In Hyperspace

Stanisław Lem was incommensurable – to SF, to literature, to himself. He was so many different writers – five, at least. I had too much to read. I risked missing the centenary in mute tribute.

The time-travel story literally depicts the physical conditions of ‘the Place’ where the ‘points’ from which we ‘view’ plots unfolding must be presumed to abide. But modernity has in fact invented such a hyperspace from which to observe the observer: it is called the camera.

Kindred is an act of generosity, an embodiment of the hope that one day, it will be nothing to write home about when a Black woman sits in her new house with her white husband, happily surrounded by piles and piles of books. History, Octavia Butler often said, is also ‘another planet – the only one we know to bear any life’.

Sometimes, one has to say, Science Fiction just seems too crowded. Too many people have had too many ideas, and now they come too cheap.

Ursula Le Guin was able to direct a whole array of ‘what if?’ questions against the conventions of children’s fantasy. What if you don’t need heroic quests? What if keeping going and tending children through damage and disaster and getting home is the form of heroism that matters most? What if girls can be dragons?

Where other SF asks whether made-up entities (aliens, androids, emoting computers etc) deserve the respect we give real human beings, Philip K. Dick more often asks whether we ought to view ourselves as fakes or machines.

In Gun, with Occasional Music, the erasure of the individual memory is the final stage in a process that began with the elimination of the public record, of newspapers and books. Lethem’s dystopia is a version of the end of history.

Margaret Atwood was to become a world success with The Handmaid’s Tale, a science-fiction-like horror story, the story of a terrible imaginary place and society, a dystopia. And in The Blind Assassin the interrupting tale, the alternative text, is a kind of science fiction story of a dystopia.

Cixin Liu’s monumental Three-Body Trilogy is one of the most ambitious works of science fiction ever written. The story begins during the Cultural Revolution and ends 18,906,416 years into the future.

How will interacting with relational artefacts affect people’s way of thinking about what, if anything, makes people special? The sight of children and the elderly exchanging tendernesses with robotic pets brings science fiction into everyday life and techno-philosophy down to earth.

As L. Ron Hubbard began to consider himself a religious leader he came to see his writing years as a productive phase of ‘research’. Thanks to science fiction, he had discovered an age when men could transcend the boundaries of the physical universe.