Saturday 6 August 2011

Why Sci Fi turned to shite

    Once upon a Time, Science tuned men into machines and drained magic from the world. Those were the good old days- the Golden Age of Sci Fi.

    At that time it seemed Science had no limits- what was very small was like what was very large- Time itself had been spatialized- Man could boldly go everywhere he hadn't gone before and make it as banal as a brothel and as exotic as Crystal Palace.
 
    Then came Planck's constant which spawned the queer quantum world and a cap on the speed of Light which spawned General Relativity and Black Holes and Big Bangs, and then Bells' inequality and Higgs bosons and Multiverses and Sting theories and suddenly Science was adding more and more Magic to everything while cutesy GUIs, like kids with Williams Syndrome, tended to leave us feeling smarter, but less empathic, less human, than the computers we use.
 
 So, quite suddenly, Sci Fi turned to shite. It saw, perhaps too clearly for its own good, that now only Maths was Magic and Mankind boring, it had not farther horizon than allegory and gesture politics.

 Frankly, it now gives prostitution a bad name.

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