Captain Future's Log

News That Stays News

I attended what's called a liberal arts college, not one of the more fashionable ones on the East or West coasts but in the heartland of the midwest, where there is still a small group of them.

Partly because I've written on a lot of different subjects for different publications and clients throughout the years, I've continued my liberal education throughout my life.

But a liberal education is more than non-specialized. It is about interpenetrations, knowledge and conceptual tools from one area providing perspective and added depth to another area. It's about developing frameworks, making relationships. In gross contemporary parlance, it's about connecting the dots.

I'm prompted to explain this by a recent thread on a community blog, where I have posted and where I've found the most thoughtful and informed commentaries of any such Internet site I've seen over a bit of time. The thread was about "art or literature that changed your life." Most of the responses named science fiction novels, or other genre fiction.

Obviously Captain Future is a sci-fi fan, and I see many science fiction stories in whatever form as useful in understanding the present and past, and envisioning various futures. But though some innovative writing in science fiction has energized the contemporary literature of its time, as literature it is usually a subsidiary form, dependent on other forms of storytelling. And little science fiction writing rises above middling quality.

The resonance of popular forms like sci-fi depends in part on knowing the classic literature that it in-forms it. It becomes a richer source of insight and even pleasure when the reader knows something of its relationships to other storytelling forms.

When I read that thread I was surprised that people who dealt intelligently with political, economic, ecological issues had such tenuous connection to literature. I simply assumed that they too would think of James Joyce or Virginia Woolf or James Baldwin or Gabriel Garcia Marquez, or even J.D. Salinger or John Irving or Barbara Kingsolver, let alone Keats or Conrad or Rilke.

But that's an incorrect assumption, I realized. I was perhaps more sensitive to it because of the comments I quoted in my recent rant on the Charlie Rose interviews about tech trends, which showed such a fundamental lack of understanding of what literature is all about.

Literature is essential to the future, as much as psychology or physics or medicine. So it is a piece of the puzzle that I've decided to emphasize a bit more here at Dreaming Up Daily.

Maybe there's some projection involved here, too, for in the press of other business, and required reading (for stories and reviews), I've neglected the nourishment I've always sought in literature. But I "indulged" myself in a spate of such reading in recent weeks, beginning with a memoir by contemporary novelist and poet Jim Harrison.

I was going to summarize that little exploration just for Books In Heat (my books blog), but now I've decided to go into it more thoroughly, starting here.

So that's something I plan to do over the next few days. Look for it above.