“Science fiction is a genre that makes use of the political, the historic and the social to garb space gnomes in a cloak of glamor that they are unlikely to have achieved in actuality.
The standard-issue content is a result of its barely-examined acceptance of progress in technological, ideological, economic religious and social life.”
Alfred Bork: ‘Deep Vanishing’ in Jeff Lint’s Science Fiction. Jeff Lint is a great and underrated writer.
There is also the tragedy of the person who wants to be an artist but has the mind of an inspector, perhaps they end up writing science fiction, which has the most literally described fantasies. Star Trek is full of this invented technical gobbledygook.
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Jeff Lint is very interested in the philosophy of ‘tentacled beauties‘ – which covers nearly all alien types (all of which are invented, despite their looming preponderance in the modern world) – just think how much better Darth Vader would be with tentacles instead of (as well as?) the Force.
Just watched movie Skyline – lots of tentacled beauties in there. War of the Worlds with Tom Cruise, Independence Day… all those tentacles.
Michael Crichton [RIP] added a giant squid scene to Pirate Latitudes – although this had the feel of a book that had not been given the final gloss, so that scene might have been cut if he had been working on it.
How to Write task: add a tentacled beauty to a new story, whatever the genre. Try adding a tentacled beauty to a dinner party scene.