How Science Fiction Help us Make our best selling Product
Some of the first science fiction books I loved were in a YA series called The Tripods Trilogy, by John Christopher, about a future ruled by a race of invading aliens called “the masters” who rove around the country in Wellsean tripods. Human civilization is kept at a medieval level, and young people are “capped,” or given surgical implants to control their thoughts, at age 14 — which happened to be my own age when I read the books, at a time when our very nice pastor was starting to drop around the house to ask when I was going to get baptized. It’s an age when adolescents are beginning to develop abstract and critical thinking skills, and some of them are starting to feel as if they’re being brainwashed into docility and conformism, into accepting their place in a stagnant, ovine society ruled by unseen monsters.
