I was always a geek. (Well not strictly always, but excluding the few billion years before I was born, and the bit of my life when the word geek meant a Carni entertainer who bit the heads off live chickens), after that I was always a geek.

I saw an interview with the head of the old Soviet space programme and he said that he had gone into rocketry because of Aelita. The film had inspired the boy to take a career in space exploration.

So where is that inspiration now? Judging by the popularity of Harry Potter the next generation are more likely to study thaumaturgy than metallurgy.

I suspect this is the Midgley effect. During the golden age of SF, the scientist in the white coat was going to be the solution to all problems – “Here drink your radium, it’s good for you”.

Now, however, you lot, the scientists, are seen as the cause of all the ills that plague us. The result seems to be that SF would rather currently do without the scientist.

Even the last Star Trek series, Enterprise, the whole format of the show seemed to involve a non-scientist hayseed captain whizzing around the galaxy tutting at strangers “We don’ do things like that where ah come fruhm”.

science got scary. There’s a supervolcano under Yellowstone, Coronal Mass Ejection could wipe out all life on Earth, Global warming, sea level rises of 5 to 7 meters, hot-house Earth, Snow Ball Earth, The Silent Spring, not enough water, not enough food, SARS, H5N1, Ebola.

OK the universe is a scary place, but how about getting scientists to instil a bit of wonderment, rather than frightening the crap out of the rest of us.

Science fiction was always about the imagination, and science has become a constant stream of “Oh you can’t do that. oh and by the way we’re all doomed…doomed I tell ya”

Can’t we have a few scientific figures out there going “Yeah, we’ll figure it out”?

or is this all really about scaremongering funding hounds being the only ones that get financial backing?

Imagination feeds science feeds imagination