SF Goes McDonald’s: Less Taste, More Gristle
Twelve years ago, Harvard Alumni Magazine asked me why I wrote The Biology of Star Trek despite my lack of tenure. My answer was The Double Helix: Why Science Needs Science Fiction. In it, I described how science fiction can make science attractive and accessible, how it can fire up the dreams of the young and lead them to become scientists or, at least, explorers who aren’t content with canned answers.
The world has changed since then, the US more than most. American culture has always proclaimed its distrust of authority. However, the nation’s radical shift to the right also brought on disdain for all expertise – science in particular, as can be seen by the obstruction of research in stem cells and climate change and of teaching evolution in schools (to say nothing of scientist portrayals in the media, exemplified by Gaius Baltar in the aggressively regressive Battlestar Galactica reboot).
