Pseudoscience fiction?

Archive: Culture Low and High

There's new age fiction, typically novels where people go on spiritual quests and find enlightenment by meeting some shaman (shades of Carlos Castaneda who ended his days claiming his magic sperm went straight to women's brains - isn't a hellish stratagem of seduction).

Pseudoscience is a well-established term for bogus, junk, willfully bad science that willfully imagines itself genuine science. Truer science if you will that isn't subject to government cover-ups and the presumed arrogance of the professional scientific community.

Much early science fiction was full of weak if not bad science. It was adventure fiction, cowboys vs. injuns: the former had ray guns, the latter tentacles, three eyes and a genetically senseless interest in white women.

Pseudoscience fiction emerged I'm not sure when. Maybe in the John W. Campbell's magazines. Engineer or not Campbell was hungry for proof of psychic powers. A.E. Van Vogt's Null A books are fun. I've never resented the General Semantics underpinnings.

Somewhere the mass of science fiction fans, most of whom probably do not read books became believers in Something or other.

Maybe it started with Star Wars, which has given us tens of thousands of people who claim Jedi as their religion (better that than Baptist).

I'm not sure what the poor critters who speak Klingon think about the universe. Can you imagine what would happen to them in a warrior society?

They don't fit into this but let us stop to think of the men and women who try to base their love lives on John Norman's Gor books. (Nothing wrong with BDSM but to take it seriously ?… !)

Since I just want to complain I'll blame it on the successor to Kolchak the Night Stalker the X-Files. Take three extraterrestrials, mix in a pound of ESP and season with whatever conspiracy makes your life seem more intelligible.

That species of Spielbergian entertainment product that gave us movies like Signs might as well be called pseudoscience fiction.

An addendum to an earlier rant: Heinlein vs. Taken.