Sci-Fi Is the Last Bastion of Philosophical Writing
Submitted by mwilliams on Thu, 2008-01-24 01:18.“If you want to read books that tackle profound philosophical questions, then the best — and perhaps only — place to turn these days is sci-fi.” So says Clive Thompson, who feels that literary fiction has become a boring reflection of everyday reality and that science fiction is the last great literature of ideas.
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Very well said.
I'd like to add that I'm not really a SciFi fan, either.
I REALLY agree, but I wouldn't call "deep philosophical writing" SciFi, I call it science fiction. SciFi is the stuff that's just adventure stories in space, based on old ideas and metaphors, not ever challenging our view of reality or our assumptions.
SF is the only writing that really seems meaningful to read, good SF makes you look at reality in a whole different way, it's like reading a really good research paper! :D
I'm serious!
While I think there are some really thought-provoking S.F. works being published, I really don't think it has a monopoly on "deep thought."
(And to counter Mr. Hare above, I am an S.F. fan.)
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Perhaps not but SF appears to be a very suitable platform for delivering that kind of ideas or concepts. You can do it with other genres as well, but it's easier with SF and the readers expect and appreciate it.
If I may belabour this a bit, it's not about monopoly. This is the stated point of the article:
"If you want to read books that tackle profound philosophical questions, then the best — and perhaps only — place to turn these days is sci-fi."
OK, it *may* be about monopoly, but that's the part I bleeped over. What I think is critical is that people who want to "go deep" find themselves unispired by our current culture, and rather unwelcome in the world of "literary fiction".
That's really sad because I've long though that the whole point of "literary fiction" was to provide myths and frames that help us to understand our own culture. Apparently, that has either fallen by the wayside or our culture has chosen to crawl up its own asshole and die.
While not a fan of SciFi, per se, I am a big fan of its cousin Anime. While those writers often seem to be trying too hard in these, they do often use their settings to get at very raw motivations that lie deep in the human psyche. That makes them dense and hard to get into mostly, but when it's done well it just freakin' works.
I'll take anime over "literary fiction" any day, as it now stands. Our world is a cartoon, and serious writers seem to have stopped drawing inspiration from it. Perhaps serious writers don't even care anymore. Perhaps I shouldn't. That's rather telling and worth commenting on, IMHO.