And everyone seems to complain about the lack of flying cars.

Prediction is very difficult, especially about the future.

Niels Bohr, Nobel-prize winning physicist

Here we are, New Year's Day once again, all of us time travellers zooming along at the frightening speed of one second per second (faster than it sounds), and you know, I have to say that I have mixed feelings about the future so far. I don't mean the future as in a hundred years from now, I mean now - you know, the future.

Because let's face it, that's where we're living, the future. It's 2009 now, and by the standards I grew up by, I'm sorry, 2009 is the future. It must be, I've read hundreds, if not thousands, of science fiction stories that took place in our past.

2001? Well, I think we all know what that was like: space stations, moon bases, artificial intelligences, interplanetary exploration, all that stuff. No, wait, the moon base went away with the moon in 1999, didn't it? Remember 1984? It wasn't all that much like 1984, was it?

The first Isaac Asimov robot story, Robbie, is a touching tale of a mute robotic nursemaid set in 1998 - you remember, five years before all the governments banned the use of robots on Earth. It's also one year after the opening scenes of Joe Haldeman's The Forever War, wherein an elite group of soldiers is trained to combat aliens in 1997, then hurled through a collapsar to Epsilon Aurigae, 2000 light years away. Philip K. Dick's Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep - better known to most people by the title of its movie adaptation, Blade Runner - was originally set in 1992.

This sort of thing is unfair, of course. As I discussed in my initial post, the role of science fiction is not intended to be predictive. Science fiction's role is one of "what if", not "when".

But I have to say that if I was going to pick someone to have written this particular future, it would have to be the late Mr. Dick. It's difficult for me to think of anyone else whose imagination would have created a future where there's a computer in almost every home in the Western world, incredibly powerful devices which require constant protection from offers of penis enlargement; where space exploration has been all but abandoned, apparently due to lack of interest; where the United States is involved in a war that costs them $720,000,000 a day - wow, do you think we'd be able to sell this to a publisher in 1955?

Oh well - the future is like a bed, I suppose. Having made it, we are forced to lie in it. Happy New Year, everyone - one more step into the future.

- Sid

"We're interested in the movie rights to your book title - but not your book."

Ah, the great traditions of science fiction cover art! This forty-nine year old publication doesn't cover all the bases, since it lacks a both a bug-eyed monster and a woman in either a brass bikini or see-through space suit, but it's still pretty good as clichéd covers go - the needle-pointed red-finned space ship, the bubble helmet, and the accordioned spacesuit. 

If only this poor fellow had gloves, it seems a bit much to be out there bare-handed. 

Sadly, I was unable to find a credit for the cover art, not so much as to assign blame but to attribute credit for copyright purposes. Of course, copyright for the novel resides with Alan E. Nourse, or more probably his estate (since his death in 1992). 

Nourse was born in 1928, and was a strong member of the Golden Age group of SF authors - Robert A. Heinlein dedicated his 1964 novel Farnham's Freehold to Nourse. There's often a bit of confusion about Nourse, because Andre Norton was writing as Andrew North at about the same time, and he is sometimes assumed to be another of her pseudonyms. (I admit to having fallen prey to this belief at one point.) 

Nourse has the dubious honour of having a movie named after one of his books without the movie itself having anything to do with the book in question: for some odd reason, the title of his 1974 novel The Bladerunner was borrowed for the 1982 movie adaptation of Philip K. Dick's Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?. This has to be one of the strangest decisions ever made when adapting a book to the big screen, like deciding that War and Peace would be a better sounding title for a movie version of Anna Karenina. 

As an footnote to the above, an uncopyrighted Nourse novel, Star Surgeon, is available at the Project Gutenberg web site.

- Sid

A rose by any other name.

I just picked up my copy of The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction - no easy task, at 1395 pages and 2 and 7/8 inches thick in trade paperback it's big enough to use as a bookend - and, in a moment of whimsy, looked up the term "Science Fiction". Surprisingly, there's no entry, and I couldn't seem to find anything in the Introduction or the "Contents of This Book". 

Oddly enough, there are listings for alternative names, such as the British "scientific romance" of the pre-WWII years, and the original "Scientifiction" of Hugo Gernsback's invention - even a quick hit-and-run on "sci-fi", apparently now being pronounced "skiffy" - but no actual definatory entry on "science fiction". You'd think if you were going to knock off close to 1500 pages on a topic, you'd spare a word or two on what it was you were discussing. 

 All right, then, what is science fiction? 

 Many of the available definitions seem to aim more at distinguishing SF from fantasy than anything else. Chapters, the major Canadian book chain, separates the two genres into separate sections, albeit with mixed success. I recently suggested to an undeserving victim who was ringing up my purchases that, as a basic rule of thumb, the ones with space ships on the covers are often SF, and the ones with dragons are usually fantasy. (Not a hard distinction, but a useful filter for the uninitiated.) 

However, there are obviously more subtle distinctions in play at Chapters: Batman novelizations are in the science fiction section, whereas Spiderman is fantasy. Hmmm... 

But, I digress - space ships and dragons aside, is there a functioning definition of science fiction in play? Thanks to Google™, we are quickly presented with over two million links for the search terms "science fiction definitions". (Apparently a few people have an opinion on this.) For the most part, I suspect that most people, albeit unwittingly, use the Damon Knight definition:

Science fiction means what we point to when we say it.

In other words, whatever we want to be SF, is. Personally, in spite of all the involved, thoughtful, and philosophical definitions that have been put forward, I've always had a strong affection for Philip K. Dick's take on the question, from the introduction to The Golden Man:

The SF writer sees not just possibilities but wild possibilities. It's not just "What if–", it's "My God, what if–!"

And we shall proceed on that basis - it's not just "what if".

- Sid