BENGALURU: The current coronavirus outbreak feels like something out of a Science Fiction (SF) novel to many fans of SF, who recall Dean Koonz having mentioned “Wuhan-400” as the origin of a virus in his 1981 novel, The Eyes of Darkness. Neither Koonz nor his fellow SF writers have powers of prophecy. Their prescience is merely the result of their having used their imagination and creativity to extrapolate the cultural reality of their time into the future.
So, what is the genesis of this genre? Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein in 1818 was the first true sci-fi novel in a genre that has historically been dominated by men (Isaac Asimov, Ray Bradbury, Aldous Huxley, Michael Crichton, Kurt Vonnegut, L Ron Hubbard etc). Kicking off modern SF in the 1940s and 1950s were writers like Asimov, Joseph Campbell and Robert Heinlein who reflected optimism and excitement about things like space travel and the power of technology to solve humanity’s problems.
The New Wave in the 1960s and 1970s (Samuel Delany, Thomas Disch etc) saw more cynical and experimental explorations, while cyberpunk in the 1980s evoked even darker visions of a humanity enslaved to technology that exacerbated social inequity. By the turn of the century, SF became the visionary vehicle for many innovative ideas about nanotechnology, smart matter, virtual reality and so on. Kim Stanley Robinson’s books on terraforming Mars spring to mind. In the past decade, SF by and about people of colour, women, and LGBTQIA+ persons have brought fresh perspectives to the genre.
Star Trek and Star Wars exposed me (and probably my entire generation) to SF. My favourites, Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World and George Orwell’s 1984, are in the sub-genre of speculative fiction. Huxley’s last novel, Island, a provocative counterpoint to Brave New World, depicts an ideal society on a remote island. In The Giver by Lois Lowry, a society that has eliminated pain and strife by converting to “Sameness” has also removed emotional depth from their lives. Douglas Adams’ The Hitchhiker’s
Guide to the Galaxy was probably was the first satire of fantasy fiction. Some books and movies attained cult status in India: 2001: A Space Odyssey directed by Stanley Kubrick, based on Arthur C Clarke’s novella; Logan’s Run, Blade Runner, Soylent Green, and Andrei Tarkovsky’s masterpiece, Solaris.
While most SF was dominated by robot rebellion, apocalypse, or tyrannical governance, Dune, Foundation, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, Stranger in a Strange Land, Neuromancer, The Left Hand of Darkness, Ringworld, and Rendezvous with Rama offered intellectually challenging plots and philosophically imagined worlds. In India, the gentler, more narrative-driven world of Fantasy fiction and cinema, as exemplified in Lord of the Rings, Narnia, Harry Potter, the Dark Materials Trilogy, The Hunger Games, and the Game of Thrones, would eventually usurp the spot the great sci-fi novels once had.
Contemporary novels and short stories in the SF genre incorporate the tech world and faithfully depict it, but add a slight element of fiction — a good example being the recent bestseller (now a movie) by Dave Eggers called The Circle, a techno-thriller of sorts. Cixin Liu’s recent success with The Three Body Problem is backed by solid scientific knowledge (physics, software engineering etc) and magnificent philosophical imagination.
The greatest challenge for SF writers is to explore the future in a realistic manner. As the best-selling author of Sapiens Professor Yuval Noah Harari says, “Science Fiction shapes the understanding of the public on things like artificial intelligence and biotechnology, which are likely to change our lives and society more than anything else in the coming decades.”The author is a technologist based in Silicon Valley who is gently mad about books.