It's mainly an article about worldchanging allies Charlie Stross and
Cory Doctorow (and we're happy to see 'em get the much-deserved press).
But the frame within the story is set is a now-familiar one: "Awed
at the pace of technological advances, a faction of geeky writers
believes our world is about to change so radically that envisioning
what comes next is nearly impossible."
Been there, done that.
Here's a draft of a piece I wrote for the New York Times Magazine in
2002, which got bumped by the appearance of a vaguely-similar piece in
the Week In Review section:
Who's afraid of the future? Science fiction writers, apparently.
It seems a strange charge to level. After all, science fiction
has been the genre of choice for writers who love to ponder the future,
its possibilities and its dangers, ever since Mary Shelley mythologized
both the expanding vistas of science and the perils of technological
hubris in Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus almost 200 years ago.
Nonetheless, a growing number of science fiction writers and critics
contend that works which tackle the future with true originality are
becoming something of an endangered species.
"There's still plenty of space opera out there, with heroes
running around in galactic Disneylands," says author Bruce Sterling,
"but almost no one is addressing the nature of the 21st Century, or
putting together, like, genuinely novel visions of life in the year
2050."
In the 80's, Sterling notes, it gave young SF writers such as
himself "a hormonal rush" to see their wildest predictions begin to
come true a decade later; in the 90's, that lag had run to a couple
years; now, he says, between the time a SF writer can predict something
and his publisher can get it on the shelves, reality will have caught
up. "Genuinely novel ideas about the future have a short shelf-life
these days."
(more...)
In fact, some of the most respected American science fiction
authors recently haven't been writing science fiction at all. Instead
they're turning out scientific thrillers, spy stories, even historical
novels. Sterling himself though a founder of the "Cyberpunk" school
of SF (the preferred term, "sci-fi" being outmoded), and the author of
several books widely regarded as classics in the field says he's now
working on a "techno-thriller" set in the present day.
And many of those who are still writing in the genre, argues critic Judith Berman in her much-noted recent essay "Science Fiction Without the Future,"
are turning out stories "full of nostalgia
fear of the future in
general, and the experience of change as disorienting and bad."
Berman, speaking in an interview, said she's concerned that the
genre as a whole is moving away from stories which use future settings
to explore the nature of societal change think, for instance, of
William Gibson's Neuromancer, or for that matter, 1984 or Brave New
World. Instead, she says, writers are turning increasingly to escapist
stories which rely on tropes from science fiction's past.
"A huge proportion of the books out there are about time-travel,
or are set in alternate futures, or have a retro feel, like steampunk,"
Berman said, referring to the trend for science fiction set in the
Victorian era. Where, she asks, is the novelty, the exhilaration about
change, the engagement with the future's possibilities that SF used to
offer? Why are science fiction writers shying away from the future?
There are a number of different answers. Berman herself blames
the graying of the field, contending that the majority of SF writers
and fans are Boomers, and that the discomfort and disorientation they
feel in the face of technological change manifests itself in a desire
to look back to simpler times.
Sterling sees a larger problem, a sort of "cultural anemia" in
our society. Americans' confidence in the future has been rocked by
events like the 9-11 bombings and the Dotcom collapse. We no longer
have any "new, exciting destination myth," Sterling says. "Space
certainly isn't it. Our space program has become a hollow symbol,
something like one of those giant Stalinist statues of the worker and
the peasant, full of rust and crumbling brick."
A simpler explanation, though, seems to make the most sense: the
world is an increasingly complicated place, changing more and more
rapidly, and finding ways to tell stories which make sense of the
nature and direction of those changes is becoming more and more
difficult. The accelerating pace of change is making the present harder
to predict.
"Changes in our social relationship to technology the speed
with which people adopt technology and find strange ways to use it
beggar the ability of science fiction writers to stay ahead of them,"
says writer Neal Stephenson. And, he says, since SF stories set in the
near future (as opposed to the Flash Gordon kind) rely on bursts of
dizzying foresight for much of their narrative force, being unable to
stay ahead of the curve tends to make authors shy away from writing
them.
