Devangshu Datta: Truth is stranger than fiction

VIEWPOINT

BJB was published eight years after John Fitzgerald Kennedy turned around a losing presidential campaign by being articulate in TV debates. Blacks were fighting for voting rights and desegregated schools and colleges. Americans were dying on the other side of the world where the USAF was diligently bombing three Asian countries.

It was also the Abbey Road era of drugs and mysticism. The widespread availability of cheap contraception and wonder antibiotics took care of risks like pregnancy and STD. Young Westerners were prosperous enough to ignore their parents' mores and joyfully participate in a sexual revolution. And of course, Apollo 11 was due to land on the moon.

Spinrad wove all these strands together. Jack Barron, a mega-popular TV talk show host goes head-to-head with a billionaire selling eternal life and super-science. Although BJB won a Nebula, it's long out of print.

There is a chance that it will undergo revival. It was maybe the first time a black man was portrayed as US president. Jack Barron, who is white, leverages his TV popularity into a presidential campaign. He attracts the newly-empowered black vote by appointing a black running mate, and positioning himself as "The White Shade". Barron intends to hand over to the Veep after taking down his billionaire bete noire.

The black president plays a very minor role. But this was one of several reasons why the book (which had its share of sex and salty language) was denounced as "depraved, cynical, repulsive and degenerate".

What is actually happening in US politics is beyond anything Spinrad imagined 40 years ago. A black man is running for president and what is more, he has a Muslim middle-name. "Browser Helper Object" as geeks have taken to calling him, has received support from a TV show host, a black woman, who is herself more popular than McCain and Obama put together.

Truth can turn out stranger than fiction. But fiction often points towards truth. Every scientific advance since the mid-19th century has been written up before its advent in some work of speculative fiction.

SF only started to deal with broader social themes post World War II. That is when Huxley's Brave New World and Orwell's 1984 sparked new schools. Many of the new wave works were by very bad writers. But some were very good.

That is when SF started growing up. Cloning, organ-legging, cyberspace, gender alteration, drug utopias/dystopias, rail guns and cellphones; the themes came up as scientific themes always did in SF. But more interestingly, there were attempts to mirror the ways in which technology changes societies. And most interestingly, these were mirrors of the future