Still from Blade Runner, based on Philip K. Dick's Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? Credit: denofgeek.com.
A few years ago, Iain Banks and I got into a pub conversation with another writer who wasn't a writer of science fiction. He didn't disdain SF, but wanted to know why it mattered so much to us.
We explained that SF was the language we used to engage with big questions: the dizzying vistas opened by science and technology; how societies work and how they change; what might yet be and what might have been. At its strongest, strangest moments SF gives its readers what some of them call ‘the sense of wonder’ – that distinctive, addictive kick of the sublime which comes from vividly imagining oneself in the presence of the immense: deep time, deep space, and natural or artificial objects of gigantic scale or fascinating complexity.
