I'm Tired of Flying Cars

Or rather, I'm tired of people trotting out the cliched quip of "Where's my flying car?" whenever they talk about the future not living up to expectations. And I got to say, what's the big deal about flying cars? The future is certainly living up to my expectations without them. I carry over 7k songs around in my pocket in something smaller than a pack of cigarettes - that's every CD I've bought since 1985. I talk for free every other day to my buddy George Mann in the UK, on a "videophone" called Skype, and I read all my news off the same screen, and the pictures next to the columns of words all move. If I want to know the complete lyrics to a song that's rattling around in my head and I can only remember three or four words, I can call it up within 30 seconds on something called "Google" (and "google it" is an SFnal neologism if there ever was one), and just about anything else I need to know too. And I never get lost because my car, which admittedly doesn't fly, plots out all my guidance routes and then tells me where to go. It also tells me when it needs service and when the air pressure in my tires gets low. My television records things it thinks I might like without being asked, and it forwards them to my laptop. There's an International Space Station over my head right now. Meanwhile, when they aren't trying to sell me my next communicator, there are hard-&-software billionaires falling over themselves to commericialize space tourism.

So, I can do without flying cars, thank you. No, what I'd like to see is sane and rational leaders ushering in those SFnal visions of world peace, an end to poverty and disease, inequality. That's a future I'm still waiting for, one that's still worth believing in and writing about. So I find myself both in agreement and taking issue with this article in the Guardian by Damien G Walter, "Science Fiction Doesn't Have to Be Gloomy, Does it?" But certainly I'm onboard with this sentiment: "The best science fiction, as with all great art, doesn't just reflect the world but seeks to influence it."

Update: Kathryn Cramer's "Gloom & Wartime SF: A reponse to Damien Walter" is worth checking out. "...what I would substitute for 'influence,' as a goal, is that writers provide us with perceptual tools with which to understand the world, the future, and what is to be done. I view science fiction partly as a set of perceptual tools we take with us into the world. I don’t think SF can be held responsible for finding solutions to all the world’s problems, but I think it is SF’s task to help us understand them."

Update 9/26/08: Jetsie de Vries alerts us to his lengthy response to Kathryn Cramer. He takes issue specifically with her comments about SF's scope of influence, and says, "Now shoot me, but I like to think SF that's really audacious, gutsy and forward-looking dares to make predictions against the flavour of the month. Dares to make totally unexpected predictions, and -- in the process -- dares to be wrong: but nevertheless inspires others to carry the torch of progress. Depicting a world like today that's going down the drain is easy: people love to complain, and blame the world's problems on someone else. Depicting -- convincingly -- a world that changes -- even if marginally -- for the better, is much more difficult, for an SF writer."

In callng out SF's obligation to be audacious, to act as if it can change the world, whether or not that notion is realistic, he reminds me of one of my favorite quotes of all time:

The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.
--George Bernard Shaw, Maxims for Revolutionists

The Data Point of Optimism

Over on Wired.com, I was delighted to see Clive Thompson on Why Sci-Fi Is the Last Bastion of Philosophical Writing. Perhaps guilty of a little hyperbole, Clive nonetheless warms the cockles of my heart when he declares that, "If you want to read books that tackle profound philosophical questions, then the best — and perhaps only — place to turn these days is sci-fi. Science fiction is the last great literature of ideas."

Clive opines that contemporary literature has "dropped the ball," postulating that, "After I'd read my 189th novel about someone living in a city, working in a basically realistic job and having a realistic relationship and a realistically fraught family, I ... started to feel like I'd been reading the same book over and over again."

Clive then asks why SF don't get no respect, and concludes that it's because of our high pain threshold for bad prose and outdated portrayals of women. He sees hope in the mainstream persons of Roth, McCarthy, Chabon and others who are taking up the SF paints.

