Even When They’re Wrong, They’re Right

What is science fiction good for? One answer: to speculate on what the future might be like. But I would argue that the game of science fiction is only sometimes about predicting the future. Sure it’s fun to invent flying cars and moonbases, but as even these two examples show, the predictive track record of the genre is notoriously bad. The real year 2001 had relatively little spaceflight but rather astonishing advances like the Internet that even Stanley Kubrick and Arthur C. Clarke didn’t imagine when they made their little movie nearly 40 years ago. In another famous example, Ray Bradbury’s book-burning society of Fahrenheit 451 has not yet come to exist (fingers crossed).

It’s Bradbury’s book, as a failure of prediction, which precisely illustrates why I think that science fiction is so important.

Gutter Thoughts

I have to admit, I’m not much of a cultural theorist. My grasp of our cultural gutter is about as sophisticated as a falling anvil — and it’s nowhere near as funny. Which isn’t to suggest I haven’t myself reclined in the gutter and slurped up its spillings like the rest of us… but to try and define the thing itself, not to mention what attracts me to it, is like trying to catch a fly with a pair of chopsticks (if you’ll pardon the pillaged metaphor).

In my defense, comics are a gutter-al artifact due mainly to misinformation — okay, so maybe their sensationalism (at least in their formative years, produced for a North American market of, mostly, young boys) played a part. But to claim that Craig Thompson’s Blankets or Chester Brown’s Louis Riel, to name just two in the recent spate of literary graphic novels to grip the medium, are indistinguishable from X-Force or the collected Heathcliff is too absurd for words.

Yet it remains the prevailing consensus in our culture: that comics can only titillate or distract, never provoke or inspire.

Vive Le Gutter!

For a long time, I’ve always felt a little weird about the third question people ask me at parties.

“What do you do?”
“I’m a novelist.”
“Oh! Really! Have you had anything published?”
“Yep, I have three books out there.”
“What kind of writing is it that you do?”
“Well…it’s kind of science-fiction influenced stuff.”

You see the side-step there?