“Rooted as they are in facts of contemporary life, the phantasies of even a second-rate writer of modern Science Fiction are incomparably richer, bolder, and stranger than the Utopian or Millennial imaginings of the past,” Aldous Huxley proclaimed.

One only has to imagine possibilities to be in the realm of science fiction. Imagine a species in which there are six genders. Imagine blowing up the sun. Imagine a planet where a duke becomes a messiah, a god, a conqueror of the universe, and then a blind prophet. Imagine fascism arising in America. Imagine totalitarianism being so pervasive that the leader is called Big Brother. Imagine black people solving the racial problem by a mass exodus from this racist planet. Imagine a world in which everyone lives in paradise until being executed at the age of thirty. Imagine a place in which genetics have gone so far as to create supermen and superwomen. Imagine a wagon train to the stars. Imagine . . .

In his seminal essay “On Science Fiction,” C. S. Lewis wrote, “The proper study of man is everything.” He continued, “The proper study of man as artist is everything which gives a foothold to the imagination and the passions.”

Ray Bradbury said something similar several years later. “Over and above everything, the writer in this field [science fiction] has a sense of being confronted by dozens of paths that move among the thousand mirrors of a carnival maze, seeing his society imagined and re-imaged and distorted by the light thrown back at him,” he wrote in