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."
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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,
Read More: Worldchanging
Posted by: Craig Syms
Posted on: Contagious Ideas
