If you go home, turn on the laptop, the TV – almost anything could be reported. The world has become a science fiction novel, everything's changing so quickly. Science fiction turns out to be the realism of our time, which is very satisfying. ... Depending what we do in next 20 years, it's very hard to be plausible, to say this is what's going to happen. At that point you can't write science fiction, [so] the genre is in a little bit of a crisis, and all the young people are reading fantasy.Science fiction author Kim Stanley Robinson (who you will remember wrote a passionate defense of the genre in New Scientist recently) admits in The Guardian that sci-fi writers can't be prophets in the way they could be in the past and asks :
If the world is a science fiction novel then what do you read? What can the literature do for you?Robinson's new novel is Gallileo's Dream, described by Alison Flood as :
... on the one hand a scrupulously accurate, joyfully affectionate portrait of the life of the first modern scientist, Galileo Galilei; on the other a wild leap through the solar system to the moons of Jupiter and a future civilisation – Robinson set out to pin down time travel.
5 comments:
Oh a post of science fiction! Thanks for this. Haven't had one in a while (have been ploughing through some horror in conjunction with Halloween - Susan Hill's 'Woman in Black', John Harwood's 'Seance')
I'll look up Alison Flood and Kim Stanley Robinson now! (hope it's in the Southwark council libraries)
Even with the constant barrage of info thrown at us people haven't changed in the last 20 years so why would it be impossible for new generation Asimovs and Heinleins to write about a fantastic future? Wish I could!
Sharon, your cat blog is up on the Katz Tales blog!
If scifi must be grounded in real science then only scientists are qualified to write scifi? The non-scientists write fantasy?
Science fiction novel
If you want to meet Robinson (and others like GRRMartin) come to the SF Worldcon in Melbourne in Sept next year.
I'm going!
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