The role of science fiction

Today’s world doesn’t look like most science fiction stories pictured it.  But accurate prediction isn’t the main point of the genre.

One of our consultants recently reread a short story by Rudyard Kipling, “As Easy as ABC.”  It’s not one of his stories for children, or from the Jungle Books, or about India, those things for which he is best known.  In fact it’s science fiction: set in the future, using technology not available when it was written (1912), exploring possible social effects of technology.  If you make a list of its predictions, you find that most of them are wrong.  So is the story, then, a failure?

Here at Five Colors we’re not literary critics, but we will venture some opinions.  First, that science fiction stories are primarily stories, and succeed or fail as stories.  If the science aspects become primary, it’s in danger of becoming a textbook.  They may be necessary to the story (indeed, in a short story there’s no space for unnecessary elements), but they shouldn’t be the whole thing.

And the primary intention of a bit of science fiction may be solely to entertain.  That’s fine!  Though we strongly prefer that any science in a story be done right (and offer our  Science for writers service to help you if you’re unsure).

But one unique role of science fiction is warning.  By showing what might happen, by extrapolating something that already exists or might soon exist into a possible future, it can argue for or against it.  The most powerful works of this kind are dystopias, of which 1984 is an outstanding example.  On a much less terrifying scale, we remember one story written in the middle of the last century (before electronic calculators became common) that predicted people would come to rely on computers even for easy mathematics.  As any math or science teacher can tell you, that has come true.

So it is no failure that “As Easy as ABC” predicted a world of commerce using dirigibles (Kipling did get the importance of air transport right).  And it is quite understandable that a subject of the British Empire, writing before the First World War, should picture a peaceful world presided over by a benevolent “Aerial Board of Control.”  Most interesting to us, though, is Kipling’s projection of social attitudes, which (as it turns out) is almost completely backwards.  Instead of the narcissism of Facebook and Instagram he shows a world obsessed with privacy, and instead of noisy political activism he has a world in which almost everyone wants someone else to be in charge.  We can only wonder what Kipling (or Orwell) would make of the world we now live in.