But while I love to see the above roster of writers turning to our tools, I think we have our own prose stylists who can compete, and always have. Certainly I'd put the best of Sturgeon or Delaney up against anything today, and as for today, Ian McDonald can certainly hold his own alongside literary novels. In fact, not five minutes ago, I finished reading Paolo Bacigalupi's contribution to Fast Forward 2, a wonderful 10,000 word novelette called "The Gambler" which is going to blow you all away in October. He blogs about its genesis here. In the meantime, I'd love to know what Clive Thompson would make of either McDonald's Brasylor Bacigalupi's rapidly approaching collection, Pump Six and Other Stories. And Clive, if you find this on the Google Alert or the trackback, I'll gladly send you Fast Forward 1 now and 2 when it's out.

Eyes Wide Open

Amen to this. Gabriel Morgan's new column in the News & Observer proclaims for the literary reader that "everything is going on" in speculative fiction. The article is an elegant appeal to the uninitiated, making points like this:

"Describe a subgenre of mimetic fiction, and there are speculative authors doing similar work. Do you prefer fiction that is heavily character-centered? Fiction that explores the human condition, that asks the big questions? Fiction that displays a sense of history, that draws connections between important things? How about fiction that explores what it means to be an American in the 21st century? Speculative authors are writing about all of these things. They, like Pablo Picasso, have every single one of the tools that a 'naturalist' (read: mimeticist) has to work with; but they, like Picasso, also have the freedom to abandon the appearance of reality when it suits their vision."

Naturally, I am excited to see where this column goes in the coming days.

SF is Dead! Long Live SF!

Bruno Maddox has an interesting piece in Discover magazine, called "Blinded by Science: Fictional Reality," with the subtitle "Sci-fi helped make the present; now it's obsolete." The article uses the occasion of the recent Nebula Awards weekend to ask the question why, if SF helped usher in so much of the science fictional present in which we currently live, it has degenerated into "a fairly drab and subdued sort of bunch. The demographic is middle-aged to old," and a weekend that is "palpably low on excitement."

Maddox suggests that "the genre that lit the way for a nervous mankind as it crept through the shadows of the 20th century, has suddenly and entirely ceased to matter." Then he goes about establishing his bona fides with a pretty good description of the difference between hard and soft science fiction - using Wells and Verne as examples - and he gets points for taking it as rote that there is both a back and forth between science fiction and actual science as well as an important social roll that SF has to play. "Space precludes a full listing here of every real-world marvel lifted straight from a work of futuristic fiction," Maddox writes, and he says, "Would we even be bothered by the proliferation of surveillance cameras if we didn’t recognize the phenomenon as 'Orwellian' and know, therefore, that it is bad?"

So his depression is palpable and sincere when he asks, "Why are the heirs to such a grand tradition dipping their tortilla chips into bean dip that has not even been decanted from its original plastic container into a proper bowl? ....Why are they not holding their annual meetings in some sort of gilded purpose-built pyramid while humanity waits breathlessly outside to receive their inklings into our future?"

His explanation is two-fold. First, that science fiction has ceased to matter because the larger category of fiction in general has also ceased to matter. "...it was around that time, the mid-1990s, that fiction—all fiction—finally became obsolete as a delivery system for big ideas. Whatever the cause—dwindling attention spans, underfunded schools, something to do with the Internet—the fact is these days that if a Top Thinker wakes up one morning aghast at man’s inhumanity to man, he’s probably going to dash off a 300-word op-ed and e-mail it to The New York Times, or better still, just stick it up on his blog, typos and all, not cancel his appointments for the next seven years so he can bang out War and Peace in a shed."

Then Maddox proposes that an even bigger threat to SF is that the technological world is speeding up, and "Why would I spend my money on a book about amazing-but-fake technology when we’re only a few weeks away from Steve Jobs unveiling a cell phone that doubles as a jetpack and a travel iron?"

His conclusion - that SF has outlived its usefulness, but that it deserves the love and respect of the world, or as he puts it, "If, through their talent and imagination, our species has progressed to the point that it no longer requires their services, then that should be a source of pride, not shame, and the rest of us should be honoring these obsolete souls..."

