Join the Arizona chapter of the World Future Society on Tuesday, June 27, from 6:30 to 8:30 pm at the Scottsdale Civic Center Library for an engaging presentation on Science Fiction and the Future. Tom Lombardo will be continuing his lecture from last month’s meeting, with Science Fiction: The Golden Age to the Singularity and Beyond. RSVP here. I hope you can join us!

Science Fiction: The Golden Age to the Singularity and Beyond

Speaker: Dr. Tom Lombardo

Science fiction is the most visible, influential, and populous contemporary form of futurist thinking and imagination in the modern world. For an immense number of people science fiction has become a way of life. It is the evolutionary mythology of the future.

Following Tom Lombardo’s stimulating presentation last month tracing the history of science fiction from ancient times to the cosmic visions of “Doc” Smith’s seminal space operas and Olaf Stapledon’s evolutionary sagas of future humanity and the universe, in this follow-up talk Tom will continue and complete his journey forward, chronicling the subsequent decades of consciousness-expanding thought and imagination in science fiction up to present times.

Beginning with the Golden Age of science fiction in the 1940s, including Heinlein, Asimov, van Vogt, and Clarke, Tom will successively cover: the Silver Age, with the “explosion” of science fiction cinema, the fantastical psychological science fiction of Alfred Bester, and the meta-realities of Philip K. Dick; the New Wave and the “Dangerous Visions” of the 1960s and 1970s, sex, drugs, and the psychedelic in science fiction, and the rise of popularity of women science fiction writers, such as Ursula LeGuin and James Tiptree, Jr.; “How Science Fiction Conquered the World” in the 1980s, comedy and satire, computer technology and  AI, and the emergence of Cyberpunk; Steampunk, Watchmen, ecological and bio-tech science fiction, and mind-blowing experiments in reality in the 1990s; and stories of global consciousness, the “New Weird,” alternative realities and universes, passing through the technological singularity, and a thousand Sci-Fi movies (with super-heroes and anti-heroes galore) since the beginning of the new Millennium.

Please Note: If you missed the first talk, you can enjoy and get into this second talk without any problem.

About Tom Lombardo

Thomas Lombardo, Ph.D. is the Director of the Center for Future Consciousness and The Wisdom Page, the Managing Editor of the online journal Wisdom and the Future, and Professor Emeritus and retired Faculty Chair of Psychology, Philosophy, and the Future at Rio Salado College, Tempe, Arizona. He has published seven books and over fifty articles, and given an equal number of national and international presentations on diverse psychological, philosophical, and futurist topics. A member of numerous futurist organizations and contributing editor to futurist journals, his newest book Future Consciousness: The Path to Purposeful Evolution has been described as a “masterpiece” and “truly breathtaking,” “a deeply wise book for a wise future…challenging us to take our everyday thinking to a whole new epic scale.” He is presently working on a new book series Science Fiction: The Evolutionary Mythology of the Future, covering the history of science fiction from Prometheus to the “Singularity” and beyond.