Americans lost one of our great heroines today, Sally Ride, to pancreatic cancer at the cradle-robbing age of 61. My Senior year of high school I proudly wore a vintage t-shirt which proclaimed, "Girl scouts can do anything." Because of women like Sally Ride, young women accross America--and not girl scouts only--believed they could do anything, too.
When combining the frontier of space and fiction you usually come up with science fiction, a genre for which I have a tragically poor understanding, especially considering the abundance of hackneyed premises I'm able to produce without even trying.
If I were teaching a literature class at the local Community College and could impart whatever I wanted so long as it sounded plausible, I would describe the key convention of science fiction something like this:
a story taking place in a universe held together with consistent but unfamiliar rules, whose hero alters the course of that universe's destiny.
Now, in the company of such an ignorant statement, aren't we glad to have wikipedia to save us?
"Science fiction includes such a wide range of themes and subgenres that it is notoriously difficult to define."
Well, I guess we're all grasping when it comes to this fascinating genre.
While reading the many attempts over eighty years to nail down the nuance of science fiction, I realized one reason that accounted for the variety of definitions. Science fiction not only reinvents itself as a genre by varying its best themes. It also feeds off the desires and moods of culture.
Take the Dark Knight film series that has been so popular for the last five years. I haven't seen Dark Knight Rising, but nonetheless I remember how Dark Knight ended. The Joker's philosophy is turned on its head as the citizens choose not to destroy each other, but to relinquish their fate to the gods insted of saving their own necks. The police begin to search for Batman, convinced this man who hides his face must be the cause of the city's trouble. Therefore it's Batman's plight not only to save the helpless masses, but to embody our guilt and twistedness (shouldn't they be chasing the guy who uses blood for lipstick?).
The writers of Dark Knight got it right when they presumed movie-goers would appreciate the mystery of a superhero scapegoat. Something struck home with us when Batman was unjustly accused.
Things were different in the 80s, when to inspire others you had to have the charisma of a Sally Ride. I look forward to watching the future develope, and I'm thankful for people like Ms. Ride who encourage us to be what we desire so desperately to be.
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