Roundtable: SF vs. The Future
The world is now full of everyday tech that would have had Hugo Gernsback wetting himself–GPS, smartphones with full internet access, iPads stocked with whole libraries of text and video (and wireless internet access). The other day I heard an NPR story about how the spread of cell-phone-based financial transactions in Kenya is driving commerce in rural parts of the country, and how the service has spread across Africa and as far as Fiji. In other news, there’s the Wikileaks drama, including decentralized hacker attacks on large institutions that were seen as part of a government-business effort to shut down Wikileaks’ host servers and PayPal funding. Shades of Gibson and Sterling.
So, yeah, it’s a nifty skiffy world, and I can see that people 30-40 years younger than I am (especially if they hang out on Boing Boing) have interestingly different attitudes toward, say, how information is acquired and stored and used–they are often indifferent to libraries (except as free internet access points) and tend to react to the decline of paper books and magazines with a shrug and a remark about dead trees and obsolete business models. They’re tethered to their iPods; they’re connected to each other and to the world at large via smartphone. They refuse to get off my lawn. Oh, wait, that’s a different thread.
But aside from the occasional shock provided by the likes of the Kenya or Wikileaks stories, to this geezer the nifty-skiffy future feels like the pre-nifty past, but with creaky knees and trifocals. On the gripping hand, I’m scheduled for cataract surgery in a few weeks, so the trifocals may be going away, to be replaced by multi-focal lens implants. Replacement parts. Whoda thunkit.
One reason I’ve read science fiction for the last half-century or so is that it looks around corners. But pointing to that wannabe-predictive, crypto-educational, Gernbackian side of the genre is a bit like defending video games because they improve hand-eye coordination. What I want most of all from SF is to go somewhere else that does not feel like here-and-now, no matter how nifty today has become. It’s the same urge that sends me to the histories recreated by Patrick O’Brian and Bernard Cornwell and George MacDonald Fraser and Robert Graves and Lindsay Davis. Or to the mean streets that some (finally unbelievable) PI is walking and fighting (exaggerated and overcomplicated) crime.
Fiction has always had a troubled relationship to “reality,” and genre fiction’s has more problems than the bourgeois novel–at least the latter can claim to deliver some sort of mimetic-moral truthiness along with the pleasures of storytelling. And let’s face it, we’re not going to have multi-species interstellar empires or meetings with “intellects vast and cool and unsympathetic” (well, maybe some global financiers) or travel back to murder our own grandpas and re-fight the Civil War. As a source of reliable scenarios for the specifics of actual future life, SF is a bust. But that’s no reason not to use those unlikely scenarios for stories and to see what other flavors of truthiness (to say nothing of amusement) might be available there, just as imagining what it might be like to find and face down a murderer can encourage us to think about the roots of depravity and the meaning of justice. I suspect that Ovid, Chaucer, and Shakespeare approached genre this way, too.
The mundane and optimistic SF movements are both ways of enacting moral criticism, and while I don’t doubt or devalue the sentiments as presented, I suspect that what really drives shifts in genre formulations is aesthetic fatigue–the endless desire for The Same Only Different that operates in all dynamic artistic traditions. Steampunk, on the other hand, strikes me as not very strongly coupled to moral seriousness. Instead, it’s about surfaces and style and the kinds of adventures one can have given this rather than that set of costumes and sets. It’s about play, and play is what most non-ritual art is about.
As Ceclia Holland says, “Whatever happens next, it won’t be anything we’re prepared for.” The future is unpredictable by definition. If science fiction can be said to be predictive surely it is the broken-clock-showing-the-right-time sort of blind luck. Being predictive is a story we tell ourselves about science fiction after the one of the blind luck ideas becomes real.
The future arrives in fits and starts, one halting step at a time, and when we glance backward we see that “the past is another country” and that we are transformed. The science fiction community goes through periods where it narrows its view of tomorrow and is susceptible to groupthink, before eventually breaking out in new directions. Always, writers need to shrug off yesterday’s tomorrows and find their own way. Never mind prediction. Offer a vision of a possibility and readers will gather like moths to a flame.
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With regards to the previous comments as to the future being unpredictable (which is true in the science sense) it is possible to make assumptions about trends etc. (And so for example we have the UN global population forcast for the 21st century.) Meanwhile SF is a bit like a blunderbus that sometimes points at a target called the future but with many shots missing but a few hitting the target.
As a bit of fun we (a team of mainly scientists and engineers who run a website) make some predictions for the near and medium term future at the beginning of every other year. We have done this for the best part of a decade. Our latest New Year prediction snippet is here (and we do seem to have quite a few hits).
See http://www.concatenation.org/news/news1~11.html#predictions
And the gamey lovers e’er rest in a quandary on how to have the unloose minecraft accounts.
It also features some interesting caves and rock formations, so if those are your thing then check this out.
You would possibly be wondering, Random Mobile phone industry’s.
As Ceclia Holland says, “Whatever happens next, it won’t be anything we’re prepared for.” The future is unpredictable by definition. If science fiction can be said to be predictive surely it is the broken-clock-showing-the-right-time sort of blind luck. Being predictive is a story we tell ourselves about science fiction after the one of the blind luck ideas becomes real.