Science Fiction is the literature of the future. How's that working for you lately?

SF really and truly is the literature of ideas. What other works get to examine the possibilities of robots and aliens, of cyborgs and mutants, of hive minds and telepaths, of worlds dominated by corporations and theocracies and libertarians? Metaphor is SF's core; that colony on Mars, that trip to hunt dinosaurs, that clone child, that first contact with aliens, that surprise attack from another galaxy, manage to turn around, dissert, and expose subtleties about our current world that would be lost in a more straightforward approach.

Corollary to Carper's Law: Science Fiction is Never About the Future. It Is Always About Today.

That was just as true nearly 100 years ago, when neither the genre nor the phrase existed. Writers of that day saw the possibilities in ideas, using them to comment on the dramatically fresh technology transforming their world before their eyes. I have examples of those protostories under the Robots, Food Pills, and Rays tabs and they are distinctly different from A Journey to the Year 2025 here in the SF section. They are all about their current day, even if some of the inventions hadn't yet - or would never - come to fruition. They may be little more than animated editorials, crude by modern standards, but they shone light on the world around them and the people affected by change.

Clement Fezandié, the author of "Journey," had the same intentions with different means. A product of Hugo Gernsback's stable of writers, who populated Amazing Stories and Science and Invention and other Gernsback properties, and who wrote under the banner of scientifiction (a word still in use in 1940), he also explored ideas, but ideas for their own sake, not caring much for the people they impacted, probably because he could conceive of no changes that wouldn't be beneficial. Those changes tell us much more about Fezandié and his view of 1922 than they do about the onrushing year of 2025. They are a historian's dream and a reader's nightmare.

SF lurched between those poles for the next several decades, years that yielded a group of stories and writers we celebrate today as the Golden Age. Those years gave SF the ineradicable image of being about spaceships, and of telling the world the way the Future ought to be. The writers seldom invented that future; they were wonderfully skilled as translating ideas in fiction and filling in the larger picture with thousands of tiny details that loom in nostalgic minds. SF and the Consensus Future are like the two antennae of a Tesla Coil. Sparks fly between them. Neither can function without the other.