@mattbrowne: yes that delineation of sf types reminds me of an article in Asimov’s of F&SF a few years ago that said pretty much the same thing. It makes sense to me.
So, you are suggesting that humankind does not use it’s imagination nearly to the extent that it could, and further, that if we did, we’d solve more problems more quickly?
I guess I can agree with that. However, if this is the case, it is important to understand why it is the case, so we can figure out what to do about it.
My personal villain is parents and schools and employers. There are folks within all these types of organizations that actively (though not necessarily consciously) squash imagination all the time. They do it because they are too tired to answer all those “why” questions, or because they need order in the classroom, or because there is a huge bureacracy and it just isn’t set up to deal with new ideas. These are all simplistic descriptions of what are much more complex processes.
The solution, as usual, is education. Teach parents how to encourage children’s curiousity instead of squashing it. Teach educators how to handle “disorder” and to understand that it can be and often is a vibrant learning atmosphere. Show employers how they are reducing profits by not listening to employees.
It’s all pretty practical and doable stuff. In fact, a lot of people are working on these things even as we “speak.”
However, you’re talking about science fiction and you point the finger at the visual media. Movie and television producers are not exactly science whizzes, and what they don’t understand, they tend to leave on the editing room floor. Visual media with high production values are such huge operations, that they become quite bureacratic and, as already noted, tend to squash imagination.
Written media, and more specifically, novels, are the place where innovation and imagination are shown most often. These are generally created primarily by one person (although a lot are shopped though a writing group—and Scott Card seems to put his up on the web for critique and suggestions by the ravening hordes), and thus can give free reign to the imagination. Though, of course, once again, that can get chopped out by the publishing house and it’s minions.
The most useful imaginative science fiction, I believe, comes from writer/scientists working in the field. They know the most current research, and even the unpublished research, and have the best idea of how to project forward.
Writers could conduct this research, and some do, but the scientific jargon can be daunting and I just don’t think laypeople, no matter how smart they are, can get as much out of the material as those who have been steeped in it for decades.
I’ve done futures research. And no, we don’t have any crystal balls. What we do is look, in depth, at current trends, and then extrapolate. We extroplate four different scenarios: 1) the best possible; 2) the likely good one; 3) the one if things keep on going just as they are; and 4) what might happen if things go desperately wrong (bad weather event, limited nuclear war, comet landing—that sort of thing).
In this process, it helps to have a good imagination, but I don’t think it’s terribly necessary. I think you only need a lot of curiousity. When you know a lot about something, you can’t help but try to look into your scrying pool of choice. Science fiction writers, as all of us, get things right sometimes, and they can become famous based on that. But far more often, they get it wrong. No biggie, but people tend to forget that when enshrining our great visionaries.