Science Fiction calls us far beyond the stars! The Captain of the Enterprise is now a rocket man. This fiction is the pathway to fact and calls humanity to lift their gaze from the things that surround us to possibilities that surpass horizons.
“Let there be lights in the vault of the sky to separate the day from the night, and let them serve as signs to mark sacred times, and days and years, 15 and let them be lights in the vault of the sky to give light on the earth.” And it was so.
Genesis 1:14-15
In 1964 Gene Roddenberry finished writing police dramas and switched to seek out new life and civilizations in the universe, only a year before in 1963 across the Atlantic Verity Lambert was beginning her Adventure in Time and Space with Doctor Who. These visionary creators were taking the baton from writers of science fiction and story tellers of speculative fiction who have explored the possibilities of imagination taking us into the new media of television and film.
Today we see a virtual explosion in the genre that allows for diverse stories to be explored around philosophy, ethics, theology and supernatural themes. Huge question about how and why we do things allow us to enter the revelation of apocalypse from the comfort of our arm chairs as our screens transport us to worlds beyond our dreaming. From such comfortable spaces we could allowed ourselves to be lulled into believing that this is all just mere frivolous entertainment. I have heard people denigrating the waste of their time spent “binging their favorites TV shows. But what if there is something to be learned from these so called idle hours.
In the episode of Doctor Who titled “The Big Bang,” which is the finale of the fifth series (season) of the show is the of then quoted “We’re all stories in the end, just make it a good one, eh?” .Spoken by the Eleventh Doctor, portrayed by Matt Smith this quote both validates the power of stories in curating our identity and calls us the attend to the stories we read watch and tell as formative top who we might become. Cause and effect here can become a little wildly wobblily timey whimey but then is that the truest nature of good narrative which which gets better with each telling. Stories incite us the dream beyond the known way and invent the pathways forward on ground not yet discovered and all this with no cost or consequence in our current space and time.
Gene Roddenberry, the creator of the Star Trek franchise expressed thoughts on storytelling in this way “To confine our attention to terrestrial matters would be to limit the human spirit.” Our imaginations set on fire by narrative can allow us the challenge the so-called limits of human reality allowing for fantasies that call forth realities as yet unseen, They can also give us the opportunity to test ideas in safe ways before risking negative ethical and moral effects.
So look up and dream into the vault of lights and allow your self to journey beyond your reality seeking out new ways to understand. Don’t allow your story to limited by reality instead take flight into a greater universe of possiblities!