Science Fiction
What the world needs is fact, not science fiction. we have enough problems of our own to deal with, we don’t need to worrry about different worlds, aleins and disasters that may not even happen. science fiction is a waste of time.
Science fiction is something we hear about day in day out. But do we really need it? In this essay I will be answering just that question. The definition of Science Fiction is: Writing about aliens and space and strange creatures, and people writing about the future. The most important thing to remember is that fiction means not true. Sometimes it is about aliens invading earth e.g. War of the Worlds. In this essay Science fiction will mean books about aliens, spacecraft. The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the galaxy is one author’s view of space. War of the Worlds is reflecting what might happen if aliens invade, also I will be using Brother in the Land and 2001: A Space Odyssey. Those are the four Science Fiction novels which I will be using to show both points of the argument. In the next two paragraphs I will show you the advantages and the disadvantages of Science Fiction.
The advantages are that Science Fiction can be funny and one author’s point of view about Space and Stars and sometimes Planets which might interest other people. The Hitchhikers guide to the galaxy is a good example of an extremely funny Science Fiction novel. We need Science Fiction because when you read it you forget about the real world. Sometimes the advantage can be serious e.g. Brother in the Land is another good example because in it a nuclear bomb goes off and it is persuading people to look at it from the survivor’s point of view and it is anti-nuclear weapons. In the ‘New Scientist’ magazine It had an article on energy-efficient ways to travel between stars and it quotes: ‘The idea [of travelling between stars] is not entirely original. Peter Hamilton’s recent Science Fiction novel Pandora’s Star portrays a future in which people travel by train to planets encircling different stars.’
The disadvantages are that sometimes you believe it when its absurdly stupid e.g. the first radio reading of War of the World was broadcast by H.G Wells in New York. The problem was that everyone thought it was real and there was mass panic! Aliens and spacecraft are something we really don’t need to worry about. We don’t need to because we have enough of our problems to worry about than thinking about aliens invading, which probably won’t happen. People start worrying about aliens knocking on our front door, but they don’t realise that it will take them a long time to get here, and anyway interstellar travel is scientifically impossible. In Arthur C Clarke’s 2001: A Space Odyssey he writes about what it might be like in 2001 - Bases on the Moon and travelling between Earth and the Moon quite regularly - But that never happened.
So is Science Fiction is waste of time? No, I think that it is good to have some genres which stretch our imagination. It is sometimes funny and sometimes scary but really doesn’t give an accurate view of space.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Brother in the Land Robert Swindells
2001: A Space Odyssey Arthur C Clarke
War of the Worlds HG Wells
The Hitchhikers guide to the Galaxy Douglas Adams
by Anonymous Student
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