Now, to be fair, I've lamented myself the shift I saw in media from years previous, when science fiction writers would routinely show up on the Discovery Channel, on the news, on technology panels, etc... But I've said before that we're returning to that period, that this was only a lull or a dip in the pendulum (or even a failure of my own perception), and that we're on an upswing. We can site Greg Bear's recent Daily Show appearance, or his Sigma think-thank of SF writers trip to a Homeland Security conference, as proof that the larger world really is listening to SF writers and their opinions. For that matter, wasn't Cory Doctorow just labeled on of the 25 Most Influential People on the Web by Forbes magazine? (Cory ranked number fifteen.) And don't I see Charles Stross pontificating about the future of surveillance and recording technology over on the BBC News site? And here's Warren Ellis talking to William Gibson over on Wired magazine's website. For that matter, Amazon's bookstore blog has a three part interview with Gibson up now. (For those who prefer, here's the full transcript.) And as I write this, Spook Country has an Amazon sales rank of 58. To say nothing about McCarthy and Bradbury's recent Pulitzer prizes, the former for a work of post-apocalyptic fiction and the latter for his "distinguished, prolific and deeply influential career as an unmatched author of science fiction and fantasy." So let's see, that's a phenomenally successful television show, the government, a major business magazine, a major world news site, a major tech/culture magazine, a major Internet commerce site and a major literary organization. Gee, looks to me like the world has never been more focused on SF than at the present moment.

No offense meant, but Maddox's disappointment with the Nebula weekend may have more to do with the SFWA organization itself and some of it's problems than with science fiction literature and the wider world. And one wonders what he would have thought had he attended the Hugo awards at the 64th World Science Fiction Convention last summer in Anaheim instead? The building wasn't pyramid shaped - it was an enormous shiny glass rectangle - and the audience was packed, the guests were in tuxedos, the food at the private reception was top-notch, and a very distinguished delegation came from Japan. (No, there were no Klingons in attendance, but there was "robot maid." Someone explain that to me.)

True, in his Amazon interview, William Gibson does elaborate on the difficulty of imagining the future in a sped up world. "I don't know if I'll be able to make up an imaginary future in the same way. In the '80s and '90s, as strange as it may seem to say this, we had such luxury of stability. Things weren't changing quite so quickly in the '80s and '90s. And when things are changing too quickly, as one of the characters in Pattern Recognition says, you don't have any place to stand from which to imagine a very elaborate future."

But Gibson's not exactly abandoning ship. "But science fiction is definitely where I'm from. Science fiction is my native literary culture," he says. And the fact that he can't see the way forward may have more to do with his own perspective and generation and "place to stand." The man's already done his part to get us to the here and now. He created the word "cyberspace" for God's sake! It's okay (and very relevant!) if he wants to write about the science fiction present he ushered in and let Stross, Doctorow, McDonald, MacLeod, Morgan, and others envision the next few decades past that for a while. (Note: I'm not counting him out. Pattern Recognition was my favorite book the year it came out, and I can't wait to read Spook Country. As Amazon's Tom Nissley writes, Gibson's present day science fiction makes you "feel like I had put on special headphones tuned into the frequency of our lives with a sensitivity that my own biological antenna could never match." Or as Gibson says, "I thought that writing about the world today as I perceive it would probably be more challenging, in the real sense of science fiction, than continuing just to make things up." Emphasis on "in the real sense of science fiction.")

In fact, Gibson himself hints at the answer when he says, "...over the last five to six years it's started to seem to me that there's something else going on as well, that maybe we're in what the characters in my novel Idoru call a 'nodal point,' or a series of them. We're in a place where things could just go anywhere. A couple of weeks ago I happened to read Charlie Stross's argument as to why he believes that there will never, ever be any manned space travel. It's not going to happen. We're not going to colonize Mars. All of that is just a big fantasy. And it's so convincing. I read that and I'm like, 'My god, there goes so much of the fiction I read as a child.'"

So yes, a lot of the SF of the past may be collapsing in on itself. Nothing dates faster than hard SF, but that's also a direct function of its relevance to the time in which it is written. And it's something that is true of all narrative. I remember watching Rebel Without a Cause in college and being utterly mystified by the motivations of every single character in the film. Cinema had taken a jump in psychological realism a few years later, and I just couldn't get my genie back in their bottle.

