Aerin’s Reviews > Science Fiction Criticism: An Anthology of Essential Writings > Status Update

Science fiction is now a research and development department within a futures industry that dreams of the prediction and control of tomorrow. Corporate business seeks to manage the unknown through decisions based on scenarios, while civil society responds to future shock through habits formatted by science fiction.

Kodwo Eshun, “Further Considerations on Afrofuturism”

Whatever formal, articulate language our visitors may use in real life, all the aliens we know so far speak human. They speak our human predicament, our history, our hopes and fears, our pride and shame. As long as we haven’t met any actual no kidding intelligent extraterrestrials, the aliens we imagine are always other humans in disguise.

Gwyneth Jones, “Aliens in the Fourth Dimension”

The dark secret behind human nature used to be the upsurge of the animal - as in King Kong. The threat to man, his availability to dehumanization, lay in his own animality. Now the danger is understood as residing in man’s ability to be turned into a machine.

Susan Sontag, “The Imagination of Disaster”

Consider: naturalistic fictions are parallel-world stories in which the divergence from the real is too slight for historical verification.

Samuel R. Delany, “About 5,750 words”

The biggest developments in the immediate future will take place, not on the Moon or Mars, but on Earth, and it is inner space, not outer, that needs to be explored. The only truly alien planet is Earth.

J. G. Ballard, “Which way to inner space?”

Just in case I'd forgotten how much Heinlein's condescending bullshit annoys me, this book includes a fantastically distilled example of it. He did coin the term "speculative fiction" and the essay is a valuable inclusion for that reason, but man, he's so obnoxious. "There are only three kinds of human-interest SF stories that exist, because I am a human and these are the only ones that interest ME."