Death Rays Are So Yesterday

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I reckon it boils down to the scarcity of foreseeable future.

The world is speeding up, and the rate at which it’s speeding up is speeding up, and the natural human curiosity that science fiction was invented to meet is increasingly being met by reality. Why would I spend my money on a book about amazing-but-fake technology when we’re only a few weeks away from Steve Jobs unveiling a cell phone that doubles as a jetpack and a travel iron? As for the poor authors, well, who would lock themselves in a shed for years to try to predict the future when, in this age, you can’t even predict the present?

But the science fiction writers should not beat themselves up. If, through their talent and imagination, our species has progressed to the point where it no longer requires their services, that should be a source of pride, not shame, and the rest of us should be honoring these obsolete souls, not making fun of them in snarky, supposedly humorous commentaries (you know who you are).

There is only one tribute commensurate with the debt. Let all of us, today, march into the fiction section of our bookstores and quietly relabel the shelves to set the record straight.

Let everything but the truth be “fantasy,” and let the truth—the searing, unmanageable, discombobulating truth of the lives we have invented for ourselves in a world it took artists to imagine—be science fiction.

Excerpted from Discover(Aug. 2007). Subscriptions: $24.95 (12 issues) from Box 37808, Boone, IA 50037; www.discovermagazine.com.

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