Turning inward in complex times
5 o'clock, June 10, 2003
Greg dropped me a note pointing out an excellent post by Steve Carper over in the Tangent Online sff.net newsgroup. It’s an excellent capsule treatment of the “What is science fiction?” question, with an eye toward what it used to be and what it’s becoming. He nails the Golden Age perfectly:
I’ve tried reading some famous sf books of the 50s recently, and I've been appalled at just how awful, how limited, how small, how badly written they were. Their worldviews were the constricted worldviews of the 1950s. Even Bradbury, with his beautiful prose and imagery, starts off The Martian Chronicles with a story about a Martian woman whose husband makes all the decisions for her. And when you get to a Heinlein novel like The Door Into Summer, the portrayals of females make you want to hose yourself off after reading.
No kidding. I went through this a couple of years ago when I picked up a Gollancz edition of the collected stories of Walter Miller — I was looking for the transcendence of A Canticle For Liebowitz and instead I got a thick packet of run-of-the-mill stories about heroic engineers and self-sacrificing space colonists. As for Bradbury, I still love The Martian Chronicles, but I read them the same nostalgic way I read Dandelion Wine, as a product of a vanished idyllic era. (I’m not going to talk about Heinlein without drinking first.) We don’t need more stories like the ones written in the middle of last century; I’m not even sure we need stories that do the same thing for our time that those stories did for theirs.
And in asking what we do need, Mr. Carper also nails a problem that I’ve been struggling with in my own writing:
Nanotechnology leads to a world that is not human. So does genetic engineering. So does artificial intelligence. So does virtual reality. So does consensus cyberspace. Every individual technological marvel we create leads to a world in which we are obsolete. Mix them all together and you get a future in which simple is a word left to historical dictionaries, a world too complex to be envisioned, let alone written, let alone possible to empathize with.
There are a handful of writers who have been able envision and write those posthuman futures in an empathetic way, but only a handful, and from a burst of early extrapolative exuberance most of them have taken to writing about futures, or even presents, much closer to home.
Mr. Carper goes on:
Why are writers turning to people as their main subjects? Because that's what writers — good writers — write about. Why is fantasy overtaking sf as the leading genre? Because fantasy points to the past and the present, where people live. Why is it harder to find exciting stories about the technological future? Because technology is not inherently exciting: only its effect on people is.
That really is the trick, isn’t it?
Though I admit I don’t read as much new stuff these days as I probably should, I’m not actually sure when I last read a science fiction story that really said something new and startling about the impact of some technology on the human condition. Ted Chiang’s “Liking What You See”, maybe. If I wasn’t such a lazy bastard, Oliver Sacks is where I’d be looking for new frontiers.
I am sure I haven’t written a story like that, and that I don’t have any in the pipeline.
But in a minute I’m going to start wondering if I’m a fraud. Stop reading this and go read the post.
Writing good science fiction is difficult, because the technology must be present, but it's hard to empathize with a widget. That's why when people write good stories such as your own "Fetch", they should be praised. (Nice touch referring to Bondarenko and Chafee.)