Rockets, robots, and reckless imagination

"In 2013, I met Neil Gaiman at the Clarion West Writers Workshop in Seattle. The author of classics such as Sandman, American Gods and Coraline said something very interesting, which he later wrote in an article for the Guardian: “I was in China in 2007, at the first party-approved science fiction and fantasy convention in Chinese history. And at one point I took a top official aside and asked him why SF [science fiction] had been disapproved of for a long time. What had changed?

It’s simple, he told me. The Chinese were brilliant at making things if other people brought them the plans. But they did not innovate and they did not invent. They did not imagine. So they sent a delegation to the US, to Apple, to Microsoft, to Google, and they asked the people there who were inventing the future about themselves. And they found that all of them had read science fiction when they were boys or girls.”

Has a better argument for the importance of imaginative literature ever been made? Perhaps I should ask that of my family teacher."

read this article by Uisman Malik >>

Rockets, robots, and reckless imagination - Perspective