Look at this recent article from Freeman Dyson, "Our Biotech Future," from the New York Review of Books. (Speaking about the back and forth between science and science fiction!) Dyson writes, "I predict that the domestication of biotechnology will dominate our lives during the next fifty years at least as much as the domestication of computers has dominated our lives during the previous fifty years." And then goes on to blow our minds with what that prediction portends. So maybe manned space travel and silicon chips as classically presented to us in fiction have an expiration date (and maybe not), but read Dyson's article and tell me that's not several decades work of work for our science fiction writers. His description of Green vs Grey technologies reminds me of nothing so much as Walter John Williams' "Green Leopard Plague." And then go check out some of the works of those aforementioned writers, Stross, Doctorow, McDonald, MacLeod, Morgan, etc....

As William Gibson himself says, right now "We're in a place where things could just go anywhere." ANYWHERE. Now how can that not be good news for writers - and readers - of science fiction everywhere?

Update: First, I want to make sure that no one thinks I'm slagging off Gibson by suggesting he's changed his focus from the future to the present. To begin with, he hasn't changed his focus. He's always been concerned with this period right here in time and now that it's arrived - largely inspired by his writing - he's as relevant as he's ever been if not more so. And, for that matter, I don't read Gibson to see people jacking in. I read Gibson for his singular ability to describe our techno-culture in ways that make me gasp in recognition while marveling at his oh-so-articulate perspective. I read him for all the moments I have to set his books down in my lap and shout, "Yes! Yes! That's exactly right!" Second, in suggesting we are in a "nodal point" between 20th and 21st century SF, I wouldn't be too quick to count the concerns or the set pieces of 20th century SF out yet. In a really inspired rebuke to the Mundane SF movement, scientist and science fiction author Rudy Rucker outlines four mind-blowing alternatives to FTL that still get us to that space opera future. More importantly, he reminds us that its predictive and directly-inspirational qualities are only one of the reasons that SF matters. As he writes, "I don’t think SF is necessarily about predicting possible futures. I’ve always felt that SF is more like surrealism. The idea is to shock people into awareness. Show them how odd the world is. Whether or not you draw on realistic tropes is irrelevant... Let it be said that futurism and SF are quite different endeavors. A rude person might say that futurism is about feeding inspirational received truths to businessmen and telling them it will help them make more money. SF is about unruly artistic visions." So anyone really think the age of "unruly artistic visions" is drawing to a close? Get real.

Update: Thanks to Kathryn Cramer for pointing to JR Minkel's article on Scientific American.com, "Science fiction is not obsolete--do you read me Bruno Maddox." Minkel points to the works of Neal Stephenson, the nonfiction writings of Bruce Sterling, and Marc Andreessen's recent list of the top 10 science fiction novels of the 2000s as evidence that "the world has not outpaced science fiction. Rather, science fiction has outpaced Bruno Maddox."

The Science Fiction Bazooka

One of my favorite short story writers these days is Paolo Bacigalupi, who in a relatively short while has already wracked up 1 Sturgeon win and 2 Sturgeon nominations, 3 Hugo nominations, and 1 Nebula nomination despite having a hard to spell last name. Paolo is the second interview in the current issue of Locus, and something he said therein about the purpose of SF struck me just right:

"I feel like science fiction has been given this fantastic bazooka: we have tools that no other genre has, we have ways of talking about people and humanity - our fundamental qualities - that are just not available to most other genres. And yet we take this bazooka and shoot chipmunks with it, we shoot prairie dogs and squirrels, but we never go after the dinosaurs! We've got these amazing tools, and we use them for entertainments... My sense is that right now the role of science fiction is to calm and assuage people so they don't think about how bad shit is, but I don't write anything to make people feel good. I write to make people worry about the same things I worry about. The role of science fiction should be to bitch!"

The New SciFi

That SF is Respectable vibe is working it's way through the bloggosphere again, stirring up all sorts of thoughts in Yours Truly. It started when my friend and author Dave Hutchinson sent me a link to an article by Gareth McLean in the Guardian entitled "The New Sci-Fi," which echoes sentiments expressed here and, oh, everywhere about both the new levels of sophistication that SF TV like Battlestar Galactica, Heroes, Lost, and Doctor Who represent, and the increased level of respect this is affording SF in the mainstream.

