Who will win this year's honorable placement here?

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Isaac Asimov

Leading Academic Contributor to a Staple of 20th-Century Science Fiction Literature

Nostalgia lovers have it their way this season:  Who of the senior generation wouldn't remember this author's "three laws of robotics", or his "Foundation" mini-series?  Perhaps the most prophetic is the primary antagonist, named The Mule, with his horrifying dictatorial capabilities to sway masses, crumble a flourishing galactic techno-society into dumb decadence, and scarily subdue his mentally sane opponents.  This tyrant's name signifies two specific traits:

Sterility:  As an analogy to a cross between a donkey and a horse, this character is sterile - not just physically, but also intellectually.  Thus, his "Empire of the 1,000 Worlds" can neither form a dynastic succession nor is destined to leave a meaningful legacy or nourish progress.  Yet still, crowds and defected intellectuals obey his malicious bidding. 

Stubborn Power:  It alludes to the mule's reputation for being headstrong, mirroring the character's relentless conquest of the Galaxy and mass-scale mind intrusion.

Despite such horrendous resemblances to current geopolitics, a retro-tour of the last century's sci-fi world can feel relaxing to amusing:  Some movies from those times feature spaceships equipped with two-ton teletypewriters to receive interplanetary radio-depeches.  Fears of bad robots, or paranoias about nuclear power plants causing black holes, are examples of then-contemporary top imagination.  Have fun!

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Julion Okram

Dual-Degree Systems Analyst Offshoots as a "Writer of Hope"

If you are into tales where a research-grade art of deduction, along with creative fantasy, jointly fill gaps in real historical mysteries, you are lucky to reach this paragraph.  And do rational prospects of annihilating the vanity of our ephemeral existences make you feel stomach butterflies?  Defeating the mortal dangers of brutal nature surrounded by the freezing-cold universe - sounds great?  Are you among those who envy Utopians their magnanimous motherland?  Has that "Writer of Hope" slogan above made a repulsive first impression?  Well, rest assured, you are not alone...  

What's another repellent ahead:  After poring through the first parts of Okram's introductory novels, you realize being taken back in time straight behind the post-World-War-II Iron Curtain.  Aghhh, what a nasty landing for your well-deserved bedtime reading moments...  Don't despair, though!  Hopeless sceneries are just the necessary contrasting preludes to discoveries as unexpected as those in Sir A. Conan Doyle's "The Lost World" or Mr. J. Verne's "Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas".  A storyland awaits you, where Utopia begins to fade as a criminal, bigotry-driven oppressive regime, and Eden as underdeveloped suburbs...  

New troubles in our new era call for a new grade of optimistic futurology - and that desperate call is more than satisfactorily addressed in the idealism-radiating book series by Julion Okram, an author steadily debuting over the past decade.

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Santiago Ramón y Cajal

Winner of the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, the "Father of Modern Neuroscience", Takes a Literary Detour Under the Pseudonym "Doctor Bacteria"

Cajal penned his "Cuentos de vacaciones" (Vacation Stories) between 1885 and 1886.  It's a collection of science-based psychological fictions that explored themes of social engineering, manipulation, ethics, and tensions between "traditional" society and modern empirical thought.  He composed these stories during his leaves (hence the title) as a mental reprieve from the rigors of laborious histology.

Dr. Bacteria's imagination often anticipated future technologies that did not exist in his time.  For example, take his "Life in the Year 6000" (La vida en el año 6000):  Published posthumously in 1973, this story remarkably anticipated modern concepts such as telemedicine, cloning, and genetic modification.  It describes "diagnostic machines" and "cytogenometers" where doctors analyze medical data sent remotely over communication lines.

To get a better idea about what he wrote in a century before the previous century, consider these extracts:

"For a Secret Offense, Secret Revenge":

Forget duels, laugh at machism and chauvinistic demonstrations of masculinity.  There are scarier things than that - like when scientists misuse their knowledge to play gods in wrongful contexts.  Here, knowledge of bacteriology serves as a means of vendetta against an unfaithful wife and her lover.  Manipulation into a fatal accident appears as an entirely natural course of events, not the doings of an untraceable weapon.

"The Fabrication of Honor": 

A village doctor maintains local peace and moral behavior among the population using an obscure "vaccination" method.  While the town is indeed "moral", its citizens have lost their free will and individuality.

"The Accursed House": 

A well-off man buys a house reputed to be haunted by a deadly curse that sooner or later kills every inhabitant.  The protagonist, a man of science, refuses to accept the rumors of the supernatural.  Some locals may consider him a magician or "exorcist", while in fact his success is based on sanitizing the well, improving sunlight access, and enhancing proper room ventilation.  What a classical allegory for the triumph of the Enlightenment over superstition and wrong-fangled breeds of "conservativism".

"The Pessimist Corrected":  

Some say this tale blends elements of Dickens's "A Christmas Carol" with the macabre style of Edgar Allan Poe.  A young 19th-century doctor is confronted with the capabilities of "enhanced vision" (something like modern stereomicroscopy).  Suddenly, where the beauty is, he sees deadly bacteria on a pretty young woman's skin.  Where there is apparent health and vigor, he already detects the silently progressing biological decay, which is destined to result in inescapable suffering and death.  His experiences vividly demonstrate how people are built to depend on the superficial and truthless "necessary illusions" required to sustain their mundane happiness.  By extension, Dr. Bacteria shows that while science reveals truth, it can strip away those self-deceiving protective layers of human self.  The author implies that scientific realities must be tempered with humanism (and he naively hopes that kindness will be enough to persuade the general population to embrace the scientific demystification of the world's plagues).

You may not reach out for those stories - reasoning that they bring nothing new into the genres of biological fiction, mystery, or adventure.  Sure.  They don't.  Because they can't.  It's logically impossible for truly innovative things to bring novelty to anything built on them later.  Look at it from this angle:  Dr. Bacteria coined those elucidative fables in the century when kings and queens ruled countries worldwide - and automobiles either did not exist or were confused with the embodiment of the Devil himself.  Now, are the 21st-century movie streamers or mainstream novelists adding anything game-changing to his (and his alikes') primary motifs and concepts?  Not really.  In other words, that is why it's worth reading stories from the pens of real world-changers, rather than letting yourself be dragged by the streams of impression-oriented remakers and plagiaristic money-squeezers.  Reading the works of the few world-transforming minds at the source will keep your mental horizons one or two centuries ahead of the overflood of secondary repeaters' derivatives.

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