science fiction
The bridge between imagination and technological advancement, where the dreamer’s vision predicts change, and foreshadows a futuristic reality. Science fiction has the ability to become “science reality”.
Science Fiction Author Frederik Pohl
Pohl’s early career unfolded over the background of the Great Depression and the Second World War, a climate of unimaginable fear and uncertainty. This was the so-called "Golden Age" of science fiction, the years of John W. Campbell's catalytic editorship of Astounding Science Fiction, when pulp publishing was slowly metamorphosing into a defined genre, an era when its practitioners hadn’t yet begun to comment on the gloomy aspects of progress. To Pohl’s generation, science represented the potential for escape from the disaster of economic failure and war. No one was looking for a downside; they only saw the virgin capacities of uncolonized planets, and dreamt of a people united in the betterment of the species through new technology. “In those early days,” Pohl writes in his lovely collection of short stories, The Early Pohl, “we were as innocent as physicists, popes and presidents. We saw only the promise, not the threat.”
By Claire Evans12 years ago in Futurism
Will Artificial Intelligence be Nostalgic?
In 1996, I decided to teach myself to use my parents’ turntable. They weren’t home; I was sixteen years old. I really, really wanted to listen to The White Album on vinyl. I had a version of it on cassette, but I craved the authentic experience. At the time, I believed that I related more to The White Album than my parents did. I always loved The Beatles when I was young, maybe because digging something “vintage” is part of the same emotional gymnastics involved with reading and loving science fiction.
By Ryan Britt13 years ago in Futurism
