New Scientist magazine asked six major SF writers for their thoughts on the future of science fiction, and received some interesting replies:

Kim Stanley Robinson:

One solution is to jump past the next century to the familiar comforts of space fiction. If we survive we’ll get out there, and it’s a great story zone. Without the next century included, though, the imagined historical connection between now and then will be broken, and space fiction will become a kind of fantasy. We need to imagine the whole thing.

Margaret Atwood:

It’s the gateway to the shadowiest and also the brightest part of our human imaginative world; a map of what we most desire and also what we most fear. That’s why it’s an important form. It points to what we’d do if we could.

Stephen Baxter:

Science fiction is a way of dealing with change, of learning about it, of internalising it – not so much prophecy as a kind of mass therapy, perhaps.

William Gibson:

I took it for granted that the present moment is always infinitely stranger and more complex than any “future” I could imagine. My craft would be (for a while, anyway) one of importing steamingly weird fragments of the ever-alien present into “worlds” (as we say in science fiction) that purported to be “the future”.

Ursula K Le Guin:

Science fiction that pretended to show us the future couldn’t keep up with the present.

Read all these contributions in full at: http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn14757-science-fiction-special-the-future-of-a-genre.html

Tags: Science • SF