The End of Science Fiction...

As a story genre, Cowboys and Indians is today a fairly spent force, as are Cold War spy novels and Graustarkian adventure tales.  Spies were undoubtedly real, but the Cowboy mythology had nearly no basis in reality.  I've been to the OK Corral.

The first yummy image a Google search coughed up for "Science Fiction".

It took the Europeans to transform geriatric Westerns into something really epic, the Spaghetti Western, where good and evil got distilled, magnified, exaggerated.  Sure, you could still spin soap operas about lost love, but as soon as you point a gun at someone you have instant, high-intensity, if not high-quality, drama. That's gotten to be an incredibly overused gimmick, to me.

Adventure-tinged "Sci-Fi" with a dash of low-level porn.

I read tons of Science Fiction years ago, finally picking Stanislaw Lem as the coldest--or coolest--intellect around.  Dropping his name was like offering your scent to the pack after rolling in carrion.  No wonder they booted him out of American SF.  But do watch the original Russian Solaris film, if you get the chance. 

Science Fiction has historically made some pretty huge promises, in spite of dystopian warnings.  Today, Science itself is also caught red-handed making more promises than it can keep.  It has claimed that we'll soon understand consciousness by studying the brain, and, we'll conquer all disease by mapping the human genome.  Neither goal has been reached, and most of the investors have backed out of Genetics, which should illuminate things clearly--just by following the money, as it escapes.

Did anyone ever really want to live here?

Materialist Science, or "MatSci", could take a huge hit by not immediately healing all human ills as promised, but it can always request more time, which it usually does.  But with Consciousness, there's no ailment to be "fixed", so there's no one to blame for a failure to produce results. But the prime fallacy of MatSci is the idea that material machines can explain the immaterial, that is, our separate consciousnesses.

The "10,000 Year Clock", the watchful, cyclopean eye/idol of MatSci.

My own experiences with "expanded" consciousness, for lack of a better term, aren't something I keep a secret, but they are somewhat personal as they're part of my evolution.  Mainly, they concern many of the things MatSci dismisses out of hand: "psychic" experiences, past life memories, viewing auras and other energies, so-called "ghosts", exploring alternate timelines, and out-of-body projection. 

So ultimately, I don't need the MS priesthood to give me permission to know what's up with the Universe, any more than you need it to tell you that you love someone.  But then, you may think that your emotions are nothing more than chemical reactions, which is certainly a common, but false, belief. And even though the scientific priesthood claims it's so during work hours, they themselves don't bother adhering to it on the weekends.

Science Fiction illustrates all sorts of possible scenarios based around technology, some good, some bad. And that's not to say those events won't ever happen; people could well merge with machines and become cyborgs, but machines, approaching the technologic "singularity" some claim is coming, will never, ever attain consciousness.

Ask yourself how would we tell, anyway-- by using yet another machine to test for it?

Our friends the Materialists would like to imagine that everything's a machine, and that matter preceded consciousness, but in fact it didn't.  Even a technologist like Nikola Tesla understood that the Universe operates vibrationally.  Also true is that the frequency spectrum is infinite, spatially and dimensionally.

Vibration alone sends sand grains into atomic & biological patterns.

The prime component of the militant MatSci guerrilla force, the "skeptics", "debunkers" and other members of the scientific clergy, is Ego, the same aspect of consciousness that currently holds much of humanity at a  vibrational impasse.  Nowadays most people--men, usually--have flexible definitions of ego that allow them to maintain their bad behaviour, but its actual function owes more to eastern mysticism than psychology.

Basically, ego is what a dog doesn't have that allows it to live in the moment, thereby experiencing total Buddha-like connection to the Universe.  In that sense, every animal on Earth down to the last tiny little bug has an advantage over most us.  Even your pets can tell when an earthquake's coming.  A real, inquiring  Science would study that, but of course dogmatic MatSci won't even acknowledge it.

Your dog has an invisible halo.

Consciousness is a big subject, probably the biggest, so staying close to our theme I'd end by saying that Science Fiction, of the speculative sort--not blasters and cowboys in space a la Star Wars--is completely and utterly bankrupt because its foundation, the materialist/mechanistic paradigm, is false.

And "pure" extrapolative SF is rarely even a good story, it's just a manual to a potential destination, with reams of MatSci dogma lurking in the margins.

But no new mode of fiction need be invented to take its place, because even though Science Fiction is technically false, our Mythologies aren't.