Why Reading Science Fiction

Will screw you up.


In 2008:

From Thomas Frank in the Wall Street Journal, December 10, 2008

“Surrogate motherhood has been the subject of much philosophical and political dispute over the years. To summarize briefly, it is a class-and-gender minefield. When money is exchanged for pregnancy, some believe, surrogacy comes close to organ-selling, or even baby-selling. It threatens to commodify not only babies, but women as well, putting their biological functions up for sale like so many Jimmy Choos. If surrogacy ever becomes a widely practiced market transaction, it will probably make pregnancy into just another dirty task for the working class, with wages driven down and wealthy couples hiring the work out because it's such a hassle to be pregnant. “

(h/t Daily Dish)

1957:

From “The Door Into Summer”, by Robert Heinlein, 1957, wherein our protagonist has been put into involuntarily suspended animation and awakes in the then-far-future year of 2000. Part of his regime to orient himself to his new world is to read the daily papers.

Here one of the headlines he encounters in the (fictional) Greater Los Angeles Times, December 13, 2000.

“HOST MOTHERS ORGANIZE FOR HIGHER FEES -- Demand “Amateurs” Be Outlawed”

Later, our hero gets an unskilled labor gig at an auto-stamping plant where he crushes what appears to be perfectly good cars. He asks his foreman why the industry is making vehicles if it only to plans to scrap them unused a two years later.

“It’s a simple matter of economics son. These are surplus cars the government has accepted against price support loans…”

But it appeared to be so damn wasteful.

“If just seems wasteful. You want to throw people out of work? You want to run down the standard of living?”

Well no, but if we know no one is going to buy them, why not sell them overseas?

“What!-- and ruin the export market? Besides if we started dumping cars abroad we’d get everybody mad at us – Japan, Germany, Britain, France, Great Asia, everybody. What are you aiming to do? Start a war?”

Why will reading science fiction screw you up?

Because, if you think its maddening being stranded for the last eight years in a world where, no matter how many times you get things more-or-less right, and intractably determined people get things blow-up-in-their-faces wrong, those same people never change their minds and instead just hunker down and call you weird and crazy…

…try soaking in that dynamic – one way or another – since puberty, when you discovered Heinlein, Pohl, Vance, Williamson, Kornbluth, Bester, Ellison and all the rest.