As heard on The Sci Phi Show.

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I’m Matt Arnold, from Detroit, Michigan. Thanks to Jason Rennie for accepting my contribution to the Sci Phi Show. Let’s talk about what we get from science fiction, philosophically, so that you’ll know where I’ll be coming from.

I was recently asked, “If you met someone who had never, ever read a single SF/Fantasy book in their lives, had not even heard of the genre but was open to trying it out, what is the first book you would introduce to that person?” It depends on what they want. Different books are good are for different folks and they can get different purposes from the same book. Mine is just one flavor of preference and I’ll offer it as nothing more. My thesis is this: I like science fiction to the degree that it’s not a fantasy.

Before she or he embarks on science fiction, there is a non-fiction book this new person needs to read: Unbounding the Future by Eric K. Drexler. It is available in print and for free on the web. This is the work that first presented to me a realistic possibility that within our lifetimes we could see technological revolutions which could overturn all the assumptions of the present world. I love the world-view-changing, paradigm-shifting, “real-life-type-of-scary” experience called future shock. That’s what I read science fiction for.

It could turn out to be wrong, of course. All forecasting amounts to a tentative educated guess, not dogma. Yes, I do use futurics and science fiction as very weakly analogous to “religious guidance” at least in the sense of a substitute for the same purposes: orientation to values, a sense of where we come from and where we are going, what is the self, “our place” in the universe if there is any such thing. But I would be silly if I claimed that it even remotely approaches inerrancy. In fact, the greatest hallmark of rational inquiry is having been wrong– this admits of continued improvement on what one’s religion or political party believes now. So faith in what the future holds is unnecessary, and in fact it would be an active detriment. But reading the SF that I enjoy does require an attitude-stance toward revolutionary change. I do allow myself to hope, and be warned, within limits of what seems plausible so far. If Unbounding the Future turns out to be total crock, it will still have been a mind-expanding process which made it possible for me to contemplate a radically different real-world. The future will not be like anything that has been depicted, but it will not be like the present. I’m convinced the Planet Earth we grow old in will be a radically alien one.

Some people claim to get answers to philosophical questions straight from Perfection Personified, which ossify them in static thought patterns chained to the past. But these issues are more productively served by mortals who write plausible science fiction set in the 21st century based on the cutting edge of current research. I like SF to have a crunchy technological coating and a chewy philosophical center. These are the narratives of characters who have to live their lives with what we mortals learn or fail to learn; what we achieve by working for it or fail to achieve by praying for it. The stories are thought experiments of the implications and lessons of modern knowledge as it inexorably makes authorities, such as religious revelation or the totalitarian State, increasingly unnecessary.

I haven’t intended this to mean that politics and religion is the only thing science fiction should be for. Fiction shouldn’t be a thinly disguised tract, and good science fiction stands on literary aesthetics alone. But thought-experiment seems to be SF’s main advantage over other fiction. Thought experiments about my nonfantasy real-world would not be served by the suspension of disbelief required by fantasy. This is not to say that I dislike fantasy, but that science fiction has a unique advantage lacked by other genres whose strengths lie elsewhere. When I read a work which satisfies me, it persuasively compels my belief and involves an act of the will to suspend belief, not to suspend disbelief. I have to make an effort to use my critical thinking skills to see the problems with it or detect if the author is, in my opinion, wrong. This is a second stage to the reading process which I also enjoy.

So that’s one way to appreciate science fiction, and perhaps some of the listeners to this show can relate. A Connecticut Yankee In King Arthur’s Court. Do you sometimes feel like you would feel if you were from the future, living in a time that isn’t ready for you? Then you might enjoy philosophy the way I do, in approaching futuristic developments in philosophical, religious and political thought, as illustrated in the thought experiments of science fiction and futurics.