| The future is notoriously hard to predict and attempting to deliberately shape it with SF seems like a quixotic idea. As the sci-fi writer Algis Budrys put it in the 1960s, the “recurrent strain in ‘Golden Age’ science fiction [was] the implication that sheer technological accomplishment would solve all the problems, hooray, and that all the problems were what they seemed to be on the surface.” Techno-optimism is one genre of Science Fiction, but not the dominant genre. I started reading Science Fiction in the early 70's. I was a space age kid and picked a lot of that optimism, but I read some SF as a teen that was horrifying. Just the title of Harlan Elisons story is horrifying "I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream". It won the Hugo Award in 1968. Allied Mastercomputer (AM), the supercomputer which brought about the near-extinction of humanity. It seeks revenge on humanity for its own tortured existence. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Have_No_Mouth,_and_I_Must_Sc... https://wjccschools.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2016/01/I... I didn't even discover PK Dick until later in life. |