This, Stephenson says, may explain the current obsession with
SF's past. When writing intelligently about the future is strewn with
so many pitfalls, trying to make your case through historical analogy
begins to seem more attractive. "Once you begin taking a science
fictional viewpoint, you find that there's no reason it needs to be
confined to an imaginary future," he says. "Science and technology have
been shaping human destiny since the start." Stephenson himself is now
at work on a historical novel.
The plotlines of last decade's SF is the stuff of headlines
today. Genomes are deciphered, lifespans of 130 years promised, sheep
(and cats and mice and dogs and cows) are cloned (and does anyone
expect the first cloned baby to be far off?). Schoolkids trundle off to
class with notebooks running ten times the computational power it took
to put a man on the Moon. Wireless Internet is common enough to become
grist for stand-up comics. Engineers use virtual worlds to evolve new
tool designs through a sort of artificial Darwinism. "Napster fabbers,"
machines which can turn out simple models of three-dimensional objects
using lasers and gels, promise to do for simple material goods what
their namesake did for music. Globalization is so pervasive that
college students from Seattle to Genoa protest for trade reform,
fundamentalist wackos of all stripes launch terror campaigns and
somewhere in Kuala Lumpur or Helsinki a pimple-faced hacker is
preparing the next virus to crash your computer. And it all shows no
sign of slacking off.
Quite the opposite, actually. Change shows every sign of
accelerating. Advances in computation, biotechnology and artificial
intelligence are colliding to produce breakthrough after breakthrough,
tumbling one after another. While politicians may make disapproving
noises about stem cell research, and venture capitalists have grown
wary, no one seems really to doubt that the overall trend is up, up and
away. There's even a vogue among some younger SF writers to see this
manic acceleration as heralding the arrival of a phenomenon known as the Singularity.
The Singularity describes a moment when technology begins
evolving so rapidly that the future ceases in any meaningful way to be
subject to anticipation. Imagine change charted as an exponential
curve: at some point the line goes veering off the top of the graph. It
that point, we will have run into the "prediction horizon," the theory
goes a transformation of such magnitude that nothing can be seen
beyond it. Beyond the Singularity, the future goes opaque.
Though the idea of the Singularity has been sometimes dismissed
as "the rapture of the nerds," many of the new generation say that all
serious thinking about the future, perhaps even the present, must be
done under the its shadow.
"If even science fiction authors are finding it difficult to
think about the near future," says futurist and author Jamais Cascio,
"it's a good sign that change is happening faster than anyone can
reasonably apprehend." That in turn, he says, may be a sign that the
prediction horizon is upon us, "that we aren't heading into the
Singularity, we're already immersed in it."
If that's true, then science fiction faces a unique crisis.
"More than anything SF has propagated the meme that the future is
linear and can be extrapolated from the present day," says Cory
Doctorow, novelist and author of the Complete Idiot's Guide to Science
Fiction. "What the genre's role is when the future becomes truly
nonlinear and unknowable is an open question."
I no longer think this is true, though. I now believe that the
failure of futurists and writers of speculative fiction to "see around
the corner" is a failure of the will, a symptom of too much closed-loop
thinking. For while folks who think about the future pride themselves
on being out there, the kind of out there that gets you kudos as a SF
writer or corporate futurist has become utterly predictable. There are
few shockingly new visions, I think, not because it's impossible to
envision the future, but because an increasingly narrow band of visions
resonate with these communities.
I don't think the Singularity impossible. And it's definitely a
useful metaphor. But it's current over-use strikes me as much more a
matter of the last, industrial paradigm in futurism explaining away --
in its own terms -- its inability to see ahead, than of any
intellectual or cultural vigor in the idea itself.
Then there's the cultural baggage of the predictors themselves. JC Herz said it best, when she wrote,
"Hatched in the atomic age, the Singularity is the embodiment of our fears and desires about 20th-century technology:
Read More: Worldchanging Posted by: Craig Syms
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