Link: Blinded by Science: Fictional Reality | Technology | DISCOVER Magazine .
07.20.2007
Blinded by Science: Fictional Reality
Sci-fi helped make the present; now it's obsolete.
by Bruno Maddox
In a sulfurous chasm beneath Reality, lit by the orange glow from what appears to be a river of molten Time, the serpent and the eagle have reached their moment of final reckoning. The eagle swoops in for the kill with talons extended, each mighty feather a-bristle with fury. The serpent marshals what’s left of its coiled strength and turns its fanged and slavering maw to meet the eagle’s gaping beak in a cosmic kiss of death that will obliterate countless worlds, if not, in fact, all of them.
Other than this, however—the design on the back of the Hawaiian-cut shirt of a very old man investigating the bean dip over at the buffet table—this gathering of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America is palpably low on excitement. We’re on the 38th floor of a Marriott hotel in Lower Manhattan, in a poky beige suite filled with the same cheap, gestural furniture you find in those fake rooms that get set fire to in fire-safety videos. And with the exception, obviously, of this correspondent, we’re a fairly drab and subdued sort of bunch. The demographic is middle-aged to old. The median shirt type is sweat-. And there are several grown men apparently untroubled by the fact that they’re wearing backpacks to a social event, yet troubled to the point of madness and eczema by pretty much everything else.
Not that there’s anything wrong with that. This is, after all, a gathering of fiction writers, and if fiction writers were good at going to parties, well, most of them wouldn’t be fiction writers. Fiction is a job for people with Big Ideas, not a flair for small talk—and with the exception of Tom Wolfe, they’re generally too concerned with topics like the human condition and the fate of the world to worry about their appearance.
But this is science fiction, which I thought was supposed to be different. I wasn’t hoping for Naomi Campbell in Vera Wang, just a few people dressed as Klingons, perhaps, or painted green, even very faintly, or even just in a nice houndstooth jacket or something, wildly gesticulating with the stem of an unlit pipe. Energy is what I’m missing, that raw, spittly, unsocialized fizz that only an overexcited nerd can produce.I suppose they may all be fatigued. After all, this is only Night One of their annual Nebula Awards Weekend, and apparently many have driven all the way across the country to be here.
Then again, it could also be the other thing—the thing that nobody’s quite bringing up over the plastic cups of Yellowtail Merlot. Which is that science fiction, the genre that lit the way for a nervous mankind as it crept through the shadows of the 20th century, has suddenly and entirely ceased to matter....
