Let your imagination run riot
M.RAGHURAM
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Science fiction encourages us to think out of the box.
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Today’s sci-fi is tomorrow’s sci-fact. The last generation has seen many sci-fi stories turning into sci-facts that we take for granted today. Space crafts, deep space probes, un-manned space vehicles that travel to the edge of the universe and send pictures and data so accurately back to the earth carrying a wealth of data are ever so common today. At one time they were an intrinsic part of the fantastic.
Reading Gene Rodenberry’s Star Trek, or Arthur Clark’s Space Odyssey trilogy (2001, 2010 and 2061) or Perry Roden’s science fiction in the Seventies made one wonder if those days would ever arrive. But they did eventually. .
Ever popular
All these were possible thanks to people who could dream about the future . Students today aren’t encouraged to read such books. Maybe that’s why they aren’t so popular any more.
Sci-Fi books have a limited readership, unlike the Harry Potter series. There was a time when such books were commercially a run away success. Movies based on them were considered cult classics. They were watched and re-watched.
With films like ‘Close Encounters of the Third Kind’ and Star Wars to the ‘Back to the Future’ Trilogy in 1990s the way the world looked at the science fiction books and films changed for ever. Youngsters had found new icons of modernity and for the first time T shirts showing characters like Chewbacca, Capt. Han Solo and his millennium falcon and ET (from the movie Extra Terrestrial) appeared on the fashion scene.
Sci-fi books set youngsters to think of the possibilities of innovation.
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