Monday, May 4, 2009

Focus on: Trillion Year Spree

Brian W. Aldiss has written a fantastically exhaustive history of Science Fiction. The first edition, titled "Billion Year Spree" was published in 1973. This latest, from 1986, isn't just revised, it's nearly rewritten and twice the original length.

I have to wonder at the possible length it might be were it expanded yet again to include the last 15 years of speculative fiction, and the current--shall I say meteoric?--rise of of the latest names.

Nevertheless, it's a good reference, and what it lacks in direct plot it makes up for in opinionated narrative. His is a viewpoint of science fiction as literature, if it meets the prescribed convention, and suggests we can mine centuries as far back as the 17th to find bits of scientifiction trope.

It's too easy to think of SF as a most recent blip on the literary radar. To place its beginning with "Hugo Gernsback's lurid magazines in the nineteen-twenties" might serve well for nostalgia's sake, but man, specifically writing-man, has been imagining himself among the stars (or beneath Earth's surface), expanding and contracting against his mortal confines for far longer, of course.

One might say SF is the stuff of myth or legend, of science and environment, of exploration and conquer. It has solidified into a genre in the late half of the century, the "fiction of a technological age". But I like the way Mr. Aldiss sets a parameter for it. In his own words: "Science Fiction must call to account our deepest fears and aspirations."

Isn't that really the best of all literature?

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