Science Fiction: The Evolutionary Mythology of the Future © Tom Lombardo, Ph.D. Center for Future Consciousness Science Fiction as a Way of Life As a young boy growing up in the 1950s, I was drawn into the wondrous, strange, and at times frightening world of the future through the movies. At the Alhambra Theater in Waterbury, Connecticut, I watched—totally mesmerized—the classic science fiction movies, The War of the Worlds, When Worlds Collide, Journey to the Center of the Earth, The Time Machine, and the best of the best, Forbidden Planet. I was so inspired after viewing The War of the Worlds that I wrote my first science fiction story and screenplay, about an alien invasion of the earth, convincing some of my friends to put on a play, build sets and props, and “volunteer” their mothers into making costumes. We were going to “live the future,” a future of space ships and great battles to defend the earth. We never did the play, but I still have the original handwritten story, dated 1954. Science fiction is the most visible and influential form of futurist thinking in contemporary popular culture. It is so popular because in narrative form it speaks to the whole person —intellect, imagination, emotion, motivation, behavior, personal identity, and the senses. Readers and moviegoers are drawn into envisioning, feeling, and even acting out possible futures. Science fiction provokes psychologically holistic future consciousness, stimulating and engaging all the dimensions of the human mind. For many people within the vast and ever-growing science fiction community, science fiction has become a total way of life—a way of experiencing and creating reality, and in particular, the future. My early experiences with science fiction cinema and my enthusiastic efforts in writing and producing it exemplify this “total person” immersion that science fiction can generate. Not only did science fiction permeate deep into my psyche through the sights, sounds, drama, and excitement of it all, it also instilled in me an urgent desire to share this powerful and elevating experience with others, to create and to collaborate in imagining the possibilities of the future through science fiction. A superb contemporary example of how science fiction can become a way of life, of visualizing, feeling, and living an imagined future, is the TV comedy, The Big Bang Theory. Its characters, Sheldon, Leonard, Howard, and Rajesh, participate in numerous sub-cultures and sub-genres of science fiction, including comics and superheroes, cinema, Star Trek, and gaming; they collect memorabilia, posters, and action figures; attend conventions; regularly socialize through game playing and TV viewing; dress in science fiction costumes (vicariously adopting the identities of science fiction characters); and routinely (obsessively so) wait in long lines with other fans to view the latest science fiction films. It is a standing joke that Sheldonʼs friends think he is an 1