Shawl's School Blog

“science fiction encourages us to explore… all the futures, good and bad, that the human mind can envision.” – Quote by Marion Zimmer Bradley   

 Society needs science fiction because it gives the reader a whole unique perspective, shows the difference between dystopia and utopia, another way is how science fiction writes diverse ways to show science fiction so with that being said Science fiction is an important genre to society. 

Eventually writers write about the dystopian issues in the novels with using real life events in the face of using science fiction. Accordingly, in “Lecture 7 Environmentalism in Science Fiction” the Arthur Wolfe, P.G for example “The Blood Angels” (2014) by

the finished novelist Johanna Sinisalo using world plague in the novel and it shows food shortages, catastrophes, failure of pollination and another novel for example “End of Dream” (1972) shows more issues as in environment threats facing humans a given example nuclear reactor spill. As a result, science fiction writers make readers compare to the real-world using logic of science fiction, making the reader think, could we end up being in a diminished, post- apocalyptic world, can we prevent destruction from  happening? 

Secondly, dystopia and utopia are a significantly different imaginary examples.

 Think of dystopia as dark clouds over a deserted town with no running water, and utopia as rainbows and sunshine with everything perfect. But let’s be realistic consider examples from “The Lottery” and “Twin Oaks”. They are both groups of society and the difference between them is that one of them is bad and the other is good, could you guess which one is good? Well, if you guessed the lottery. You were wrong it is the kind of lottery you would not want to win because, here is why the lottery was a dystopia because the towns people would gather every June and one person gets picked for the lottery also with these lottery awards you get stones but not to hold but to get thrown at the lottery winner. In addition, as for the utopia twin oaks is a society as well and, in this place, it sounds perfect! In this community everyone is fair to one another, they drop racism, values of cooperation sharing, non-violence, and ecology. So, dystopia and utopia play separate roles and showing how it’s important to this area of science fiction.  

Now to explain the diversity of a couple of sub-genres of science fiction indeed wasteland sounds bad, and it is as bad as it sounds. “Lecture 5 The Science Fiction Wasteland” in this reading the wastelands are talk about how they are discrete for example “Scarlet Plague” (1912) this was the role of apocalyptic and the outline to this novel is survival and hoping to find more survivors and teach and to grow a safe new society. Also followed by destruction by war another one is destruction by nature although spaceships in science fiction is used to explore the universe and investigate the issues of the society surroundings of limited resources for example “Lecture 3 The Spaceships as a Science Fiction Icon” in this reading it talked about a novel “Earth to Moon” (1860) by Arthur Jules Vernes shows how the first novel to show and describe the very first space machine which would be the capsule. In other words, but different saying it gradually upgrades to a giant ship for example “Captive Universe” (1969) by Henry Harrison it’s one of the most imaginative variations, but in the novel, it talks about the character Aztec which who is a villager that lives in a large ship that divided into two cultures therefore the ship with the two generations become an elaborate and lunatic experiment which is social and genetic engineering. Certainly, the two sub genres have separate roles and different stories to their narrative, but the difference is the storyline and action.  

After all this reading, having to say science fiction is important, it has a huge part in the reading literature. Science fiction feeds the readers information that can be seen to happen or already happen or what can become in other words science fiction is important because it’s what people want to read it gives off more action and events that continues.