AIAA San Francisco Section Newsletter December 1995 Reality Is A Crutch For Those Who Can,t Cope With Science Fiction by Brenda Forman I read science fiction for the same reason I read history: it stretches my lifetime. History lets me live in the past. Science fiction lets me live in the future -- indeed, in any number of futures. It bestows a fine feeling of longevity while telling some rattling good yarns. It also frees the mind and the spirit from the confines of this single, small, isolated planet. I do not expect to experience either interplanetary or interstellar or intergalactic travel in my lifetime. But I have experienced the thrilling sensation of it when riding with Robert Heinlein, Isaac Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke, and their talented successors. I read my first science fiction story when I was about 12 and I was instantaneously hooked. In retrospect, I realize that I was astonishingly lucky because Port Washington Public Library had a multi- shelf collection of science fiction classics. As any kid would do, I thought nothing of it at the time -- wasn,t that standard for every public library? Only in adult life did I realize how completely unusual it was, probably the bequest of some unknown fellow fan. And what a feast! I read my way through it from end to end, and many of those books marked me for life. I suppose I was your typical nerd -- although of the female variety (nerdette?) -- smarter than the rest and therefore a distinct social outcast in high school society devoutly consecrated to the worship of the Jock, the Cheerleader and the Mediocre. Thus I found a profound and altogether liberating sense of identification with the brilliant, misfit protagonists of the books like Olaf Stapledon,s Odd John or good old "Doc" Smith,s Lensman series, or Henry Kuttner,s strange and compelling story, All Mimsy Were The Borogoves. So much did I love the stuff that many years later, when I went for my Ph.D., I ruthlessly excluded science fiction from my life for nearly five full years. There were all those mammoth reading lists in Party Formation, French Politics, American Constitutional Law, Political Theory and God knows what else, and if I was to get through them all, no way was I going to have any science fiction singing its siren song from the coffee table. It would have been like being on a rigid diet and having a large box of Godiva chocolates in plain view! But when I won my degree, I went on a six-month binge, reading everything published in the preceding five years. And lo! While I was immersed in the science of politics, the whole genre of science fiction had entered into a glorious new era where first-rate stylists created splendid and sophisticated characters in complex social situations, without ever surrendering the traditional intellectual challenges of a good sci-fi plot. Modern science fiction, in short, had blossomed into some of the best writing anywhere -- certainly more challenging and decidedly more interesting than the pallid anti-heroes and endlessly self-absorbed neurotics touted by the literary establishment. In the years since, I have become increasingly gleeful at the growing entry of science fiction into the best seller lists. (Jurassic Park, for example, is pure science fiction.) And hard bound, yet! What old- time fan ever expected that to happen? What did happen, of course, was that we all grew up! We always loved the stuff -- and now we can afford to spend more than 25 cents for the Ace paperback. I have long believed that any corporation wanting to do real strategic planning should forget the viewgraphs and the market projections and instead hire a first-rate science fiction author, provide him or her with some basic assumptions and a rundown on the company,s history, and then tell the author to write the company,s story for the next ten years. I am absolutely certain that the results would come closer to reality than anything we typically produce now. Of course, I don,t expect anything of the sort to happen. Who ever said we really want to know the future?