LiveScience online magazine with a very nice article HERE. What stood out to me in particular was how science fiction enables one to speculatively imagine a future which isn't as bright as many suppose technological science would deliver us unto. The best of science fiction, I think at least, allows one to feel as if the future in question is right around the corner, even if five minutes away.
Science fiction inevitably is a speculative-imaginative philosophical enterprise allowing human beings to not only consider what French philosopher Quentin Meillassoux has titled "the great outdoors," but to partake in a radical form of deanthropocentric and bleak ecological transcendence by imagining what twentieth century process philosopher Alfred North Whitehead referred to as other cosmic epochs being possible, including futures without the human.
For some H.P. Lovecraft accomplishes this with his use of the horror genre and correspondingly his "cosmic pessimism." I, however, do not find Lovecraft so potent. I find that science fiction, not horror, is the truly more philosophical literature of the two.
