Science fiction teaches governments—and citizens—how to understand the future of technology. - By Robert J. Sawyer - Slate Magazine

Science fiction teaches governments—and citizens—how to understand the future of technology. - By Robert J. Sawyer - Slate Magazine

I'm going to do some sample posts using some of your assigned genre watch periodicals. Here's one from Slate.
I just mentioned the literary origin of Science Fiction in class, and we were talking about how ideology and Industry might structure Genre,  but here's a piece on how genre , science-fiction specifically, might structure ideology and industry instead. Highlights below, but the whole piece is worth reading as are the comments section.I
A debate rages there over whether or not Literary SF is so negative that it actually impedes public acceptance of science innovation. Also of interest to me is that the Slate author seems only willing to give literary SF respect or acknowledge its influence, i.e. Heinlein matters, but not Kubrick. Thoughts? 




"Mary Shelley's 1818 novel Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus,is generally considered the first work of science fiction. It explores, in scientific terms, the notion of synthetic life: ...Think about that: Mary Shelley put these questions on the table almost two centuries ago—41 years before Darwin published The Origin of Species and 135 years before Crick and Watson figured out the structure of DNA. Is it any wonder that Alvin Toffler, one of the first futurists, called reading science fiction the only preventive medicine for future shock?


Isaac Asimov, the great American science fiction writer, defined the genre thus: "Science fiction is the branch of literature that deals with the responses of human beings to changes in science and technology." The societal impact of what is being cooked up in labs is always foremost in the science fiction writer's mind. ... What's valuable about this for societies is that science-fiction writers explore these issues in ways that working scientists simply can't. Some years ago, for a documentary for Discovery Channel Canada, I interviewed neurobiologist Joe Tsien, who had created superintelligent mice in his lab at Princeton—something he freely spoke about when the cameras were off. But as soon as we started rolling, and I asked him about the creation of smarter mice, he made a "cut" gesture. "We can talk about the mice having better memories but not about them being smarter. The public will be all over me if they think we're making animals more intelligent." But science-fiction writers do get to talk about the real meaning of research. We're not beholden to skittish funding bodies and so are free to speculate about the full range of impacts that new technologies might have—not just the upsides but the downsides, too. 

So this is a good genre find in Slate and it's it wasn't in the "arts" section, rather it was under SCIENCE. Don't limit your reviews to just the entertainment section -- Genre is everywhere.