WHO IS THE SCIENCE FICTION FAN?

 

Science Fiction is a form of technical writing to me.

It is science until it’s not.  It takes what knowledge we have about science and expands it to the very limits of its understanding and then leaps ahead beyond what we know to dimensions on the fringes of belief and expands on it even more.  Then, it becomes a universe.

Fantastic stories live within that universe for book after book until it exhausts itself into reality.  At that point, the fiction becomes real life and we live that science fiction turned science and invent new science fiction universes.  That is the cycle of what we know as science fiction.

For some of us, the life cycle of science fiction is too slow.  Those very special people grasp the future at a very early age and feel an urgency to catch up to a universe we know should already exist and doesn’t yet.  We see and become frustrated that others do not.

We look into the sky and know we are not alone.  We look at our planet and visualize the skyways of flying cars and antigravity aircraft and devices of all kinds.  We imagine pointing and firing a weapon of energy pulses.  We see civilizations of human life spanning into the hundreds of years, robots that become our best friends or worst enemies, our complete command over diseases, and societies living in modern, environmentally controlled domed cities. 

All of this, yet as humans remaining humans after all but somehow better able to handle advanced levels of adversity that only science fiction can depict.  Yet, in the minds of those who continue to reach for it, the universe of the future lies solely in the books, movies, and video games just barely out of our grasp, but through them, we are able to live that future we understand and love.

And, to be sure, we have attained those universes in our minds and hearts even as we continue to build the very universes we imagine.

Science fiction will never die.

-Ted R Bailey-