'The authentic language of Auschwitz, Eniwetok, and Aldermaston'

Responding to Clive Thomas's claim last week that science fiction is the last great literature of ideas, Simon Sellars at Ballardian has a nice compilation of similar quotes from Ballard and Gibson.

I firmly believe that science fiction is the true literature of the twentieth century, and probably the last literary form to exist before the death of the written word and the domination of the visual image. S-f has been one of the few forms of modern fiction explicitly concerned with change—social, technological and environmental—and certainly the only fiction to invent society’s myths, dreams and utopias. —Ballard, ‘Hobbits in Space?’ (a review of Star Wars), 1977

Science fiction is the apocalyptic literature of the twentieth century, the authentic language of Auschwitz, Eniwetok, and Aldermaston. —J.G. Ballard, from the blurb to the original 1962 edition of The Drowned World

At the risk of quoting the whole post—there's more over there, trust me—I like what Sellars himself has to say near the end of his post as well:

When in the course of a normal day one can stroll through any number of virtual realities and simulations, engaging in prosthetic inter-personal communications which would have seemed unthinkable even 10 years ago, where’s the point in continuing to try and define the genre? When the future has collapsed into the present so completely, and completely reshaped our view of reality right down to the most banal details of our lives, as it does in the here and now, all I see when I conjure up the term ’science fiction’ is mouldy old episodes of Star Trek and creaky reruns of Flash Gordon.

More on this when I have a little more time to think about it. The culturemonkey crew has been talking about it a lot at our weekly meetings...