If poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world, science-fiction writers are its court jesters. We are Wise Fools who can leap, caper, utter prophecies, and scratch ourselves in public. We can play with Big Ideas because the garish motley of our pulp origins makes us seem harmless. Very few feel obliged to take us seriously, yet our ideas permeate the culture, bubbling along invisibly, like background radiation.”
— Bruce Sterling, in the introduction to William Gibson’s Burning Chrome
We believe that imagining the unimaginable enables the development of new creative ideas and new technologies, and allows new questions and innovative new answers.
We believe that science fiction is a wondrous laboratory for thought experiments and big ideas – scientific and technological, social and philosophical.
We believe that science fiction is the first and foremost cultural arena for a critical discussion on the effects of science and technology on society.
We believe science fiction has an important role in civic society, as a place for political criticism and as a catalyst for social change.
We believe science fiction is a source for inspiration. For children and teenagers it has tremendous educational value, nurturing imagination and curiosity, literacy and critical and “out of the box” thinking. Science fiction promotes multi-disciplinary creativity, and is a formidable force in encouraging the study and practice of sciences and technology. For scientists and entrepreneurs science fiction presents a challenge – making the “out of this world” unattainable visions crafted by science fiction authors, film-makers and designers, a reality.
We don’t believe that the role of science fiction is to portent the arrival of the robot, atom bomb or virtual reality, even though it did. Its mission is much harder. The creators of science fiction must stay in touch with the scientific community, know the moods and trends, study all the new and innovative technologies. But that is only the beginning of their task. They must be well acquainted with history, sociology, ethics and metaphysics, all part of their most difficult of tasks: understanding people.
To quote Fred Pohl, science fiction author and editor of the legendary science fiction magazine “Galaxy”: “A good science fiction story should be able to predict not the automobile but the traffic jam”.
The creators of science fiction must be well-versed in the social and cultural zeitgeist, study the scientific and technological marvels of their time, and try and understand how these will come to fruition. When they do so – exploring new sciences, amazing technologies and social trends – They take us all on a voyage of discovery into the unknown, each and every mile expands the frontiers of human thought and imagination.