Roundtable: SF vs. The Future
I don’t think fiction is broken. The idea of the death of the novel is very old, you’ll remember the death of the novel, in the 50’s and 60’s, and that snotty book by Richard Kostelanetz from the 70’s, the end of intelligent writing. Reading good fiction is still a wonderfully intense kind of intellectual play, maybe more compelling than any other mental exercise. There may be fewer readers (i don’t know about this, but I’ll grant it) but those readers are as committed and focused as ever. People crave stories; the medium may change but the story is always necessary. TV and movies and the other picture media supply the story more easily but for that same reason their stories don’t match the deep visceral pleasure of turning words into mental theater.
What fiction may be doing is morphing, somehow: the way painting did, when photography became available. Painting got less figurative and more abstract for a long while, unwilling maybe to challenge the realism capable with a camera. We may be looking for new ways of doing this beyond the reach of video games and movies, which can only be good. Anyhow, everybody I know is writing a book; some of them are even reading them. And I know a lot of reading kids.
Looking at the quotes, Gibson’s right. Interesting, isn’t it, that projections into the future flourish in a tight focus, while projections from the current free-for-all are weightless and craven. So maybe when we pretend we’re projecting into the future we’re only dealing with the now. Which is what fiction is supposed to do anyway.
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.