Out & About with #RandomThoughts For the Week Courtesy the Mission

“You don’t have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading.” — Ray Bradbury

Food For Thought

The Value Of Science Fiction

Science fiction is the telescope that looks into the future. Through science fiction literature and films, we are able to address technological change, existential risks, and cultural crises that may define our future. This form of deep imagination is the ultimate form of preparation. It not only allows us to speculate what the future could look like, it also gives us tools to draw from when/if these or similar events actually take place.

To help prove our point, here are how some of the greatest sci-fi minds speak about the value of the genre. 

Isaac Asimov:

“It is change, continuing change, inevitable change, that is the dominant factor in society today. No sensible decision can be made any longer without taking into account not only the world as it is, but the world as it will be…Science fiction writers foresee the inevitable, and although problems and catastrophes may be inevitable, solutions are not.

Individual science fiction stories may seem as trivial as ever to the blinder critics and philosophers of today — but the core of science fiction, its essence…has become crucial to our salvation if we are to be saved at all.”

Ray Bradbury:

“Science fiction is the most important literature in the history of the world, because it’s the history of ideas, the history of our civilization birthing itself. …Science fiction is central to everything we’ve ever done, and people who make fun of science fiction writers don’t know what they’re talking about.”

“We need not to be let alone. We need to be really bothered once in a while. How long is it since you were really bothered? About something important, about something real?”

Douglas Adams:

“Let us think the unthinkable, let us do the undoable, let us prepare to grapple with the ineffable itself, and see if we may not eff it after all.”

Philip K. Dick:

“I, for one, bet on science as helping us. I have yet to see how it fundamentally endangers us, even with the H-bomb lurking about. Science has given us more lives than it has taken; we must remember that.”

Gene Roddenberry:

“For me science fiction is a way of thinking, a way of logic that bypasses a lot of nonsense. It allows people to look directly at important subjects.”

And finally, Arthur Clarke:

“There’s no real objection to escapism, in the right places… We all want to escape occasionally. But science fiction is often very far from escapism, in fact you might say that science fiction is escape into reality… It’s a fiction which does concern itself with real issues: the origin of man; our future. In fact I can’t think of any form of literature which is more concerned with real issues, reality.”

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