We Live in a Science Fictional Universe

With “The Gernsback Continuum” and its phantom futures in mind, it’s worth thinking about how other kinds of futures function rhetorically, how they bleed through into the present, how they set the terms for our experience of our own world. For instance, imagine if all stories were written like science fiction stories—imagine what it would be like to see the world through that lens, to experience our existing technologies with the awe and astonishment with which science fiction encourages us to see imagined technologies.

Channeling the Tom Disch excerpt we read, we can also think about versions of the future that have been offered—sold, quite literally sometimes—to us over the years. Some of the things we’ve been tantalized by, in fiction or advertising or both, have yet to come through. Some of them have.

Either way, what I want to establish up front is the extent to which science fiction and science fictional imaginings of the future aren’t escapism, aren’t disconnected from the contemporary world—the ways in which they’re less a matter of making predictions about the future than about making things happen in the here and now. Instead of thinking about science fiction as a category for most or all fiction dealing with a certain set of topics (artificial intelligence, space travel, aliens, time travel, virtual reality), what would it mean to think of science fiction as a mode, an aesthetic, a worldview? Put another way, what would it mean to think of it not as a noun or a set of nouns (science fiction is robots, lasers, spaceships, and little green men), but as a verb? What kind of worldview does it model for us? What does it look like to experience your surroundings and your circumstances through the lens of science fiction? What does it mean to say we’re living in a science fictional universe?