what if cavemen had science fiction?
If sci-fi says more about our hopes and fears than about the future, what sort of sci-fi would our prehistoric ancestors produce?
From a comic by Aaron Diaz
As a literary genre, science fiction is a fairly recent phenomena which came into the spotlight thanks to works by great writers such as Jules Verne and H.G. Wells. But surely there were science fiction stories before that, maybe even in the ancient past, which is why cartoonist Aaron Diaz tried to rewind the literary clock all the way to the Stone Age to see what caveman futurism might have been like if it was based on the common threads which underpinned some of the most popular works from the Golden Age of Sci-Fi. (click to see more…)
Ok, so it's not very optimistic but there has to be a twist to make the story interesting and thought provoking. If you really think about it, really good science fiction is about putting today's worries and ideas in a new context and despite captivating millions and inspiring scientists and engineers for generations, it never quite got its due, often snubbed by haughty literary critics as somehow less important than historical fiction, romance and gritty first hand accounts. And that's really a shame. Maybe today, it wouldn't be a bad idea to have millions of people looking into the future for inspiration rather than dwelling in their dissatisfaction with the here and now.
