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Nick Sagan
Science fiction remains is more and more precise measurement.” This, of course, was just before the atom came apart, the quantum genie burst free and all scientific hell broke loose. In the case of science fiction, the premise of the doomsayers’ claims is that the genre is about predicting the future. In fact, very little of it is. The question “What is science fiction?” is often the subject of heated debate. However, at its most basic level, science and the extrapolation of science simply provide alternative worlds in which to set a story. Storytellers have invoked different worlds ever since hunter-gatherers regaled their companions with tales that took them out of themselves and gave meaning to the events of their daily existence. As well as a mere storytelling device, science fiction often articulates our presentday concerns and anxieties – paradoxically, it is often about the here and now rather than the future. As Stephen Baxter points out (see page 49), H. G. Wells’s ground-breaking 1895 novella The Time Machine – famous for popularising the idea of time travel – was more concerned with where Darwinian natural selection was taking the human race than with the actual nuts and bolts of time travel. In the 1968 novel Stand on
Zanzibar, John Brunner imagined the dire consequences of overpopulation. Arthur C. Clarke’s The Lion of Comarre explored the terrible allure of computer-generated artificial realities, which – god forbid – people might actually choose over the far-from-seductive messiness of the real world. All of these books are about imagining where present-day, often worrying, scientific and technological trends might be leading us.
“As long as change is an integral part of our lives, sci-fi is likely to survive” They can act as a warning or, at the bare minimum, cushion us from what American writer Alvin Toffler so memorably described as “future shock”. Science fiction is the literature of change. It is no coincidence that it emerged as a recognisable genre with writers such as Jules Verne in the late 19th century, an era when, for the first time in history, children could expect to grow up in a world radically different from that of their parents. As change accelerated in the 20th century, science fiction mushroomed.
As long as change is an integral part of our lives, science fiction is likely to survive. Even the fact that science may be stranger than science fiction should not deter writers. “We simply have to keep our thought processes lubricated so as to avoid imagination atrophy,” says Cramer. “It’s something we ‘hard’ science fiction writers do as a matter of course.” There is, though, a sense in which science fiction, rather than dying, is changing. From the 1930s to the 1950s, science fiction existed in the ghetto of the lurid pulp magazines, with their covers depicting bug-eyed aliens pursuing scantily clad heroines. Thereafter it managed to break free of these shackles, and the modern, semi-respectable science fiction novel was born. Latterly, we have not only seen sci-fi novels hit the mainstream best-seller lists, the genre has reached truly gargantuan audiences through gaming and films such as Star Wars and The Matrix. Sci-fi themes have infiltrated mainstream fiction too. Malorie Blackman, in her bestselling Noughts and Crosses trilogy for teenagers, explores a world in which the situations of black and white people are reversed. Kazuo Ishiguro, in his beautifully written novel Never Let Me Go, recounts a heartbreaking tale of people who have been
Kim Stanley Robinson
Nick Sagan
Science fiction is now simply realism, the definition of our time. You could imagine the genre therefore melting into everything else and disappearing. But stories will always be set in the future, it being such an interesting space, and there is a publishing category devoted to them. So there is a future for science fiction. It will get harder to do, though, because it needs to spring from the realities of the time, not from some past decade’s ideas. These days rapid technological change, volatile global politics and inevitable climate change all combine with contingency to make imagining our real future impossible. Something will happen, but we can’t know what. One solution is to jump past the next century to the familiar comforts of space fiction. If we survive we’ll get out there, and it’s a great story zone. Without the next century included, though, the imagined historical connection between now and then will be broken, and space fiction will become a kind of fantasy. We need to imagine the whole thing. So we have to do the impossible and imagine the next century. The default probability is bad – not just dystopia but catastrophe, a mass extinction event that we will have caused and then suffered ourselves. That’s a story we should tell, repeatedly, but it’s only half the probability zone. It is also within our powers to create a sustainable permaculture in a healthy biosphere. The future is thus a kind of attenuating peninsula, running forward with steep drops to both sides. There isn’t any possibility of muddling through with some good and some bad; we either solve the problems or fail disastrously. It’s either utopia or catastrophe. Science fiction is good at both these modes. Will it be fun too? Fun, entertaining, provocative. Yes.
For a genre that’s about looking to the future, science fiction has sure been looking backwards lately. Nostalgia is what sells best, with readers spending their money on movie tie-in novels and sequels to long-running series. Yes, there have been trailblazing new sci-fi books (as a look at the past few years of Hugo winners will attest), but more readers seem to prefer established universes like Star Wars and Dune. Even the writers who have broken through have benefited from a sense of nostalgia – John Scalzi’s magnificent Old Man’s War series is unapologetically Heinleinian, a touchstone to the glory days of sci-fi. We’re snacking on comfort food. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, as some of it is excellent. But it does raise the question of where science fiction is going. British and Canadian sci-fi strikes me as more forward-looking than its American counterpart, as evidenced by the success of Iain M. Banks, Charlie Stross, Robert Charles Wilson and Cory Doctorow. American sci-fi has fallen into the doldrums in part because of the anti-science sentiment that’s so prevalent in our culture lately. We’ve been pushed to care more about aesthetic engineering than the wonder of science (“How cool is the new iPod Touch?”). We have not been asking the serious questions about the future of our species, questions sci-fi regularly explores by showing us the best and worst of what could be. When the world is inspired by a bold new scientific initiative on the scale of an Apollo programme, say, renewable energy to protect our planet from climate change, or a crewed mission to Mars where we actually set foot on another world – then a sweeping resurgence in science fiction will usher in a fresh generation of readers, and the genre will move in exciting, unexpected new directions.
