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You can’t make this up — or can we?
Whenever we find ourselves living in interesting times, someone is likely to make the assertion that “you can’t make this up,” implying that people who create novels, television shows, or political propaganda could never invent something as bizarre as real life. The Trump administration has offered daily examples of people who seemingly would cause a novel to be rejected as absurdly unrealistic if they were to appear as characters, reiterating the claim that truth is stranger than fiction.
But is this an accurate observation about a supposed distinction between human behavior generally and the specific art of storytelling? Conventional wisdom also informs us that life imitates art which in turn imitates life, and herein I find more truth than what is available in the previous declaration. The pragmatic — as opposed to aesthetic — value of art of all kinds, be it written or visual, is in its lasting conversation with the creator, the readers or viewers, and the succeeding generations of people who are influenced from then on by the discussion.
As a reader and writer of science fiction, I have heard the claim that this genre imagines technology that tinkerers go on to bring to the real marketplace. This is taking too much credit if treated literally, though it is true that Arthur C. Clarke, for example, proposed a geosynchronous satellite network as a means…
