Science Fiction, Technology, and the Relationship in Between

This week’s reading assignment revolved around Jon Turney’s ideas on Technology and the place it holds in Science Fiction in the essay “Imagining Technology”. A little background information about Jon Turney is he is a British science writer and editor who has several books. This short essay that I am going to talk about explores “imagining technologies and societies in which they are used makes innovation more or less likely” and the relationship between that and Science Fiction. I really enjoyed reading Turney’s perspective about the two and the relationship between them. He starts off with defining Science Fiction for the reader, but first lets them know that it is extremely impossible to define. He notes that there is only one definition that does the job well enough. “Science Fiction is a literary genre whose necessary and sufficient conditions are the presence and interaction of estrangement and cognition, and whose main formal device is an imaginative framework alternative to the author’s empirical environment.” He emphasizes to the reader that a simple version of Science Fiction is the depiction of “another world, a future world, or a different version of this world”. When watching a Science Fiction film or reading a book, you can obviously tell that there is a lot of technology being used. Without the technology, there would literally be no movie or no book, or a good one at that. But, Science Fiction is not only just spaceships and robots, it has more to it. I really liked how Turney put it when he said that Science Fiction is an “arena for imagining he effects of technologies, existing and yet to come”. It allows for our minds to wander and imagine what is coming in the future. Our minds consistently keep getting blown away with the technology portrayed to us through movies and books, so to think there is a whole arena where your imagination can continue to broaden is unbelievable! Our lives are run by technology, so when it continues to perfect and grow, it is hard to believe what is to come. At the end of the essay, Turney writes, “just as technologies have always come with stories, there have long been fictional stories about technology…[they] symbolize the perils and rewards of innovation”. Our world is evolving with new and improved technology, just as the stories presented to us evolve as well.