Science-fiction paradox

Press, 22 June 1981, Page 9

Science-fiction paradox

What would happen if. having learned how to cross the barriers of time, you travelled back into the past and shot the young Adolf Hitler ... or your own father? Michael Kennedy Joseph, a former professor of English at Auckland University and a distinguished author in his own right, put the paradox as an example of the scope of the science fiction writer. He was speaking on the theme. "Science fiction without prophecy.’’ in the first Garrett lecture at Canterbury University.

The Garrett Lecture Trust was established in 1979. on the retirement of Professor J. C. Garrett, to commemorate the work which he had done to foster the arts in the University and in the community. Professor Garrett was in the audience, with about 150 others, to hear a sometimes serious, sometimes light-hearted, look at the genre, “as history, as theology and as literature.’’ Professor Joseph flitted from the walking machines of H. G. Wells and the B. E. M.'s (Bug Eyed Monsters and-or Beautiful Earth Maidens) of the 19605. He crossed from Kubrick's

“2001: A Space Odyssey’’ (“the most beautiful space fiction movie yet written”) to Mark Adlard and his trilogy, “Interface,” “Volteface,” and “Multiface”, where the answer to a lack of creativity in a futuristic “perfect” society, was to reimplement a totally inefficient, boring system of work . . . .Science fiction’s bounds were too vague to be called a genre, he said. They were crossed by mainstream writers like Aldous Huxley and looked to ancestors like

Plato and Homer. Science fiction derived from the comic strips of the 1930 s but had now reference to sophisticated literature. Today, the literature might serve to reconcile us to reality, Professor Joseph said. We could feel relief when we discovered there ' were no ruined cities on Mars. It gave us a "guilty hope” that the universe might turn out to be more hum-drum, more manageable than we had perceived in our wildest dreams. Paraphrasing Voltaire. Professor Joseph concluded: "That’s all very fine. It may all be true. But let us cultivate our garden.”