Science Fiction Lessons
Science Fiction has taught me several important things:
1. There is no such thing as an ideologically pure individual. A little show known as Babylon 5 taught me that when purist begin a crusade to weed out the "impure" no one is safe. The episode "Infection" from the first season, in particular, shows the results of such crusades: A dead world, uninhabited for a thousand years with relics left behind that speak to true fanaticism. Ask any one person what a blameless person is like, and you might get a definite answer. Ask any group of people to agree on what a blameless or pure person is like and you cannot possibly get a clear consensus.
2. No matter how civilized or advanced our culture becomes, no matter how unified and diverse, there will always be individuals obsessed with power and control. Star Trek, and in particular the Next Generation, showed me this particular lesson multiple times. Those obsessed with power and control will go to great lengths to acquire it, to the exclusion of all else. Obsession, in fact, is a theme throughout many episodes of both the original series and the Next Generation.
3. Fear of the alien doesn't always involve something bug-eyed and green. While many science fiction works touched on this subject, the movie Alien proved a unique study on the subject to me. It's not just the eponymous villain we're supposed to fear, as it turns out (Spoilers). The Company, Weyland Yutani, is just as horrifying as the xenomorphs. Maybe moreso.
4. A writer by the name of John Varley presented an interesting viewpoint to me in my teenage years via the Gaean Trilogy. While I applaud the three books for their massive world and depth of detail, it's actually the uniting theme of the books that caught my attention most: Survival. Sometimes people do the damnedest things to survive, things they might regret or feel haunted by. What's worse, it is shown repeatedly that without actually being in survival situation, one doesn't know how they'll truly react.
5. And, of course, Don't Panic.
These are just a few of the lessons I have managed to scrape from the multiverse of science fiction. Perhaps in later blogs I'll continue the list.