Where are all the cyborgs?

Right now, the invisible, time-travelling 11-year-old version of myself is sitting directly behind me, feeling very confused. He decided to drop in on the future Toby Litt, and see what he'd managed to do with his life. Had I fulfilled his ambitions? Was I just another boring grown-up?

When he first tracked me down, about two minutes ago, he found that—very disappointingly—I was still on planet earth. At the very least, he'd hoped that I'd be working in a moon-unit a bit like the one in Space: 1999 or, failing that, orbiting the planet in a space station like the one in 2001: A Space Odyssey. His ultimate dream was that, fulfilling the prophesy of Close Encounters of the Third Kind, some aliens would have come down and rescued him from life in Ampthill, Bedfordshire.

Instead, young-Toby finds me sitting at a desk, typing. The books on the shelves to my right tell him that I'm a writer, that I've published quite a few things, and that the latest of these is called Journey into Space. Although he's invisible, and also completely silent, I can sense his delight when he catches sight of the cover. There it is, the thing he dreamed of: a spaceship blasting off to disturb the silence of space. In fact, "The Silence of Space" is the name of a song he is soon to play for an audience of parents and friends with his band, Senator. They are a prog rock outfit, heavily influenced by Pink Floyd, but slightly restricted by their equipment: a Spanish guitar, a snare drum, a Bontempi organ. Quite a large part of young-Toby was hoping to find grown-up Toby playing a double-necked guitar in front of a hushed audience of longhairs at Milton Keynes Bowl. Instead, there's another book on the shelf called I play the drums in a band called okay. Maybe he'll have a look at this later, but it's the sci-fi title that first catches his attention.



Young-Toby is more into television than books, and more into films than television, but the books he does buy tend to come out of cardboard boxes on trellis tables at fêtes, harvest festivals and bring and buy sales. He judges books entirely by their covers and, if he'd seen a book like Journey into Space in 1979, he would have bought it—despite the fact that it doesn't bear those ultra-desirable words: "Winner of the Hugo and Nebula Awards," sci-fi's two most august prizes. Although he hasn't yet realised it, young-Toby is a big fan of Chris Foss—the leading sci-fi artist. Whenever he sees one of his battered, heroic spacecraft on a novel by EE "Doc" Smith, Isaac Asimov or Arthur C Clarke, young-Toby knows that it's the right kind of thing.

So. Young-Toby has sat down in my armchair with Journey into Space, and—because his friends aren't around to play with—he's started reading it. And, well, he's just not sure. It's a bit weird. He's flicked through a couple of times, and he's still to find any mention of aliens, mutants, cyborgs or robots, of lasers, phasers or lightsabers, of teleporting or hyperspace. Yes, there's a spaceship. And, yes, there's a supercomputer called it—which he doesn't know is short for "information technology." But the story so far is mostly about two cousins, August and Celeste, who are obsessed with earth—more particularly, with the weather on earth: wind, snow, fog, hail. Young-Toby wants to look optimistically forward into the future but all he sees are two people looking nostalgically back at him.

What young-Toby doesn't realise, because he hasn't visited them, is that—in between him and me—there are any number of Tobys who are enduring a long love-hate relationship with science fiction, and, partly through that, an even more tortured relationship with futurity.

When I went to see Star Wars in 1977 at the Odeon Marble Arch, I came away with two things—a blue lightsaber (thanks, Dad) and a sense of satisfaction. At last someone had made the breakthrough. This George Lucas guy obviously knew some Very Important Aliens, and they'd given him the inside info on how to make sci-fi films not look crap. In fact, this wasn't just a film, it was reportage on "a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away…" Lucas, like young-Toby, was another time-traveller.

What I didn't realise was that, with the global triumph of Lucas's vision, I'd become part of a massive target audience. And that, for years, greedy Hollywood executives were going to fob us off with high camp escapades like Buck Rogers and tacky rip-offs like The Black Hole.

To grown-ups, Star Wars may have seemed to have its tongue firmly in its cheek, but I'm sure I'm not alone among my generation in having tried quite soberly to feel the Force flowing through me—even if only during a maths test. In fact, with the sole exception of Douglas Adams's The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, I have always hated science fiction that didn't take science fiction seriously. And, yes, that does include almost every series of Doctor Who. Tom Baker, I could believe in—he was one of the most demented presences ever to grace the small screen. But Sylvester McCoy was everything I didn't want the future to be: Doctor Who as rent-a-ghost.

Of course, there were—here and there—keepers of the true flame. Despite the boredom and the body-count in Ridley Scott's Alien, I still wanted to be aboard that spaceship. It had techno-stuff I wanted to use. It was just about far enough away from Bedfordshire.

Since the age of 11, I've constantly moved away from and then back towards science fiction. William Gibson (Count Zero) brought me back, as did Iain M Banks (Use of Weapons) and Neal Stephenson (Snow Crash, The Diamond Age). It was only a couple of years ago, though, that I discovered my ideal science fiction book: Stanislaw Lem's Solaris. In the wake of this came my ideal science fiction film: Andrei Tarkovsky's adaptation of Lem's novel.

While writing Journey into Space, these were my twin touchstones. The Lem book I had constantly in mind, for its restraint, its single-mindedness. The Tarkovsky film, I'd never seen and avoided entirely. I didn't want to catch sight of a frame of it until I'd finished a full draft of my novel. I knew and loved several other of his films. I was sure I'd love Solaris—he's my favourite director. But his vision of the future was more useful to me as a fantasy than a reality. This is ignorance as research, a method I use very often.

I've written books in lots of different genres—youth novel, crime, chick lit, ghost story—but I always knew that one day I'd have to reckon with the genre that started me reading. It's not that I'd avoided it completely. The first thing I wrote after my first novel was an online sci-fi novella called Ohm for the Guardian's first website. Around the same time I published a short story in Interzone, Britain's longest running science fiction magazine. However, until I started Journey into Space, I hadn't really approached straight science fiction for about a decade.

Having finished the book, and now published it, I realise a couple of things.

First, science fiction isn't a genre at all—it's at least a dozen genres. When I finished my novel Ghost Story, in 2004, I felt I'd managed to do something different with the ghost story as a form. The elements are few and simple: a house, a ghost, a scared person getting more scared. With Journey into Space, though, I feel I'm far from having "done" science fiction. I've done a story set on a spaceship—a generation ship, on which the grandchildren of the original crew live entirely cut off from the earth their craft left. I've done a super-condensed space opera. But I haven't done a future city or aliens, or biotech, or time travel, or any of the other near-infinite possibilities that science fiction offers.

Second, I want to write more science fiction. This wasn't a one-time visit. I still want to get back on board the spaceship.

Looking behind me, I see the invisible, time-travelling, 11-year-old me has returned to 1979. I can tell this because he's stolen that copy of Journey into Space. Except, it's not really stolen. It's his book. I wrote it for him, because of him. And I hope, maybe when ten or 20 of his earth-years have passed, he'll pick it up and get what it's about.