Gerhard’s Reviews > Trace Elements: Conversations on the Project of Science Fiction and Fantasy > Status Update

...it is easy to forget that as recently as the 1700s recreational torture of cats and dogs was considered a normal form of children’s play (see Robert Darnton, The Great Cat Massacre [1984]), and figures like Descartes and Bentham debated whether animals experience pain at all.

There were comments about the immorality of rereading because it causes you to miss new books, and comments about learning morality from reading. It all became surprisingly Victorian.

...the Texas A&M University Cushing Memorial Library and Archives, which has one of the world’s great science fiction collections, an impregnable treasure vault full of rare pulps, fanzines, first editions, and the archived papers of authors from Star Trek scriptwriters, to George R. R. Martin, to (now) me. [Ada Palmer]

I knew what was being published in the UK, and it didn’t look anything like what I was writing. If you weren’t ironic, you couldn’t possibly be taken seriously.

We prefer the narratives in Marvel’s Iron Man (2008) where we just have to wait for the nerds to invent clean power and save us all...

But there is nothing more like the future than the past: long spans of time with events happening, societies changing, technologies arriving and disrupting; both are spaces where history happens, and both hinge on the present. Ken MacLeod has said, “History is the trade secret of science fiction.”

Philip Larkin says sex was invented in 1963, but it too didn’t really make it onto the pages of Romance novels until the 1970s. This happened both with hugely successful writers like Jackie Collins and Nora Roberts pushing the boundaries of what bedroom activities could be described.

Romance is the largest genre of fiction in the US today, outselling all the rest of fiction combined. Forty-seven million romance novels sold in the financial year 2020–21 according to Fortune magazine (combined paper and e-book), and fully a third of all mass market paperback sales are Romance—that’s of all book sales, not just fiction sales.

Japanese SF also looooooooooooves its robots, has loved robots since the days of Astro Boy and kamishibai cardboard theater, and while Western SF also loves robots, the palette of standard questions Japanese stories explore is different, focusing on robot civil rights, robot consciousness, the ethics of robot disposability, sentient weapons, and the first-contact-like barrier between biological and digital life.

How did saving the world become a staple of fantasy in the first place?