I Love Science Fiction

I always loved science fiction, since I was a kid. Started with Dan Dare and devoured all I could find. I would read John Wyndham over and over, specially "The Seeds of Time": robots, time travel, great ideas even if the writing was a bit naff. I never went for the intergalactic sagas: what I loved was the way some science fiction can turn the old world we know inside out, and make the old things new and exciting, and different. 50s sci-fi movies were great at doing that - the extraordinary Incredible Shrinking Man, The Man with X-Ray Eyes, The Invasion of the Body Snatchers. I loved the long-lost American science fiction comics that worried adults so much, but which had some brilliant ideas. My favourite was a story about how our universe turns out to be just an exhibit in a science museum in someone else's universe. Someone is bending down to see the final implosion of galaxies, and saying: it's so good, it's almost real.

There was a great BBC play too, in the late sixties or early seventies, where someone kept waking up to find the same day happening all over again (hey! there's a great idea for a movie) and discovering that his whole life was just the fabrication of marketing executives, who had constructed a sort of toy new town (whose toy inhabitants had painfully real feelings) trying out new products on them. And of course there was all that other sixties stuff: StarTrek, Vonnegut and the crazy and entirely fictional Kilgore Trout, and 2001 of course, which made us all fall in love with the idea of artificial intelligence. I loved it all: science fiction was sort of like using science to create dreamworlds you could control, with all dreaming's ambiguities of the mundane and the crazy going on at once. I tried to dream it myself, and wrote a whole science fiction novel, which did achieve certain characteristics of being a cult classic. Such as being read by about four people, then incinerated.

As time went on, I did get a bit bored with the science fiction novels and the big overblown movies. But I didn't get bored with the idea of science helping us to fictionalise our lives - at least, helping us create amazing new narratives, which turn out to be real in ways I never imagined when I loved this stuff as a kid. As the very wonderful Paleo-Future shows us time and time again: people are always imagining different kinds of bright new future, but nobody ever gets it quite right.

It's great to be living in a time when the change starts to happen faster than you can imagine. And we don't need novelists or scientists to do it for us: the world is being changed by the audience.