One of my running themes — here on this blog, in the reviews I’ve written of SF novels and stories in recent years, in my essay for Gary Westfahl awaiting publication, and in my book if I manage to write it — is that some of the ideals and presumptions of even the best science fiction of the 20th century are turning out to be totally wrong. The standard examples are: there are plenty of reasons to think that ESP, telepathy, precognition, all of that, is bunk, mere wishful thinking based on infantile perceptions of the world; and notions of easy interstellar travel that beg questions about how such travel will take place (given physics), and whether there are actually habitable planets out there we can just drop in on and build a colony. The principle reason here is that science has advanced greatly over the past century. Some of what science fiction might have legitimately speculated about 70 years ago is now out of bounds, if we’re being honest. (An earlier example: hollow Earth.) These presumptions persist in pop sci-fi — TV and movies, especially including Trek and Wars — and of course they appeal to the popular imagination in exactly the same way all those psychological biases do, that lure us into magical thinking and conspiracy theories. It’s fun to watch spaceships zooming from planet to planet in 5 minutes, and pretty to think it might be possible with technology advanced enough, but it’s unlikely to ever happen.
A few science fiction writers have realized this, the standard example, again, being Kim Stanley Robinson’s 2015 novel AURORA. But pop sci-fi, and even many published works, still attract more readers by appealing to intuitively thrilling but discredited notions.
Here’s an example of a scientist pointing out problems with one traditional science fiction, and pop sci-fi, presumption.
Big Think, Adam Frank, 11 Dec 2024: Galactic civilizations may be impossible. Here’s why., subtitled “The problem for galactic-scale civilizations comes down to two numbers.”
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