The End of Science Fiction

Lisel Mueller wrote and published “The End of Science Fiction” in 1996, close to the end of the 20th century. Mueller immigrated to the United States in 1939, at age 15, fleeing Nazi Germany with her mother and sister two years after her father received political refugee status in Italy in 1937. Her father was an early opponent of Nazi ideology, and he was fired when the Nazis came to power, after a four-day interrogation by the Gestapo. The relevance of Mueller’s personal history to a reading of “The End of Science Fiction” is significant, given her parents’ political outspokenness. While the medical experiments and weaponry science of the Nazi regime may not have been common knowledge to typical German citizens in the 1930s, her parents may have understood the Nazi rhetoric that embraced a chilling vision of the future. For anti-Nazi progressives, the language and ambitions of the party erased humanity by design.

In 1996, cell phones and the internet appeared as well as other technological factors that play into Mueller’s anti-tech tone. The dominance of the smart phone and a reliance on the world wide web was not yet a reality.