Those books can be good…but they can also come across like those 1950’s ads for the “kitchen of tomorrow” (see right). There was (and is) this notion that human endeavor happened on a straight line, and was all building towards this One Great Good (though no one seemed to agree on what that Great Good looks like, even today).
It’s about slipping the bounds of reality and tossing out that idea of “progress”. It isn’t just about the gizmos and gadgets (although those can be great), or about inventing new technologies to outdo what science has done today (although Jules Verne made a pretty penny doing just that). And his novels depict that fear very well.īut the point I am trying to make here is that those works that we call “science fiction” very often speak to, and reflect, the world around us far more accurately than we give them credit for doing. …And Lovecraft was a racist, anti-Semitic, misogynistic creep who was, quite literally, terrified of everyone who didn’t look like him. George Orwell wasn’t just using up scrap paper when he penned 1984 (or Animal Farm, for that matter) he had seen first hand the harm that megalomaniacal leaders had on their people, the kind of pernicious fear that government surveillance provoked, and the real danger of tyranny, and his novels were meant as warnings as much as they were for entertainment. Huxley wasn’t just using up some extra ink when he penned Brave New World–he was giving voice to his fears that consumerism and economies based on mass-production could rob humanity of its uniqueness. What each of these references show is that science fiction is a really powerful tool for helping us cope with our own world–and to imagine a better one. And it’s good for more than just escapist reading when the world around us becomes too real. Lovecraft’s most well-known godlike beasty.īut science fiction is good for much more than passing literary references that make everyone feel a little cooler than their neighbors. I personally saw more “Cthulu for President” signs and shirts than I ever really thought possible over the past eighteen months, each of which were references to H.P. We talk about “Big Brother” watching, and a number of commentators have begun to reference the slogan “War is Peace Freedom is Slavery Ignorance is Strength” both of which are nods to George Orwell’s classic novel 1984. Literary allusions abound these days, dear readers–we hear the US being referred to as a “brave new world”, a nod to Aldous Huxley’s novel published in 1932. I think that is something we can all agree on, especially these days.