McLean's article is interesting, and seems to take three tacks:

1. That advances in CGI and reduced costs associated with same make "mainstream" television audiences more capable of accepting the wonders of science fiction and fantasy as legitimate, by presenting them in compelling, quality special effects in a way not capable at any other time. As McLean writes, "For starters, the advances in CGI and the relative inexpense of creating it for the small screen has meant that sci-fi and fantasy have become more believable and spectacular." Hey, no need to suspend your disbelief when its more human than human!

2. That the tensions and terrors of a post 9/11 world make people more interested in drama that addresses these tensions head on, as typified by BSG when it takes a hard look at terrorism by making it a tool of the protagonists. I was particularly struck/amused by this line, which sets SF telly not on a par with mainstream TV, but above it, in terms of the sophistication of its engagement with reality: "The only other major US drama to do so is 24, and its all-guns-blazing approach is to the detriment of any thoughtfulness."

3. In contrast to point 2, that these same tense times also make people more susceptible to escapism. "Tim Kring, creator of Heroes, concurs... he didn't set out to make a post-9/11 show - but 'the wish-fulfilment aspect of the show feeds off a feeling that the world is a scary place. Issues like global warming and diminishing natural resources and terrorism are issues that seem really out of control and huge. That these ordinary people may be coming along with special powers and can ultimately do something about these larger issues taps into a sense of helplessness we may feel.'" Sentiments hinted at again when McLean writes (emphasis mine), "As Doctor Who supremo Russell T Davies notes, albeit while emphasising the optimism of his own show: 'We live in a time of terror.'"

The article goes on to discuss how science fiction has gone from being a dirty word in Hollywood, something relegated to the interests of teenagers, to being what the studios want to the exclusion of everything else. Of some forty-five shows picked up by US networks for series this coming season, apparently roughly one quarter have some SFnal content. As McLean says, "Somehow, though, the suspension of disbelief that sci-fi and fantasy often require was too much for television audiences to swallow, and there the stigma remained. But Battlestar Galactica, along with the likes of Lost and Heroes, has changed that. All three shows are prime-time in America - Lost and Heroes on ABC and NBC respectively. Those are networks and not cable channels. This is a big deal."

The article concludes: "Science fiction and fantasy have changed and, in turn, are shaping other genres... BSG is the vanguard of a slew of sci-fi and fantasy shows that work within their genres, within our times, and - most importantly - as good old-fashioned emotional, engaging dramas. The producers of these dramas have created credible, cool shows - ones that are earthier and more grounded than many apparently firmly placed on this planet in the here-and-now. The drearily domestic but strangely alien Brothers and Sisters, I mean you. Why gaze at navels when you can gaze at the stars?"

Then, right on the heels of the Guardian article, I see that my friend and award-winning author Robert J. Sawyer is busy being his usual fascinating and erudite self in an interview conducted by author John Scalzi on the Ficlets Blog. Cutting to the heart of the matter, Scalzi asks, "Why is there this disconnect in the minds of non-SF readers between what they think written SF is, and what it is in your book and others?"

Rob's response: "I really think a large part of the problem is Star Wars, which has become indelibly etched in people’s minds as the standard example of science fiction. But it’s not – it’s science fantasy, or some other category – and it has almost no extrapolation, and no real moral or emotional dimension, and that’s what most people think SF is. ...it’s an uphill climb to get people who don’t already read science fiction to try the genre; you can see in many cases the look of disgust on their faces when you hand them an SF book. And, of course, there’s Sturgeon’s Law, which says that 90% of SF is crap, so it’s not true, despite what some SF evangelists say, that if you get them to read one they’ll be hooked for life. A lot of SF is pretty unreadable, even by hardcore fans, but the best stuff has new and important things to say to everyone about what it means to be human."

