The Dreams Our Stuff Is Made Of: How Science Fiction Conquered the World

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There used to be a truism—I heard it first from my then agent Terry Carr in 1964—that the golden age of science fiction is twelve, the age we begin to read SF and are wonderstruck. That truism is no longer true, for science fiction has come to permeate our culture to such a degree that its basic repertory of images—rocket ships and robots, aliens and dinosaurs—are standard items in the fantasy life of any preschooler. As for the twelve-year-olds of our own era, nothing science-fictional is alien to them.

Admittedly, theirs is not the science fiction of the printed page, for today’s twelve-year-olds have been warped away from the Guttenberg galaxy. Instead of graduating from comic books to pulp magazines, as Terry and I did, the brighter children of the 1990s transfer their attention from the TV screen to the computer monitor as they mature. In both media, it is increasingly difficult to distinguish between science fiction and assorted neighboring realities. The dinosaurs in the movies look as real as elephants or camels; toddlers’ toys morph into weapons; grown-ups on talk shows discuss their UFO abductions, while on the next channel a dull documentary recounts the history of space exploration. One has to be sent to school to begin to sort out what’s real and what’s Hollywood.

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