Education Is Science Fiction Writing Necessarily Not Serious Literature

I love writing. I love writing science fiction. I also love to read. There, I said it. The horrible truth, out in the open on the first line! Clearly this author knows nothing about suspense. What more could be expected from a science fiction writer? To be slightly more serious for a second, I do indeed love writing. What I dislike are small minded people who think that writing should only occur in a particular way, in a particular genre, style or voice. For example, "expert book reviewers" who tell me a book is bad because of the author's style, or that science fiction (SF) is puerile. Apart from the obvious considerations of spelling, grammar and punctuation, an author has a massive degree of freedom in how their thoughts reach the reader. Sometimes even these minimal rules are deliberately broken in order to tell the tale. Of course, a writer wants his work to be read, but it is also about making an emotional connection with the reader. The form writing takes can be formal, like Dickens, or truly unique and free-flowing as in the case of Joyce's Ulysses. What really matters is the connection or, if you prefer, the emotional communication. If there is no emotional connection then you could just as well be reading a telephone directory. If science fiction writing can effectively form this connection with the reader then how can it be judged as "poor literature"? How much poorer the world of literature would be without Joyce, Dylan Thomas, Wordsworth or Shakespeare. By the same token how much poorer also if there were no Asimov, Heinlein, Niven or Banks. This loss would surely be most severely felt in the world of ideas. Science fiction is the world of ideas. It is the result of looking at the world and asking, "What if?" Sometimes these ideas have changed the world: Star Trek's Communicators, once thought impossible, are now commonplace as mobile phones. On the darker side, the movie Aliens showed us robotic guns, power-assisted exoskeletons and various forms of scanners and image-enhancement technology. All of these things are now quite current and accepted in today's world. With such power to change the world, should science fiction really be seen as the poor relation to "serious literature"? Sometimes science fiction is not so much about the gadgets, but more about the sociology. Here SF gives the author the ability to explore a world that is different, yet uncannily like our own. Here too there are many notable works: H.G.Wells and The Time Machine as well as War of the Worlds can both be seen as social commentary. His lesser known short story, Tono-Bungay, satirises the advertising of the day and arguably predicted the atom bomb. Wells is of course just one author, but others could included here such as George Orwell (1984) or Aldous Huxley (Brave New World). So what of the science fiction of the future? Increasingly the gap between science fiction and science fact is narrowing. People talk seriously about a technological singularity in our near future, in which artificial intelligence will become a fact. With the current rate of improvement in computer data storage and processing power, who really knows? Sadly, science fiction has not yet shown us a solution for the problems of today's world, but perhaps the book or movie that hints toward that solution is just around the corner. buy original papers