travel, multi-verse reality.\u00a0 There\u2019s solar system colonization (with and without terraforming), interstellar exploration with and without colonization), there\u2019s first contact with different alien species, there\u2019s interplanetary war, interstellar war, there\u2019s the human galactic empire, there are galactic civilizations made up of many species.\u00a0 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).\u00a0 We have futures that include artificial intelligence as our servant or as our master or locked in a mortal combat with us.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 There are even stories about our extinction.<\/p>\n
But almost all of these stories have been terribly far from reality.\u00a0 Even the \u201chard\u201d 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.\u00a0 For instance, interplanetary space travel.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 The only exception has been manned travel to the Moon.\u00a0 Looking at Heinlein\u2019s Moon landing in the movie \u201cDestination: Moon\u201d it really wasn\u2019t that terribly different from the reality of the Apollo missions.\u00a0 Now granted he used a single vehicle and not the orbiter plus lander arrangement, but the overall effect was pretty close.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n
And as for interstellar flight they\u2019ve hand waved themselves past the realities of just how insanely far away even the closest stars are in terms of travel time.\u00a0 I won\u2019t even begin to talk about anything like time travel.\u00a0 There just isn\u2019t any scientific evidence that it can even possibly exist.\u00a0 As for Skynet deciding to kill off humanity using a cadre of cyborgs that look like Arnold Schwarzenegger, well I won\u2019t say it can\u2019t happen but I think maybe liberties have been taken with the likelihood.<\/p>\n
So, what should science fiction be about?\u00a0 Let\u2019s talk about that in Part 2.<\/p>\n