{"id":35367,"date":"2018-06-22T06:18:30","date_gmt":"2018-06-22T11:18:30","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=35367"},"modified":"2018-06-22T06:18:30","modified_gmt":"2018-06-22T11:18:30","slug":"what-science-fiction-ought-to-be","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=35367","title":{"rendered":"What science fiction ought to be"},"content":{"rendered":"<h3><a href=\"http:\/\/restoringmayberry.blogspot.com\/2018\/06\/what-science-fiction-ought-to-be.html\">What science fiction ought to be<\/a><\/h3>\n<p>Science fiction has become the dominant genre of the last four decades \u2013 the biggest film of the year has been sci-fi almost every year in my lifetime. Of those, some are simply swashbuckler fantasies set in space, like <em>Star Wars<\/em>, while others are the very entertaining superhero fantasies that have become as ubiquitous as Westerns or musicals once were. Each year, however, brings a new wave of dystopian post-apocalyptic films \u2013 in the last year we\u2019ve had <em>Blade Runner 2049, Ready Player One, War for the Planet of the Apes, Geostorm<\/em>, and later this year we can expect <em>Alita<\/em> and <em>Mortal Engines<\/em><\/p>\n<p>I say \u201cdystopian,\u201d because science fiction used to be creating utopian futures in which mankind had solved most of its problems \u2013 <em>Star Trek<\/em>being one of the only survivors of that age. In the time that science fiction has dominated our culture, though, it has been about something else: telling us how hopeless our future is, and how we\u2019re all doomed.<\/p>\n<p>They have a point; we have created a society that runs on coal and oil, which won\u2019t last forever. Even the amount we\u2019ve burned so far has changed the air so much that it is literally changing the weather around the world, creating more intense storms, harsher droughts, and greater extremes of heat and cold. Anyone who walks along the Irish shoreline can see the other main product of our civilisation, the plastic and other rubbish that now clutters the world\u2019s seas, or piles up in landfills that have become the largest man-made structures on Earth.<\/p>\n<p>Yet apocalyptic stories assume that our modern car-driving, computer-using culture will collapse overnight in some catastrophe, whether a robot Armageddon, climate disaster or Rapture \u2013 and the fact that we make entertainment about such horrors means that they are not really our fears, but our fantasies.<\/p>\n<p>\u2026click on the above link to read the rest of the article\u2026<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>What science fiction ought to be Science fiction has become the dominant genre of the last four decades \u2013 the biggest film of the year has been sci-fi almost every year in my lifetime. Of those, some are simply swashbuckler fantasies set in space, like Star Wars, while others are the very entertaining superhero fantasies [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[3,4,7],"tags":[11881,311,341,11448,4281],"class_list":["post-35367","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-energy-2","category-environment","category-survival-2","tag-brian-kaller","tag-fiction","tag-future","tag-restoring-mayberry","tag-science-fiction"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35367","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=35367"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35367\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":35368,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35367\/revisions\/35368"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=35367"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=35367"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=35367"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}