Why don't we love science fiction?
Dec. 6th, 2007 05:56 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lproven"The British are sniffy about sci-fi, but there is nothing artificial in its ability to convey apprehension about the universe and ourselves.Bryan Appleyard in the Sunday Times
... The big problem with being sniffy about SF is that it’s just too important to ignore. After all, what kind of fool would refuse to be seen reading Borges’s Labyrinths, Stanislaw Lem’s Fiasco, Orwell’s 1984, Huxley’s Brave New World or Wells’s War of the Worlds just because they were SF? These are just good books, irrespective of genre. But they are also books that embody the big ideas of the time – both Wells and Lem were obsessed with human insignificance in the face of the immense otherness of the universe, Huxley with technology as a seductive destroyer and Orwell with our capacity for authoritarian evil. Borges, like Lem, suspects we know nothing of ourselves. Interested in these things? Of course you are. Read SF..."