Kim Stanley Robinson’s next novel, Galileo’s Dream, will be out next year
Nick Sagan’s latest book is Future Proof: The greatest gadgets and gizmos ever imagined
48 | NewScientist | 15 November 2008
www.newscientist.com
Zanzibar, John Brunner imagined the dire consequences of overpopulation. Arthur C. Clarke’s The Lion of Comarre explored the terrible allure of computer-generated artificial realities, which – god forbid – people might actually choose over the far-from-seductive messiness of the real world. All of these books are about imagining where present-day, often worrying, scientific and technological trends might be leading us.
“As long as change is an integral part of our lives, sci-fi is likely to survive” They can act as a warning or, at the bare minimum, cushion us from what American writer Alvin Toffler so memorably described as “future shock”. Science fiction is the literature of change. It is no coincidence that it emerged as a recognisable genre with writers such as Jules Verne in the late 19th century, an era when, for the first time in history, children could expect to grow up in a world radically different from that of their parents. As change accelerated in the 20th century, science fiction mushroomed.
As long as change is an integral part of our lives, science fiction is likely to survive. Even the fact that science may be stranger than science fiction should not deter writers. “We simply have to keep our thought processes lubricated so as to avoid imagination atrophy,” says Cramer. “It’s something we ‘hard’ science fiction writers do as a matter of course.” There is, though, a sense in which science fiction, rather than dying, is changing. From the 1930s to the 1950s, science fiction existed in the ghetto of the lurid pulp magazines, with their covers depicting bug-eyed aliens pursuing scantily clad heroines. Thereafter it managed to break free of these shackles, and the modern, semi-respectable science fiction novel was born. Latterly, we have not only seen sci-fi novels hit the mainstream best-seller lists, the genre has reached truly gargantuan audiences through gaming and films such as Star Wars and The Matrix. Sci-fi themes have infiltrated mainstream fiction too. Malorie Blackman, in her bestselling Noughts and Crosses trilogy for teenagers, explores a world in which the situations of black and white people are reversed. Kazuo Ishiguro, in his beautifully written novel Never Let Me Go, recounts a heartbreaking tale of people who have been
Kim Stanley Robinson
Nick Sagan
Science fiction is now simply realism, the definition of our time. You could imagine the genre therefore melting into everything else and disappearing. But stories will always be set in the future, it being such an interesting space, and there is a publishing category devoted to them. So there is a future for science fiction. It will get harder to do, though, because it needs to spring from the realities of the time, not from some past decade’s ideas. These days rapid technological change, volatile global politics and inevitable climate change all combine with contingency to make imagining our real future impossible. Something will happen, but we can’t know what. One solution is to jump past the next century to the familiar comforts of space fiction. If we survive we’ll get out there, and it’s a great story zone. Without the next century included, though, the imagined historical connection between now and then will be broken, and space fiction will become a kind of fantasy. We need to imagine the whole thing. So we have to do the impossible and imagine the next century. The default probability is bad – not just dystopia but catastrophe, a mass extinction event that we will have caused and then suffered ourselves. That’s a story we should tell, repeatedly, but it’s only half the probability zone. It is also within our powers to create a sustainable permaculture in a healthy biosphere. The future is thus a kind of attenuating peninsula, running forward with steep drops to both sides. There isn’t any possibility of muddling through with some good and some bad; we either solve the problems or fail disastrously. It’s either utopia or catastrophe. Science fiction is good at both these modes. Will it be fun too? Fun, entertaining, provocative. Yes.
For a genre that’s about looking to the future, science fiction has sure been looking backwards lately. Nostalgia is what sells best, with readers spending their money on movie tie-in novels and sequels to long-running series. Yes, there have been trailblazing new sci-fi books (as a look at the past few years of Hugo winners will attest), but more readers seem to prefer established universes like Star Wars and Dune. Even the writers who have broken through have benefited from a sense of nostalgia – John Scalzi’s magnificent Old Man’s War series is unapologetically Heinleinian, a touchstone to the glory days of sci-fi. We’re snacking on comfort food. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, as some of it is excellent. But it does raise the question of where science fiction is going. British and Canadian sci-fi strikes me as more forward-looking than its American counterpart, as evidenced by the success of Iain M. Banks, Charlie Stross, Robert Charles Wilson and Cory Doctorow. American sci-fi has fallen into the doldrums in part because of the anti-science sentiment that’s so prevalent in our culture lately. We’ve been pushed to care more about aesthetic engineering than the wonder of science (“How cool is the new iPod Touch?”). We have not been asking the serious questions about the future of our species, questions sci-fi regularly explores by showing us the best and worst of what could be. When the world is inspired by a bold new scientific initiative on the scale of an Apollo programme, say, renewable energy to protect our planet from climate change, or a crewed mission to Mars where we actually set foot on another world – then a sweeping resurgence in science fiction will usher in a fresh generation of readers, and the genre will move in exciting, unexpected new directions.
Kim Stanley Robinson’s next novel, Galileo’s Dream, will be out next year
Nick Sagan’s latest book is Future Proof: The greatest gadgets and gizmos ever imagined
48 | NewScientist | 15 November 2008
www.newscientist.com