Science Fiction.
The proper stuff, with a ‘What If?’ that might just be feasible at some time, or the author succeeds in making us believe it is, and which has a convincing story featuring engaging characters woven around it. Sadly, not so much of it is being written these days. There is rather too much rubbishy fantasy or sword&sorcery or zombies etc which mostly tends to be very lazy rabbit-out-of-a-hat writing; I must have sold-on a couple of hundred of those over the years. Theodore Sturgeon once said “Ninety percent of science fiction is crud, but then, ninety percent of everything is crud.”
I’ve been collecting and reading it since the mid 1950s after being introduced to Dan Dare in the Eagle! When commuting on the Tube I was reading three books a week, but alas when I needed to commute in the car it dropped to about four a year. I have a couple of thousand, most read more than once, a lot bought by the yard at second-hand shops, eg in Hay on Wye, also several first editions bought new, some even signed, and some lucky discoveries in the junk shops. Now instead mostly writing it when time permits, but only one in print and that was let down by the printers and the wrong cover art. The Kindle publishing Ts&Cs are iniquitous in several ways so that is not really a good route either.
Arthur C Clarke once said something along the lines of “Any science, if sufficiently advanced, is indistinguishable from magic.” Some things are impossible, eg the Startrek ‘Transporter’ with unbelievable energy and bandwidth requirements even if one could disassemble at source and reassemble at the other end, and the same goes for mental ‘Teleporting’. However, future prediction or sharing thoughts? Those are more possible, but another story.
A lot of what was impossible when written in early SF is now commonplace. A classic example is a short story written by EM Forster in 1908 “The Machine Stops”, and this has a big interactive screen (before TV or Skype), global communication (almost before wireless), supply and delivery to your accommodation (before ebay, Ocado or Amazon), high-speed air travel (before passenger aviation), and the catastrophic end of a society (nothing new there).
It is fun trying to predict how things might work out, and deduce possible ways in which it might happen. We used to do this on a rolling basis for real at work; try and predict what might be the next new tech in twenty years time, and plan accordingly.
