When I was in high school, my desire was to be a nuclear physicist. I read all the science and science fiction books that were in both the school and public library. What science fiction did for me was give me glimpses of possibilities.
H. G. Wells and others provided a fertile field for my imagination. Isaac Asimov and Arthur C. Clarke, like so many fiction writers, were in fact serious scientists. Robert A. Heinlein worked in aeronautical engineering and had taken graduate classes in physics and mathematics. His desire was to be involved in politics, but I believe that his far left leanings prevented serious accomplishments in that area at that time.
Because the majority of science fiction does have a basis in fact (if only a small one), it has the ability to not only to alter one's view of science but of social mores as well. It is within this genre that all types of societies and odd social structures can be put forth as viable alternatives to our current reality.
I preferred reading was science that was fictionalized and not what is now fantasy and horror. Nuclear physics, which is primarily dedicated to studying the building blocks and interactions of the atomic nuclei, was what piqued my interest at an early age. Rocket fuel, the intense power released by splitting atoms and the sun itself fascinated me and my reading fueled my already open imagination. MIT was what I aspired to but I never got close.
I read voraciously and would often become "lost" in the story. I wanted to be in the lab making discoveries that would give us the ability to travel to distant planets. I wanted to be in that rocket ship that left earth never to return. It was my escape. I was the ship that sang. I was deterred by the cost and was told that nuclear physics was not worth spending money on when I would probably wind up married with children and all that education would be wasted.
Instead, I got swept away with the aspect of social change. Far from reaching to the stars, I remained not only earth bound but bound by the flesh and those desires.
Much of the science fiction was filled with the lack of marriage. The futuristic story lines were formulated to make marriage seem obsolete. Inter-species relationships were growing while families were only necessary if that was chosen as a way of life and then only as a social structure for colonization of some other world. Marriage became an archaic requirement of a past society.
Ridding society of marriage was just the beginning. The choice of partners was now open to whatever was acceptable in one's own eyes. Like a moth laying eggs on butter bean plants or a green horned tomato worm, the seeds of corruption were planted in abundance and proceeded to eat away at the moral infrastructure of our society. Like a brush fire, the cancer of moral disruption consumed America.
Science fiction was not totally responsible for the decline of morals in America. It was just one of the many factors that made it easy for an influx of social dis-ease. It was one of the prominent peddlers of reasons to dismiss the idea of God. When God was portrayed it was simply the way a social structure was defined and a crutch for simple ignorant cultures to define more advanced aliens. The one aspect of God and all of Creation that science fiction cannot effectively portray is creation. Stories speak of advanced races planting civilizations on various planets, but they never say where the planters come from.
Perhaps if I had grown up with Christian parents and a fierce knowledge of who I was in relationship to God, I would not have been so mislead by the fascination of science fiction. Science is not the antithesis Christianity but, as has been discovered, science actually supports Christianity. The Bible in all its wonder and knowledge knew that the earth was round before scientific discoveries proved it so.
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