Over a year ago I ran across a column by Clive Thompson in Wired, “Why Sci-Fi is the Last Bastion of Philosophical Writing”. I liked it then and upon rereading it, I still like it well enough to share here.

From the article: “If you want to read books that tackle profound philosophical questions, then the best — and perhaps only — place to turn these days is sci-fi. Science fiction is the last great literature of ideas.”

I would agree. One thing that differentiates most sci-fi from fairy tales and other folklore is the “science” part, a drive to link the fantastical outcome to the present by some plausible bridge: if this happened, and if this were true, then here is what could result. The strength of this bridge depends on several things, but in large part, it depends on whether the writer has made a plausible argument.

As literature, sci-fi has had an uneven past; as Thompson says, “the genre tolerates execrable prose stylists.” When it comes to the elements of good storytelling, the sci-fi audience has historically set the bar pretty low in order to encourage anyone willing to take the stage. When I return to some of the Asimov stories that I loved as a teenager, I’m startled to see how rudimentary they are. Even his celebrated Foundation novels are the literary equivalents of napkin sketches when compared to sci-fi stories written today about similar themes. But that’s because what gives a sci-fi story staying power is the strength of its central idea, the reason why individual Twilight Zone episodes are often sharing mental shelf space with three-volume trilogies.

Taken together, the body of sci-fi written and filmed over the last fifty years (or hundred, depending on where you mark its genesis) describes a certain kind of collective imagination, preparing us to avoid or accept what may come next.