Sci-fi is dead, and it's coffin is called Star Wars

Don't get me wrong. I love me the Star Wars.

But SW killed Science Fiction. It killed it by reawakening sci-fi as a bastion of adventure rather than a medium for scientific postulation. It made it impossible to have dry, boring, scientific, physiologically sound fiction about what the world might really be like. About what science could really offer us, and how that might be good or bad.

I like that kind of sci-fi. The kind without zombies, or ghosts, or psychics, or the force, or magic, or a dystopic tinge that leans towards the impossible.

Star Wars, as much as I enjoy it, isn't really sci-fi. It has things that aren't possible in our universe, it is fantasy in the same way the Lord of the Rings is fantasy.

This infusion of fantasy into sci-fi fundementally altered the genre, making it impossible to separate sci-fantasy, real sci-fi and space opera. And so. The lesser genre has withered and died.

Gone are the days of Heinlein, early Dick, Asimov and others. What we have left are a few off-and-on authors that work or worked in a few mostly sci-fi sub-genres, that have themselves been clouded with pulp.

Pulp is fine, but there is no-longer any real distinction between "I, Robot" and some modern Cyber-punk pulp.

Does that mean Cyber-punk isn't loads of fun? No. Just that what Asimov was using robots to say about people had nothing at all to do with robots. And yet also laid the ground-work for our classifications of AI and robotics.

It was both. And now it is neither. Now when someone writes about green men from mars, they really mean green men from mars, and they don't care that it isn't possible. Sometimes the reality of guesswork in the 50's and 60's turned out to be wrong. But now our outlook on the future is so bleak and conservative.

Too bad.

I guess I ran out of cool ideas for the future, and that is why my brain doesn't make new authors with new ideas.

That, or it has stalled those authors so my own Sci-fi novel will seem to be that much more awesome when I finish it.

Why have a blog if you are a solipsist?

Good question, me. And there is a surprisingly easy answer, and it is twofold! Goody!

Firstly, I'm not really a solipsist, I just play one on the tubes.

Secondly, I really am one and since my mind is vast and wonderful, a blog might be a good way to entertain myself with all the fun new people it thinks up. So join the fun, chat it up, call my bluffs and otherwise entertain and be entertained.

'Cause we are all gonna die eventually, so live it up while I let you.