One of the key questions asked about science fiction is does it prophesy the future or in some way create the future? According to the interventionist theory, the authors who produce the most “fantastic” ideas about the image of the future directly intervene in its appearance. Fiction shapes people’s ambition and desire to have submarines, robot vacuum cleaners, neuronavigators or long-term missions to Mars. Hence, science fiction, at least in a philosophical sense, is not experienced as an ephemeral “prophecy”, but as the creation of the future by following logical extrapolation. This thesis is partly related to the causality that is created in the human mind and which is imposed as a link to our direct experience with the present.
David Hume says that in reality, causality does not exist. When a person sees a ball moving from point A to point B and another ball is standing in the middle of the path, he can predict based on his experience that the first ball will collide with the other ball. No direct connection can be found between the two balls from the point of view of the present, we see them as two points in space, but the logical assumption that they will collide makes as much sense as “prediction” in science fiction scenarios. Hence, science fiction bases its view of the future on experience, not on some mysterious intimations of exclusive prophets. In that sense, science fiction is not just a prediction of what will happen in the future, but it is an intellectual construction based on experience. That experience can be partially translated into criticism, if a thought experiment method is used and the witness (reader or viewer) imagines the scenario “what if” this prediction comes true. Talking about future events through the prism of science fiction is not like talking about a revelation that follows the path of absolute truth and its emergence through time. Science fiction is not at all concerned with proving its own truth, it asks the question – what if, this most incredible phantasm, this lie and illusion becomes reality?!
Science says that, for example, changes in the method of treatment are necessary for some improvement to occur, while science fiction is the opposite of scientific predictions. She does not value her predictions. When science talks about its field of the future, it values it – as good or bad for a certain sphere, it calculates the consequences. Science fiction says that what a viewer of a sci-fi movie sees is neither good nor bad. She does not call the judgment of the viewer either, her role is to create a situation of absurdity that will lead to an end point on which man can base the meaning of existence. Or, as Bertnard Russell would say, man must face a cruel absurdity, not to realize that existence has no meaning at all, but to realize that the meaning of existence is in some footnote, something that we have seen all our lives as minor and secondary.
Science fiction follows the paradox of guilt because authors such as Jules Verne or Da Vinci are held to be indirectly responsible for the course of scientific discovery in a historical context. But the function of science fiction is not to deal with the true picture of the future. It deals with the possible and is a tool through which man imagines what could become, and precisely in that imagination, the future begins to take shape.
Magdalena Stojmanović – Konstantinov
