On Science Fiction

I once wrote on this page, "Science fiction is to technology as romance novels are to marriage: a form of propaganda" (see "Against Transcendence," February 2005). This represents my sincere view, but stated so baldly, without elaboration, the remark implies a contempt I do not feel. If it is propaganda, I am its happy dupe; and if I am a technology editor and journalist today, it is because between the ages of seven and fourteen, I read little but science fiction. I grew up on a farm on the North Coast of California that had at one time been a kind of hippie commune. Around the various cabins on the property were dozens of yellowed paperbacks of the sort that the counterculture loved; and when I recall my childhood all at once, it is perpetually summer, and I am alone in a field or a tree house, reading Alfred Bester, Algis Budrys, Samuel R. Delany, Philip K. Dick, or Robert Heinlein.