Over the last three years I’ve offered a webinar series that provides a comprehensive history of science fiction from ancient times to the present. The webinars, consisting of 20 educational modules, are all available for viewing on the Center of Future Consciousness YouTube channel. A two-part selected overview of this history, titled “Science Fiction Futures,” is being published this coming spring in Roberto Poli’s (ed.) Handbook of Futures Studies. Covering the first half of my webinar series in much more depth, I’ve published three volumes so far in my book series Science Fiction: The Evolutionary Mythology of the Future. Compressing all the above publications and webinars, this presentation offers an accelerative “Big Picture” overview of the nature and evolution of science fiction that highlights the diverse and immense array of its visions of the future.
Science fiction is the most influential form of futures thinking and imagination in our global popular culture, repeatedly throughout its history extending the boundaries of our consciousness of the future. Its pervasive and deep impact on our planetary consciousness of the future is in large part due to the fact that as a narrative expression of holistic future consciousness, science fiction personally engages all the major dimensions of human psychology, and moreover, contrary to limiting stereotypes of the genre, addresses the “future of everything.” The literature of science fiction is immense and the plethora of different visions of the future is unparalleled. Anyone who is interested in how humanity thinks about the future and how humanity can think about the future, in all of its wondrous and terrifying possibilities, can not ignore or dismiss science fiction.