Sci-fi soul

Science fiction is a higher exploration. If, for a moment, you'd be willing to forget that it's the product of scientific notions and fantastic depictions, what you'll see is nothing less than the ultimate expression: good writing, good thinking, good creating and good exploring. There's an unfortunate conception associated with sci-fi, that its readers are geeks, that he who enjoys science fiction will also enjoy fiddling with computers, toying with codes, and so on; the fact of the matter is, however, that it's not false.

In the beginning, such impressions could've easily been false considering sci-fi didn't originate in esoteric laboratories and into cult-hungry groups of people but simply out of the discovery of possibilities (as is the case with everything). In the beginning, sci-fi was but literature's response to mankind's entry into the Information Age. When the free distribution of and access to information transcended cultural and social boundaries that were till that moment pertinent as information barriers, when the technology became available to speculate on the possibilities of the future with that kind of information, science fiction was born.

[caption id="attachment_20793" align="aligncenter" width="270" caption="Philip K. Dick's 'We Can Remember It For You Wholesale' was adapted for the silver screen as 'Total Recall'. The story is a good example of all that's sci-fi, including the psychological effects of false memories (something that could get lost in the technicalities of normal fiction)."][/caption]

It was rooted in the ability to shrink distances, to expand those horizons in the ambit of which foreign agents of influence existed, to reach out farther and beyond charted territories to evangelize the human condition across the universe. I don't want to list works now not because I suck at remembering what I've read but because it doesn't matter what "kind" of science fiction has been read: it's the sci-fi soul that matters. Like all works of literature, sci-fi labours under the onus of repairing the bad and basks in the glory of preserving the good, and even then, things are very subjective.

For instance, even Asimov and Clarke are leagues apart despite both being greats: Asimov is a philosopher, a man given to technique and process, whose worlds are ripe with intent and purpose, a world where ends justify means, whereas Clarke is a dreamer, a creator of worlds that don't seek to precipitate order out of chaos but art, whose characters revel not just in humanism but existentialism. In fact, such leagues span the differences between the likes of Verne, Gernsback, DNA, Stapledon, Aldiss, PKD, Vonnegut, Le Guin, Pohl, Herbert and Niven.

[caption id="attachment_20792" align="aligncenter" width="529" caption="Larry Niven's 'Ringworld' was situated on a massive ring that encircled a star, the light from which was periodically blocked by an intervening ring to give rise to night and day."][/caption]

The sci-fi soul will not regret reading any of them irrespective of whether it thought they were good or bad because it exists in a world filled with more variables than equations, and any shortcomings it thinks it sees are essentially a paucity of its own imagination. Because you've lived on Planet Earth, because you've lived for quite some time in a house that had trees around it, because you know that they're so commonplace and how they are what they are, there's not much you can dispute about a leaf. On the other hand, what are the chances that all sci-fi readers would've interpreted Pandora from Avatar similarly were it a book? You'll agree the chances are less than slim.

To the sci-fi soul, reading sci-fi is a process of self-discovery, a rudimentary rite of passage through which it attempts to understand the working of a universe that is conducive to human consciousness, an initiation into a realm beyond the vestiges of laws and forces where absolutely nothing is impossible. There are no leaves to define green, there are only exploding stars and drifting clouds of intergalactic dust from which beryl, aquamarine and chartreuse must be strained, must be purchased at some cost other than that of droll sight.

Science fiction, by mandating utmost obedience to its doctrine of freestyle, is the ultimate rebellion: it is where stagnation and mediocrity are interred in their crypts, where even convenient innovations are put to the test of participation. The sci-fi soul is what it is because sci-fi is what it is - an open forum to conceive, appellate, repair and conclude, a court of dialectics adjudicated by the scientific method.