Science
Related: About this forumAre we approaching a scifi-singularity?
There are several staples, several key elements that have always shown up in SciFi over the years. Those were the "maybe"s, the "what-if"s...
Right now, we are living in an age, where the imagination of fantasts and authors comes true:
Humanoid robots?
Space-tourism?
Intelligent machines?
Invisibility cloaks?
Ray-weapons and rail-guns?
Bionic limbs?
Mind-reading technology?
Self-repairing materials?
Nano-robots?
Genetic manipulation?
Fusion-reactors?
Faster-than-light-drive?
Portable communicators, calculators and multi-purpose-sensors?
Sub-dermal implants?
Hypodermic injection of vaccines?
Cloning of organisms and organic tissue?
Every single one of those examples has already crossed the border from fiction to serious scientific research. And some of those already yield results comparable to those encountered in scifi.
So, where do we go from here?
When your dreams come true, what do you dream of?
Look at movies and novels from the past: How many conflicts could have been solved, if only they had had cell-phones?
We don't watch or read them because our present relates to their world. We watch and read to amuse ourselves with the content and the display of the artist's abilities.
How will people from the future look at our contemporary art? They will feel the same odd sensation as we do.
Just imagine a literature-course in school: "Miss Taylor, I don't get this story. If she didn't believe him, why didn't he send her a brain-scan to prove he's telling the truth?"
Just as the literature of the past gets more and more obscure, so will the scifi of the future:
More and more of the imaginary future becomes real present.
Scifi will more and more revolve around its difficult, mind-bending and imagination-stretching aspects.
Time-travel?
Anti-Gravity?
Non-organic life-forms?
Non-baryonic life-forms?
What is life like in an environment with completely other laws of nature?
What is consciousness?
What is life?
Is a human really that much different from the machines he builds and commands?
What lies beyond?
This is my question:
Will the imaginary future lose scope, as more and more of it becomes real present?
Lint Head
(15,064 posts)explored in science fiction. That is just one example. There are many more interpolations of the scifi script concept yet to be conceived.
I don't think scifi will disappear no more than imagination will disappear.
DetlefK
(16,423 posts)Stephen Baxter briefly mentioned quark-sized life-forms in one of his novels. (forgot which one)
Warhammer has (evil) bodiless life-forms in a parallel universe called "Warp".
The novels about the Perry Rhodan-universe were among the first to explore the possibility, that body and mind could be born, live and die separate of each other.
Speck Tater
(10,618 posts)There's also:
On the Beach
Alas Babylon
Earth Abides
The Time Machine
1984
Lucifer's Hammer
When Worlds Collide
The Machine Stops
I Am Legend
The Burning World
Always Coming Home
The Day the Earth Caught Fire
The Road
...
R. Daneel Olivaw
(12,606 posts)One of my older brothers suffered from mild dyslexia and was a voracious reader to compensate for it. He loved scifi and there was always Heinlein, Anderson, Zelazny, and countless other author's works laying around to pick up.
Lucifer's Hammer was probably my favorite all-time book followed by The Mote in God's Eye, and Inferno.
Speck Tater
(10,618 posts)FiveGoodMen
(20,018 posts)Especially Mote and Hammer; two SF books that only bent reality by the smallest amount to get the plot going.
So how are things on the moon after all these years?