Looney Ranting Luddite Alert!
I get a strange retro feel I when I read SF these days. It's a bit disturbing. A lot of yesterday's hard SF seems strangely out of date as if the future has caught up with us. Alright, we're not folding space and travelling the galaxy, and apart from, bloody mobile phones, computers and flat screen TVs there's not so much really new tech stuff out there. But, the excitement Hard science concepts used to engender are a bit muted for me.
Maybe it's that the dystopian stuff is coming true. There are experts in genetics out there, quoting from the film,
GATTACA and shrugging their shoulders as the contemplate a world divided into rich and genetically engineered superhumans and poor natural birth lower orders. So different they'd no longer be able to inter-breed. Not a science fiction plot line, simply a 'balanced' projection into the near future by an expert in the field.
And then there's the thought I had, when I was writing on another thread, about some poor schoolkid sent to juvenile hall for writing something ambiguous and vaguely threatening on a piece of paper. What happens when they start building brain-scanners, small enough, powerful enough and subtle enough to be able to detect abnormal thought patterns in passers by. I suspect they'll set them up at airports first, after a time, when they're cheap enough, they'll be set up around the place like cctv cameras are today.
When you see how far they've come in mapping the patterns of activity in the living brain you realize that such an innovation is no longer just a hard sf concept. It makes the premise of
Minority Report look even more like fantasy and is even scarier.
Why has S&S fantasy taken over from SF for most readers? I'd say Reality is far too scary these days. SF has done its best to keep up, leaving a taste of steel in the mouth and smell of ozone in the nostrils. A lot of people are beginning to suspect they're living next door to a Solyent Green factory and they yearn for something more exotic, lush and free. Even if it's the smell of 'Cut Me Own Throat' Dibbler's meat pies.
There, rambling rant over. Carry on chaps.