September 29, 2011
Sheree Renée Thomas, author of "Shotgun Lullabies: Stories & Poems,"
edited the anthology "Dark Matter: A Century of Speculative Fiction
From the African Diaspora."
Ever since the Dogon people of Mali predicted the existence of Sirius
B, the "Dog Star," long before it was viewed through a telescope in
1862, there was controversy on the intersection of science and science
fiction. Even Mary Shelley's "Frankenstein" is said to have
foreshadowed "test tube babies" and Dolly the cloned sheep. Greg
Bear's novels "Darwin's Radio" and "Children of Darwin" explored human
pheromones and epigenetic influences on species development about a
decade before these ideas were embraced in scientific communities and
before the popular Axe commercials. In a 2003 presentation to the
American Philosophical Society, Bear said, "Science fiction works best
when it stimulates debate" rather than when it attempts to write from
an authoritative, predictive voice.
Although another science fiction author, Octavia E. Butler, was also
careful to say that she was not interested in making predictions in
her work, the gated communities and post-apocalyptic America hijacked
by the religious right in her 1993 novel, "Parable of the Sower," and
its sequel, "Parable of the Talents," was a startling portrait of a
post-9/11 America. Butler's "earth seeds," small parables of wisdom
crafted by her African-American heroine, Lauren Olamina, also offered
a keen awareness of global warming and the role that politics of
education would play.
As the author Greg Bear put it, "Science fiction works best when it
stimulates debate."
In a 1987 interview with the scholar Takayuki Tatsumi, the author
Samuel R. Delany said that science fiction does not try to predict the
future, but rather offers a "significant distortion of the present."
Delany's works envisioned an Internet-driven world, inspiring William
Gibson to coin the term "cyberspace" in "Neuromancer." Other cyberpunk
pioneers like Pat Cadigan ("Synners" and "Mindplayers"), Bruce
Sterling and Lewis Shiner imagined virtual reality and the adaptive
personalities of social media before the ideas became real. Cadigan
has also discussed Robert Heinlein's invention of the (hospital)
waterbed in "Stranger in a Strange Land." Margaret Atwood
painstakingly collected news clippings and articles about
"Frankenfoods" and presaged other genetic anomalies before completing
her 2003 novel "Oryx and Crake."
Many of the science fiction works that perhaps unknowingly predicted
scientific developments were fairly serious in tone, but some have a
more tongue-in-cheek approach. Set in the swinging jazz age in Harlem,
George S. Schuyler's "Black No More" was a 1931 satirical send-up of
multiple well-known Harlem Renaissance icons. The humorous novel
focuses on a black insurance salesman who undergoes an experiment to
change his skin to white so he can pursue a love interest. At the
time, Schuyler wanted to skewer the ideals of white supremacists and
black nationalists alike; however, the satire loosely described the
symptoms of a skin disease similar to what fans would later learn had
affected a modern-day "racial chameleon" whom Schuyler could not have
anticipated himself, the pop star Michael Jackson.
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