Word: fictions
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...science fiction outlived the OTA, it also gets more girls, gold and glory than its other big rival, professional corporate futurology. Corporate trend spotting, after all, is limited to gizmos that might conceivably make someone money. Science fiction, in its sleep and entirely by accident, makes absurd amounts of money: SF films, comic books, action figures, CD-ROMs, computer games, chrome cards, costumes--there...
...Science fiction is a fun-house mirror for a society warped by raging technological advance. Science fiction doesn't want or need to make much sense. It seeks astonishment, terror, wonder, ecstasy and dread. It is spectacular and mythic, an oxygen tent for society's daydreams. Science fiction cordially ignores many vital technologies, such as, say, garbage recycling. Recycling is hugely important, but it has zero science-fictional thrill...
When science fiction gets over its trite romance with the parts catalog, it can achieve unnerving power. Aldous Huxley and George Orwell are the classic exemplars of that small, elite class of science-fiction writers who frighten and annoy science-fiction devotees. Huxley's Brave New World (1932) bursts with prescient speculation: "feelie" multimedia, Prozac-like "soma" tranquilizers, test-tube babies. Late in life Huxley became a psychedelics guru, seduced by the potent allure of brain chemistry...
...grim subject of networked surveillance, maybe Orwell was just a big, mean, bring-down pessimist. On the other hand, we haven't yet seen an Internet society in the grip of a genocidal land war. Security videocams are already ubiquitous; they've become too commonplace for fiction to notice...
Huxley and Orwell, of course, didn't think of themselves as science-fiction writers. The true artists of the genre are a tribe apart. Many created "future histories" that are worked out in exquisite detail. Robert A. Heinlein, for instance, was a hugely popular SF writer but of a surprisingly gloomy and gothic cast. His prediction for the late 20th century was summed up briskly: "Considerable technical advance during this period, accompanied by a gradual deterioration of mores, orientation and social institutions, terminating in mass psychosis." It was hard to watch the Clinton impeachment trial without feeling...