Brave New World Revisited
By Aldous Huxley
Judging the SF of the past on what they managed to get “right,” as though its main function was prediction, is a mug’s game. All the more remarkable then to have this look back by Aldous Huxley himself on the classic novel he’d written over 25 years earlier with that judgment of history in mind.
Not surprisingly, he thinks he got things mostly right. Indeed, it seemed to him that his dystopian projections were actually being realized sooner than he anticipated, driven by the twin banes of overpopulation and over-organization (increased centralization of political control and bureaucracy). The end result was, in his estimation, going to be a new kind of “soft” tyranny or neofeudalism, presided over by a technocratic elite.
There’s a lot here that rings as true, or even truer, than ever. (Much the same can be said for Neil Postman, whose Amusing Ourselves to Death (1985) leaned heavily on Huxley’s speculations.) What Huxley gets right, at least to my eyes, are operations of timeless social and political dilemmas, particularly as concerns democracy vs. oligarchy. His thoughts on technology have aged less well, as hypnopaedia and subliminal projection turned out to be fads. Instead, of speaker pillows we came up with social media, which does an even better job of doing the same sort of thing.
The Fermi paradox asks why we haven’t any evidence of extraterrestrial life when it seems likely that we’re not alone in the universe. Or, as the physicist Enrico Fermi is reported to have blurted out to a group of fellow scientists at Los Alamos: “Where is everybody?”
Coffee-table books like this one are all about the pictures, so it’s not surprising that the emphasis in this one is on the history of the appearance of aliens in SF. Are they basically humanoid, but with green skin and pointed ears? Are they tentacled, bug-eyed monsters? Or do they have no shape of their own, but only imitate or possess human forms?
Herbert George Wells may not have been the father of science fiction, but he was probably its single most influential practitioner, inventing types of stories that have gone on to become standards of the genre, from 
The mission statement for this colourful casebook is to provide a “secret history” of science fiction and fantasy by cataloguing some lost, overlooked, or uncompleted works. That second adjective, however, is made to do a lot of work. What counts as overlooked? What makes a book or film obscure or underappreciated? I think it’s great to want to “uncover the work of artists who, for whatever reason, did not receive their due.” But what is any creator due? How much recognition or reward? It’s hard to quantify these things, but I wouldn’t have thought Angela Carter or Mervyn Peake overlooked.
Non-fiction? Well, I had to stick it in some category.
This is the second pocket overview of science fiction I’ve looked at recently, the other being David Sneed’s 
Given the popularity of apocalyptic end-of-the-world scenarios in today’s SF and speculative fiction, it’s not too surprising that there has been a corresponding interest in how to survive such catastrophes as environmental collapse, alien invasion, and zombie plagues.
Reference books are a tough market in the days of Google and Wikipedia, but Sci-Fi Chronicles is one worth checking out. A combination timeline and encyclopedia of the genre, it’s a terrific compilation of information that’s lavishly illustrated and surprisingly well written. Covering fiction, film, television, and videogames, it’s the kind of guide that invites a browsing frenzy. One can quibble over some of the selections (I would have left out the superheroes), and biases (Asian SF isn’t well represented), but overall the coverage is excellent, ranging from the giant franchises like Star Trek and Star Wars to entries on leading authors of the golden age.
Alex on SF 