Sci-Fi: I See You Hiding There, Little Genre

  

Sci Fi YA

When I was in college, my girl friends and I would meet everyday for lunch. Like the Sex and the City girls, we’d pick a place and discuss whatever we wanted that day. Unlike them however, our conversations mainly revolved around literature and television rather than sex. As single lady nerds studying literature (library sciences for me though) in college, conversations about literature and pop culture came normally to us. During one of these lunches, a close friend of mine said something that has stuck with me. She said that she loved Sci-Fi and Westerns because they were, in her opinion, the only two genres that went well with everything. I agreed completely.

   Sci-Fi may not be the most popular genre in the market right now. Often, it gets misclassified or lumped in with regular fiction because of secondary elements. But it is still very present in all media. If you can dream up a genre and a medium, odds are you can find something that has somehow melded with it.

Today's Fiction is Tomorrow's Science

I find myself again in a bit of a whimsical mood, so rather than writing some sort of analysis of some science fiction series, I'm going to write about how fiction pushes reality forward by encouraging real life innovation based on fiction. On 1968, Arthur C. Clarke wrote in his novel 2001: A Space Odyssey, bout the Newpad, a tablet device that, even in outer space, had access to encyclopedic texts on almost any topic and could in milliseconds give all the headlines of every news publication. Of course, the popular "fictional iPad" that everyone is familiar with is the Star Trek: Next Generation tablet. This TV show, featuring one Captain Picard, began its run on 1988, a year before the first commercially accessible pad-type device, the GRiD Pad, was released on 1989. All of this is, of course, the foundation of the tablet or cellphone you are reading this from.