SF and Change

[andrewducker]

Whipped back from a comment I made here.
Perhaps what defines SF best is it's embracing of Change.  Change is _hard_ - it causes stresses and strains on people attached to the status quo, and may well kill off whatever lived in niches that are no longer there.  It's no mistake that the card in the Tarot that means Change is actually called Death.

In some ways, vast amounts of SF is about Singularities - those tipping points beyond which we cannot see without going over them, little deaths and megadeaths, deaths of personality and deaths of societies, interactions with the unknown Other, and with the unknown self.  It's about moving forward, encountering something we never expected and then seeing how that changes us.  That's scary, and it's not something most people ever think about - no wonder it's niche.

Oh, and great big rocket ships, of course.  With huge fricking laser cannons.  It's about that too.  But you don't get much change when you buy one of them.

Comments

That abbreviation.

[amberite.livejournal.com]

It took me a few minutes to determine that you were talking about Science Fiction and not San Francisco. :-)

[thishardenedarm.livejournal.com]

kabbalistically the tarot trump is also one of the paths out of the ego, the perishing of the cage of the persona, the regime of habits, tics and tropes we call our self. bring it on.