… I’m the last person to have the right to complain about pessimistic visions of the future, but it’s fascinating how story after story imagines the future as dystopic and dark, a world where the forces of nature have been subverted and plot their revenge, where computers and machines have diminished the meaning of being human. What I missed, reading these stories, was that Verne-ian sense of wonder, the palpable excitement of exploration, the now almost subversive idea that science can help us discover, not just more about the world around us, but, more interestingly, more about who we are; how science can help us be more intensely ourselves. At the heart of the scientific enterprise is the joy of discovery, of pushing the envelope of what is known, of boldly going where no man has gone before. Technology may destroy the soul, but it may also amplify it.
That’s from Falstaff, who was one of the judges of Scian’s Science Fiction Short Story Contest - 2006 (the results are here).
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