The State of Science Fiction

"If science fiction is concerned with the future, and our only future now lies within the ever-changing world around us, one can indeed write about the present and consider the results science fiction." Gary Westfahl, from his book William Gibson.

One of the great difficulties of pushing science fiction in 2020 is information fatigue. You can also call it future fatigue, a problem where the oddities and fears we all used to relegate to the future keep piling up in present reality.

In a society with a dearth of technological advances, science fiction is absolutely needed. Consider that the golden age of SF in the US came during the lead up and beginnings of the atomic age and the space age. But when science fiction is reality, what do you do then? You want to return to nature, breathe in some rarefied air, gain the perspective you can only get when you turn off all the devices for a weekend and spend time looking in the glowing embers of a fire. The last thing you probably want to do is pick up a good technothriller about a killer virus from Wuhan that causes already distressed relations between the US and Chinese superpowers to boil over.

Rimi Chatterjee: Love and Knowledge and Yellow Karma

The twenty-first century operates on the money-as-value system where one consumes or is consumed. People are nothing if they don’t contribute to the market. Global politics has turned into a complex calculus, with nationalism returning to pre WWII levels led by toxic, tiki-torch toting masculinity. The global village is sick and the globe is sicker, riddled with plastic trash, radioactive waste, and carbon with nowhere to go.

Robert Heinlein maintained that science fiction must put humans in the center of its stories. That axiom has held through the atomic age and has perhaps never been more important than now, a time, as Rimi Chatterjee describes, full of hanyos. Half man and half devil, the hanyo lives for himself and, more to the point, kills for himself, using up people and resources without regard for the future, for sustainable culture, for the inner life.

Rimi Chatterjee is an English professor and Indian SciFi writer, following in the tradition of Ursula K. Le Guin, C. J. Cherryh, and Joanna Russ. She has three published novels, Black Light, The City of Love, and Signal Red. Her novels fuse hard SF with twenty-first century social and economic perspectives. Her writing is rich with the promise of a technologically enhanced future and richer with a compassionate embrace of the human condition.

Dr. Robert Doty's Science Fiction Collection

Dr. Robert Doty was my friend and mentor. I first met him as a boy at Campbellsville University where my dad taught New Testament and Greek in the Christian Studies department. The picture above is from 1991-1992. Years later, I took Dr. Doty as an undergraduate and a Master's student, studying English Literature. While working on a PhD in English Literature, we met regularly to discuss critical approaches to texts.

The Brotherhood

Read my short story "The Brotherhood" at Altered Reality Magazine, an e-zine devoted to speculative fiction.

Brotherhood is about a guy that loses his girlfriend and power to his apartment. He goes on a quest for Wi-Fi with his roommate, Double Sam so they can play Death Kingdom. He finds something different that he sets out for.

Sometimes, I drop little Steely Dan easter eggs into my stories like the name Double Sam from a song on Can't Buy a Thrill--"Please make mine a double, Sam." I know I'm not supposed to reveal my own easter egg but this one has no hope of ever being found otherwise. I would have named the arcade they enter A Gentleman Loser, but William Gibson already used that one in a short story. I guess I shouldn't worry about borrowing something that someone else borrowed?

For more of my fiction, check out the following:

Atomic Rocat
Tower Defender
Sherman: A Novel

Star Wars Holiday Special 1978

The Star Wars Special sucks, but it was created in the ethos of the Star Wars franchise.

This movie is terrible, nearly unwatchable even. I admit that I used YouTube's preview feature to jump ahead to the scenes with a star, and by star, I don't mean to include Jefferson Starship. Carrie Fisher once called the Star Wars special "a punishment from God." The score is played poorly and its association with this film cheapens otherwise great music. Chewbacca's family scenes are rage inducing--the Wookie kid is inexplicably playing with an X-Wing toy. Mark Hamill's makeup makes him look like a Ken doll. And the height of the conflict is Han Solo's combat with a lone stormtrooper.