Everywhere, today, the question is being asked: what did the Heaven’s Gate cultists have to do with science fiction. Try this for an answer: nothing.
They had everything to do with that hideous verbal crotchet “sci-fi,” however. And they are light-years apart, so don’t confuse them. At peril of your life.
Almost exactly one year ago, my heart tried to kill me. Before I could die, they cracked me open and did a quadruple bypass. But for a moment, I shook hands with death, and in that bonding I got a tough insight; and this I now know for certain: In those gasping last moments of the Rancho Santa Fe cultists, as they were descending into their death sleep, they were thinking Please help me; I’m going into the darkness and I need to know! Yeah, we all want to know…the answers that make sense of a world growing ever more complex, of lives that seem to be controlled by forces too big for our puny intellects, of a journey without sufficient noble purpose.
Traditionally, answers have been sought in philosophy or religion or mysticism of one kind or another. What’s the sense of it all, in a bewildering universe that doesn’t seem to know or care that we’re here? But from those sources no fully integrated or fully satisfying answers have come.
And those answers may not be anywhere in the literary genre called science fiction, either, but one thing is for damned sure: they are not to be found in the cheapjack foolishness of “sci-fi.”
The concepts that abound in fantastical literature have the magical capacity to inspire dreams that become enriching reality. Science fiction, like The Whole Earth Catalog, is only an implement, a tool of the mind’s imagination. It employs the technique called extrapolation, allowing us to play the game of what-if?. A game of intellect and daring, of special dreaming and determination not to buy into all those boneheaded beliefs that always tell use we’re too stupid and too inadequate to prevail. That we need some kind of mythical alien or supernatural babysitter to get us over the rough spots. Science fiction says otherwise. It is an idea-rich literature that is, at core, hopeful and progressive, that always says–with a nod to the reawakening of a competent human spirit–there will be a tomorrow. It may be troubling, and it may require us to get a lot smarter, but there will be a tomorrow for us to work at.