Thomas Bey William Bailey
2015 m. Birželio 09 d., 08:11
Skaityta: 61 k.
Science fiction, as William Burroughs once remarked, is our "literature of ideas." While Burroughs almost certainly meant transformative ideas, to the serious public this has too often been the genre for ideas of a different kind: escapist, overly sentimental, what have you. I can only argue against these criticisms so much, and I can certainly understand why my alma mater decided to offer writing workshops in a genre known as speculative rather than science fiction: it's a semantic twist which has gone some ways towards separating works of philosophical and aeshetic challenge from giddy adventure stories, but hasn't totally obliterated public preconceptions that the two tendencies are one and the same. There are plenty of "go-to" authors that can be recommended if you want to illustrate the "speculative" / "sci-fi" split to a curious friend, among them Philip K. Dick, Samuel Delany, Ursula K. Leguin and J.G. Ballard, but more and more I find myself reaching for the work of Stanislav Lem (1921-2006) for themes that are relevant to the anxieties of the here and now.