Science Fiction Invades The Mainstream

My sister drew my attention to this article in the Telegraph:

"Science fiction has always been interested in eternal questions about the nature of the universe, what constitutes reality, what it means to be human and so on. But genetic research, globalisation, environmental concerns, social breakdown are now pressing and familiar topics for everyone. If the literary world now thinks that JG Ballard is a mainstream writer and not a science fiction one, it is only because the rest of the world has caught up with the things against which he has been warning us for decades."

The Guardian Considers Science Fiction

Sam Jordison has been writing about the collision of science fiction and mainstream literature in The Guardian.

1. Why Do Critics Still Sneer At Sci-Fi?

"Science fiction writers are dismissed by the mainstream, but for mind-expanding ideas and sheer narrative excitement the genre is hard to beat"

2. Literary Apocalypse Now, And Then

"So, novelists' visions of the future are looking very bleak at the moment. What's new?"

3. Reading Sci-Fi For Pleasure

"As soon as someone writes a really good sci-fi book it nearly always seems to get reclassified as something else."

Sunday Times SF Article

Brian Appleyard explores the "sniffy" British attitude to science fiction in an article for the Sunday Times.

"The truth is," Aldiss has written, "that we are at last living in an SF scenario." A collapsing environment, a hyperconnected world, suicide bombers, perpetual surveillance, the discovery of other solar systems, novel pathogens, tourists in space, children drugged with behaviour controllers – it’s all coming true at last. Aldiss thinks this makes SF redundant. I disagree. In such a climate, it is the conventionally literary that is threatened, and SF comes into its own as the most hardcore realism.

He goes on to claim that HG Wells was responsible for the bombing of Hiroshima and Astounding magazine caused the Cold War...