Brief Essays on Genre, Part 5: On Prediction

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On Prediction

 

In The Door Into Summer, published in 1956, Robert A Heinlein predicted cell phones, Ticketron, computer-assisted design, metal detectors in airports, robot vacuum cleaners, and much more that has since come to pass. Today, Heinlein’s visionary descriptions of then-nonexistent technology are as dull as dirt to read.

 

In a story titled “The Mole Pirate,”  Murray Leinster posited a device that would put matter out of phase with matter, making it possible for someone to walk through walls. A criminal steals the technology and uses a retrofitted submarine to surface inside bank vaults and make off with all the money. The climax when the device fails and the criminal falls helplessly toward the Earth’s molten core is nonsense but riveting.

 

Draw your own conclusions.

 

--Michael Swanwick

 

Brief Essays on Genre, Part 3: On Fantastika

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On Fantastika

 

The term fantastika, meaning a single genre encompassing both science fiction and fantasy, originated in Eastern Europe. Science fiction chauvinists object to it strenuously. But, given that Hugo Gernsback included work by Edgar Rice Burroughs in Amazing Stories, the ur-zine of what he then called “scientifiction,” it has to be admitted that the distinction between fantasy and science fiction was blurred even before the latter was named.

 

--Michael Swanwick

Brief Essays on Genre, Part 2: On the Nature of Fantasy

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On the Nature of Fantasy

 

Why fantasy?

 

Because the world as it is makes us unhappy.

 

Why not make the world as good as you wish it were?

 

Because only in fantasy do we have the power to change the world to that extent.

 

But fantasy won’t do that.

 

Neither will reality.

 

Why not simply accept reality as it is?

 

I spit in your face.

 

--Michael Swanwick

Brief Essays on Genre, Part 1: On the Origin of Science Fiction

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On the Origin of Science Fiction

 

The first written glyph was a straight line drawn with a stick in the mud or sand and it meant: I am here. This was the beginning of history.

 

A moment’s reflection, however, reveals that implicit in the statement was another: I was not always here. This was the beginning of literature.

 

So science fiction, the literature of change, was present in written language from the very beginning.

 

--Michael Swanwick