Positive science fiction
Shorter Jason Stoddard: The problem with contemporary science fiction is that it doesn’t love capitalism enough.
Now, I’m as frustrated by lazy characterizations of late capitalism as the next guy, but this strikes me as weirdly off-target. I’d say we should put the Positive SF people and the Mundane SF people in a jar and shake it to make them fight, but that seems mean, and besides, it’s not really Mundane SF that’s the poster child for stuff Jason (apparently) doesn’t like, it’s good old Paolo. So that wouldn’t work.
Meanwhile, I’m trying to think of good contemporary writers writing inspirational stories about world-changing captains of industry doing good by doing well, and I’m not getting any closer than (recent) Sterling and Gibson. Is there an anti-Paolo out there toiling in the Analog science-pits?
September 29th, 2008 at 9:39 pm
What comes to mind is the dot-com fiction of Charlie Stross and Cory Doctorow. The former’s “Lobsters” features a world-changing “venture altruist,” and in the background of the latter’s “I, Robot” is a country that has adopted open-source technology so fully that there’s no crime.
September 30th, 2008 at 7:41 am
Hmm, interesting suggestions. I have trouble with “Lobsters” because Manfred Macx doesn’t seem to be solving (or even, much, acknowledging the existence of) real-world problems. It takes the affect of Sterling’s Eddy Dertouzas stories and dials it up to 11, but takes them out of their Main Street context and moves them up to Sand Hill Road.
Cory, I’ll certainly grant as a great example of contemporary science fiction driven by can-do optimism (with a healthy dose of vigilance). I guess he hits nos. 1, 2, and 5 on Jason’s list… but 4 is debatable (depends on who’s meant to be challenged by the “challenging definitions,” I guess). And on 3, if anything, I think Cory’s work is, if anything, about democratizing change — taking the power of change out of the hands of the trust fund babies and captains of industry and putting it in the hands of the “small characters” Jason has so little time for.
September 30th, 2008 at 2:41 pm
Man oh man, I didn’t know I was promoting the takeover of the world by trust fund babies and captains of industry! Sorry if I was unclear—I wanted to make the point that, while “small” characters are just fine and dandy, the desire to do good isn’t limited to the guy-next-door. As is the desire to do evil. Sometimes it’s a lot more interesting looking at big characters than small ones.
October 1st, 2008 at 10:03 am
Jason, I didn’t say anything about taking over the world — you’re projecting that. (And I think that’s kind of the major structural problem with your whole post, really.)
But you’re basically defining change, there — the sort of change you think is “a lot more interesting” to read about, at any rate — as great deeds done by great men. This is on the one hand pernicious antidemocratic crap (which flies in the face of your call for positive SF that “inspires people to act”) and on the other a recipe for bad, unrealistic fiction of a sort SF is particularly prone to, from Bova through Heinlein back to Verne. The real history of technology is not a series of Edisonades and man was not put on the moon by Delos D. Harriman.
Or when you said “a positive future might be very different than we expect,” did you mean that it might actually turn out to be like the future SF writers imagined in the 50s? An interesting conceit for a story, but not enough for a movement, I think.