What is science fiction?


		WHAT IS SCIENCE FICTION? Science fiction defies categorization as it contains a huge gathering of disparate forms of fiction including horror, futuristic, magic, fantasy and a profusion of more demonic monsters than the Middle Ages ever imagined in its preoccupation with hellfire and damnation. Interest in the future is always partly fear-based—the unknown, the mysterious and ‘what’s-to-come’. H.G. Wells was deeply concerned with the threat/promise of technology. He struggled in his time to create a peaceful world community, profoundly disappointed at his death with humanity’s inability to transcend the limitations of its time. So of course he dreamed of time travel, the only alternative solution. Forty years later Aldous Huxley (Brave New World) and George Orwell (1984) wrote scathing denunciations—dystopias—of science, technology and their dehumanizing inventions. Orwell predicted mind control by fear and intimidation, while Huxley imagined the biological engineering of uneducated, hedonistically pleasured drug-drones. At the beginning of the cold war Ray Bradbury, a consummate romanticist like myself, who wrote the beautiful Dandelion Wine about an idyllic summer of happiness, yet was terrified of nuclear holocaust when he envisioned Earth both destroying itself and the wise advanced Martians in The Martian Chronicles. In the late 20th century Michael Crichton, worrying about medical and computer viruses writes Armageddon stories like Coma, Jurassic Park, and Andromeda Strain, but then tries to convince us there’s nothing to be afraid of in State of Fear that deals with global warming. Currently science fiction is almost synonymous with fantasy—magical Hobbit stories. You can’t tell whether Neil Gaiman is telling a mythical magic tale, once called a children’s story, or writing a story about grown up people. He seems to be doing both in American Gods, which illustrates what’s happened to science fiction. It’s become there-are-no-limits-in-the-universe fantasy writing, turning science fiction into cartoons and comic books for grownups. I believe entirely in fantasy. That’s what fiction is. But magic has been replaced by psychology…not the official kind, but what one learns about life and what really improves it by being a psychotherapist for thirty years. We have a love affair with both magic and alien monsters in an attempt to convince ourselves that the most dangerous element to human survival is otherworldly and foreign, when it’s human and very familiar. As H.G. Wells believed it’s our species inability to cease violence. In the realm of the human psyche ‘alien’ means ‘estranged’. It’s the feeling of depersonalization, of chaos, of the ground dropping out from under us. Unlike its mother, psychology, psychotherapy lives in an emotional realm. Some professionals only talk theory to their patients as well as to each other and to themselves. But the good ones know that psychotherapy is fundamentally an experience of feeling for both people, from which insight evolves. Viewed on its largest possible scale psychotherapy is nothing less than a social movement that has brought the philosophy of feeling back into the mainstream, away from the trivialized oblivion where we’ve dumped it in the name of ‘science’ for over a hundred years. Psychotherapy invites people to learn the reasoned language of emotion. Feelings think too. My science is utopian. Cassandra visits the planet Troubadour two hundred years in the future. This is a place where emotion determines priority as a foundation of social and political life, a world at peace with itself for a hundred and fifty years. Their politics are very radical, nothing less than giving up representative government and its corrupting backroom excesses, and replacing it with agreement between individual people all around the world to arrange their mutual lives…it takes a hundred years…such that trust becomes the predominant form of interpersonal experience. copyright© 2007, 2008 Don Fenn. All rights reserved.