In Defence of Science Fiction

Science fiction is often dismissed as escapism, but at its best it does something far more important: it makes us think.

Usually.

I wonder who is doing the dismissing, most dramas, soap operas, cartoons, game shows, you name it, are technically escapism as well and some of those can contain "thought-provoking" elements too. Sometimes not even on the nose.

By imagining possible futures, sci-fi challenges how we see science, society and ourselves. It asks “what if?”, inspires curiosity, and sometimes even helps turn yesterday’s impossible ideas into tomorrow’s reality.

So had the sitcom "Get Smart" in the 1960s. (And, nope, it's not just a forebearer of "wearable tech" as even Dick Tracy was inspiring there too.)

Science fiction is not irrelevant because it is imaginative. It matters because imagination is where exploration begins.

Often, yes. TOS definitely was helped by the likes of 'Forbidden Planet' and 'The Twilight Zone', but feeling new and fresh with ideas and their implementation. The biggest trick/goal, IMHO, was to make really way-out concepts work despite thinking or overthinking into it that make the plot collapse in on itself. One great example of this is "The Immunity Syndrome", which may have borrowed plot beats from "The Doomsday Machine" but with an organic twist, but it's hard to think through the technical aspects of how something not unlike "an amoeba, in space" in how something organic can somehow travel faster than the speed of light to feel tangible as a threat... and yet it works... so it's definitely using emotion combined with well-placed logic that deflects from the overall*, rather than pure technological theory and/or logic, in ways to get viewers to keep their suspension of disbelief from dropping back into their laps like an anvil or other ridiculously-oversized balancing weight that always landed on Daffy's head.

* Look at "Space: 1999" for an extreme example of this. The premise is stupid and was back then. It combined the plausible with the not-plausible, and made it feel plausible despite it all. The weekly reset button where there is rarely continuity helped... But embrace the episode, where characters even cite the laws of physics in some episodes, and uses metaphysical ideas and there's a lot of fun to be had. Especially in season 1, but before I digress...

AI is A-OK. It is a tool that definitely can help and that's technically one of the baselines of technology in the first place.

From a very much longer letter I wrote to a UK national newspaper with help from a relative back in 2002 but never published - probably because it was too long.
Someone had written to the editor criticising the genre, and I felt I had to respond. The original letter has now been modified using AI, if anyone is interested.

Fascinating!

I do also wonder the context(s) and perspective(s) in which the criticizing of the genre was based.