Word: sf
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...exaggerating here, these Los Angelinos are not your run-of-the-mill Californians. Being from San Francisco I thought I had seen all the weirdness the West Coast had to offer, but let me tell you, the SF dragfest has nothing on the women I saw strolling along Rodeo and Wilshire...
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...
Time has been less kind to other works of SF, despite hard work and serious intent. Harry Harrison's novel Make Room! Make Room! (source of the movie Soylent Green) predicted a New York City crammed with 35 million people, each allotted a meager four square yards of living space. That novel is set today--in 1999. It was published in 1966. The scenario made sense back then, before the advent of widespread birth control. All you had to do was follow the exponential curves...
...century resembles the work of any single SF writer, it must surely be J.G. Ballard. One might make an argument for the prescience of William Burroughs (if you're a junkie) or the uncanny knack of William Gibson (if you're a career computer criminal). But Ballard is surely the most insightful artist the genre ever produced. While most SF writers of his generation were down at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory cheering on the moon landings, Ballard was in a London art gallery throwing a Pop Art happening with a crashed car and a topless model. Ballard's approach...
Ballard was the first SF writer to realize that there was something basically lunatic about space travel. Ballard never predicted events or devices; instead, he described future sensibilities--how it might feel, what it might mean. A bizarre contemporary event like the paparazzi car-crash death of Princess Diana is perfectly Ballardian. No flow chart, no equation, no profit projection could ever have predicted that, but if you've read Ballard, you swiftly recognize the smell of it. I daresay that's the best the SF genre will ever do--and no more should ever be asked...