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This file is now CLOSED. This is an older version of what is now called: ETERNAL_HUMAN
March 6, 2004
Frederick Pohl once said:
"science fiction is
a way of thinking" Some of Pohl's thoughts about
thinking:
"Gold at the Starbows End"
"In the Problem Pit"
The fantasy that breakthroughs
await, demanding merely some
focused human attention.
This is touched on
in Blish/Atheling's
"A Question of
Content", a 1960
worldcon speech,
and also the
closing chapter of This also mentions Poul
"The Issue at Anderson's call for a
Hand". "Unitary" SF, that covers IN_DEEP
all the bases.
After discussing a number Over the years, Blish
of mainstream SF hits refers a lot to Sturgeon's
(e.g. "1984"), Blish says: critereon for good SF: a
story about the human heart
"In short, all these books are that "would not have
about something. I submit to happened without the
you that very few science technological premise".
fiction stories, even the best
of them, are about anything, A very wimpy critereon, that
and that in this sense they does little to explain why
fail Poul Anderson's unitary anyone would care about this
test in the worst possible way. literature of hypotheticals...
For all their ingenuities of
detail and their smoothness as
exercises, they show no signs
of thinking -- and by that I
mean thinking about problems
that mean something to
everyone, not just about
whether or not a match will
stay lit in free fall, which is
a gimmick and nothing else."
Blish's idea seems to be that real
literature must be about eternal
human verities, as opposed to the
merely technological realm that SF
champions.
But I would say that it's not clear
that "eternal human verities" are
eternal, human, or true; and the
technological realm definitely has
some bearing on these issues.
The concept of "eternal human
verities" has many, many fuzzy
edges and cracks, and I submit that
the true province of what we often
call "science fiction", is to drive
wedges into those cracks:
The meaning of the "human"
The way spirit is rooted
in the physical
The ways humanity might
transform itself. (or be
transformed...)
perhaps even
obviating some
verities.
transitory
sentient
conveniences
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