Impossibly Hospitable Worlds
Neil Gaiman, novelist, is quoted in a Wired Magazine interview of Ridley Scott, opining on the nature of science fiction:
Kurt Vonnegut believed that what science fiction and pornography have in common is that they are visions of impossibly hospitable worlds. But what Blade Runner did was create a dystopic, inhospitable world. Its dark and its grungy and you wouldn't want to live there but you'd love to go there. (Wired Magazine, 10/2007)
Whatvever Kurt Vonnegut's credentials are for delineating the nature of porn, it seems clear that he's at least touched on some truth. Pornography, like science fiction, is an invitation to a world that doesn't exist through the "door" of what is just close enough to plausible to coax many of us to make the leap.
It seems to me that science fiction and porn have something else in common. They "clothe" their social commentary on the present with the fantastic, the surreal, the impossible. In that "garb," we are drawn to embrace not a distant vision of reality, but one that is very present, one that is close at hand.
