The Cultural Role of Science Fiction

The common stereotype of the science fiction fan is the four-eyed computer nerd, a social category that many of us try hard to avoid. However, as Brooks Landon argues in Science Fiction After 1900, cultural involvement with science fiction is totally unavoidable. Everyone is involved with SF, like it or not, as all media forms have incorporated SF tropes and issues. Those armies of teenagers at multiplexes, texting in the land of virtual reality on their pocket computers, while watching the latest superhero/alien invasion/Transformer/Hunger Games movie, understand this at least implicitly.

While some SF still has negative cultural cache, I note that the highest-grossing movies from 2000-2010 are pretty much all SF and fantasy. Take out the animated movies and you have to go to #38 before you spot a movie that doesn't have SF/fantasy elements. The 1990s were similar, with the Terminator series, Jurassic Park, Men in Black, and Independence Day among the highest-grossing movies. I suspect the same is true for the best-selling video games throughout the history of video games.  And then there's comicbooks.

But Landon one-ups all this: "The 20th century, in which science fiction was first codified as a genre and -- perhaps more importantly -- as a publishing category, has seen that genre develop through distinct stages, mutate in innumerable and unpredictable directions, and finally overflow the limits of genre to become a meta-genre so broad and so pervasive as to be a concept and force quite outside the boundaries of fiction, and of art itself. As modes of science fiction have more and more become the new realism of technological society, the world itself has grown science fictional" (xiii).

So the hamburger in my refrigerator comes from a cloned cow who ate mutant corn (i.e., "genetically modified"), which I eat while the President speaks on my quasi-holographic (3D) TV, whose cable signal is received from space, while I surf the Internet on my IPad, connected to my wireless router, which I purchased online and which transmits data throughout my house while securing me from cybercrime and identity theft (because I can be robbed and erased without anything physically happening to me). 


Arguably, SF's spread into all media forms is one major example of a literary genre literally changing the world.