Thinking about S-F

From where do we come? And where are we going?

To these fundamental questions, Sci-Fi novels have their own answers and that is why I read them with concern. Through the more or less sophisticated stories laid by the author, you often find a quest of an absolute or an elsewhere that today’s science or technology cannot offer. Since less people turn to religion to answer such questions, S-F has its place. And the questions are all the more forthrightly studied that the plots are taking place farther in the future and farther away from here and now. Then the author can afford a freedom he wouldn’t dare to use in classical settings.

It seems to me that a Sci-Fi novel can often show, perhaps more than in other types of novels, its author’s deep ideology and models, because his freedom to express his fantasies without being constrained – or being less constrained – by realistic rules or even literary standards. To take an example in the political field, the liberal economic system is blazingly apparent in a number of novels, even when the set-up is put into an advanced alien civilization. In my opinion, that is simply because the American capitalistic system seems to be the best economic system to some Sci-Fi authors.

Well, I don’t want here to discuss the compared merits of capitalism against socialism or whatever the socioeconomic system can be; my point is that we humans have a very biased view of reality, strongly colored by our historical, economic and social environment. And, ironically enough, that bias shows rather more when you are describing an alien society supposed to be very advanced. Some authors are very explicit about that - I think for instance about Larry Niven, who discusses why he chose such and such type of society in his novels – meanwhile other authors are probably less conscious of it. I much enjoyed E. E. “Doc” Smith’s Lensmen adventures, but couldn’t help smiling at the naiveté of his descriptions of civilizations and characters, that copied the American society of his time.