Is Bad Sci-Fi Holding Technological Progress Back?

Ordinarily we hear about how science fiction has encouraged technological progress--how science fiction writers set forth ideas long before scientists and engineers took them up as objects of practical work and maybe even played a part in their doing so, how science fiction stories inspired scientists to pursue scientific careers in the first place, and so forth. (Indeed, Hugo Gernsback, who more than any other single individual may be credited with having made science fiction a genre in the publishing-pop cultural sense, pointed to exactly such justifications for the view of science fiction as more than entertainment.)

However, it seems to me that there is another side to the story, all too evident in the kinds of stories science fiction tends to tell--not least, horror stories which treat scientific and technological progress as a transgessive, cosmic order-upsetting act, inevitably, brutally, deservedly punished, epitomized by Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. Indeed, writing about the way fiction has tended to depict robots in particular Isaac Asimov coined the term "Frankenstein complex" to refer to what he saw as a psychological hang-up over the prospect of "robot rebellion," "robot apocalypse" and the like, and consciously opposing himself to that trend, pointedly wrote other kinds of stories depicting robots as part of a positive future. In that object he succeeded admirably--but that success has not always been acknowledged, or his intentions respected. Indeed, when Hollywood inevitably adapted the famed collection of those stories, I, Robot, what the filmmakers wound up giving the audience was, in contrast with a tidy, rational, progressive Asimov future a spectacle of robots on the rampage as beleaguered humans blasted away at them with machine guns. Of course anyone who actually followed the storyline amid all the stuff blowing up and all the robots coming at the viewer like horror movie monsters saw an attempt at something more nuanced--the traumatized anti-robot bigot Del Spooner recognizing the humanity in the machines--but all the same, it was a flashy, high-concept summer blockbuster sold on the basis of action-adventure rather than ideas, in line with a genre revolving around grandiose spectacle based on large-scale physical destruction and reptile-brained appeals to fear and prejudice.

That said, one may wonder just how much difference it all makes. A recent Pew Research Center study affirmed the impression that far more Americans are exposed to science content via entertainment than actual news. It also reported that on the whole they think it does their understanding and attitudes toward science no harm. They even report that those polled regard the media as depicting science quite positively. Still, I can't help suspecting a gap between what they may think in the abstract, and the way they actually react when looking at a particular scientific or technological prospect, with the conversations I have had with actual people in actual life consistently persuading me that Hollywood blockbuster-variety Luddism has had rather a deeper effect on their thinking and feeling in regard to these matters than they admit, or even realize. It is hard to see how it could have acted as anything but a drag on progress in an age that has had far too little of it.