. . . is, let's face it, another form of escapism. Great if you don't take it too seriously; tediously obsessive if you do. But, unlike the absolute adherence to generational, faith-derived religions, science fiction does have the added benefit of holding a mirror up to the reality that we all think we perceive.
The problem with "sci-fi" is the fact that there are many variations on a theme. On the one extreme there is "speculative fiction" such as the writings of Verne and Wells in an earlier age when practical imagination was taking a huge evolutionary step forward. Speculative fiction begat "science fiction", written by people who were trained physicists or academics such as Baxter, Benford and Brin. But, as always, the mystics and fantasists hijacked the game. The "fantasy fiction" that swamp the book shops and libraries are jammed with endless regurgitations of Tolkien or proselytising on behalf of the authors' religion-of-choice.
Of course "speculative science" fiction itself is in danger of generating its own monsters. "Cult" film and TV shows produce an extreme worship of anything beginning with the word "Star" (Trek, Wars, Gate, etc.) with more and more Hollywood producers jumping on the money bandwagon. The "science" is replaced with even more fantastical impossibilities, but they still can be fun . . .
But back to the mirror to reality. In Alastair Reynolds' book "Blue Remembered Earth" he paints an evocative view of humanity from the view of one of his protagonists: "Consider all the inanimate matter in the universe, all the dumb atoms, all the mindless molecules, all the oblivious dust grains and pebbles and rocks and iceballs and worlds and stars, all the unthinking galaxies and super clusters, wheeling through the oblivious time-haunted, mega parsecs of the cosmic supervoid. In all that immensity, she had somehow contrived to be a human being, a microscopically tiny, cosmically insignificant bundle of information processing systems, wired to a mind more structurally complex than the Milky Way itself, maybe even more complex than the rest of the whole damn universe".
Quite. But then with a true sci-fi writer's sense of the absurd, his character is informed: "Please also be aware that you may experience altered emotional states while your neural chemistry is stabilising. Some of these states may manifest as religious or spiritual insights, including feelings of exaggerated significance. Again, this is no cause for distress".
Feelings of exaggerated significance. Ha Ha. Doesn't this found familiar?
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