As if in response to this observation, Infoquake author David Louis Edelman has launched a major discussion on his blog with his post, "Introductory Science Fiction Books for Literary Readers." David writes:

"Let’s say your readers in question are already discerning connoisseurs of quality literature. They’re not typically readers of so-called pulp novels or airport thrillers. They would think nothing of bundling down with a Philip Roth or a Don DeLillo or a Barbara Kingsolver or something that The New York Times Book Review would approve of. They know who Michiko Kakutani is, and they were reading Cormac McCarthy years before Oprah ever heard of him. But as soon as you mention the words 'science fiction,' they picture Klingons with light sabers jumping off spaceships with big-breasted ninja assassins in tow and bug-eyed monsters in hot pursuit while a supernova goes off in the background. What do you hand to these people to convince them that there’s a lot of intelligent literary science fiction that’s worth reading? "

The 60 or so comments that ensue are well-worth reading, though there does seem to be some confusing as to what constitutes "literary" fiction vs. popular fiction, and I would humbly suggest that rather than pursuing a niche readership that's smaller than our own, SF would be better served in convincing readers of popular fiction that science fiction is quality entertainment with something for all ages, adults of both sexes included, not that it's quality literature.

It is, after all, a genre, not a style. SF isn't a like a school of anime where everything produces must be a carbon copy of a house style, though that is how it is oft viewed from the outside. McLean's article, however, is the latest evidence in my argument that this is changing. Or, as Rob Sawyer says later in his interview, "As I said at the outset, good science fiction has things of value to say to everyone."

Medieval Dead

Over on new blog No Fear of the Future, Chris Nakashima-Brown uses Tom Stoppard's The Coast of Utopia as springboard for a nearly-incomprehensible-in-its-hippitude essay which asks the question "Is the idea of Utopia rendered completely frivolous in a world that has made the cyberpunk dystopia so completely real? In a world where the pragmatic inevitability of market capitalism seems to have proven the inherent truths of its basic assumptions about the innate self-interest at the core of human nature?"

C N-B laments that Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars Trilogy was the last compelling vision of utopian SF in relatively recent times, and that one has to look "back further for the rest: Aldiss, LeGuin, Van Vogt, Stapledon, Dick." (I can, I hope, be forgiven for pausing to add Zebrowski to that list, as his 1979 novel Macrolife is still unsurpassed in its unique take on viable utopias).

Meanwhile, my friend Paul Wargelin points me towards an article by Jason Silverman of Wired lamenting the lack of series SF cinema. "Hollywood Eats Sci-Fi's Brains," keys of the recent box office failure of Darren Aronofksy's The Fountain, which cost $35 milllion to make and earned a whopping $5million over the extended Thanksgiving weekend, to ask why Hollywood has stopped making series sf. Drawing on opinions of Hollywood insiders, Silverman diagnoses the problem as being a combination of the fact that SF films are always hit-or-miss, never a "slam-dunk" - with the fact that the budgets necessary create a barrier for entry. As Gordon Paddison, New Line Cinema's executive vice president of new media and marketing, says, "You have to put a certain level of budget into these films. You have to swing for the fences, otherwise you just aren't in the game at all."

This perspective seems to me one likely to date fast, as we see an increased democratization of the tools necessary to produce special effects. A more relevant question is found in Silverman's closing paragraph, where Paddison asks, ""The Gene Roddenberry form of sci-fi was the accepted template for years and years, the vision of what the future was to be for many, many people. Then it evolved into the horror sequences of Alien. So what is it now? What are we and our children fantasizing about?"

I don't know, but I suspect, as Silverman comes just short of hinting, that a good place to look for clues might be on YouTube.

Meanwhile, I wonder why no one ever thinks to suggest that the reason a film like The Fountain failed at the box office was not because of the subject matter, but because the trailer looked completely uninspiring and failed utterly to suggest a compelling reason to see the film. The other recent Hugh Jackman vehicle, The Prestige,which exited my local theaters to make room for The Fountain, while by no means a blockbuster, faired considerably better and was a very smart, very demanding film.

Hollywood has a very bad habit of blaming the genre or the setting when they should be blaming the script or the directing. I've just seen the trailer for Eragon, and am significantly underwhelmed. I imagine the legions of fans devoted to the book is enough for them to get their money's worth out of it anyway, but supposing that the film tanked at the box office, or, more realistically, simply underperformed. Then all those producers currently in development on adaptations of books by George R R Martin and Terry Brooks and whatever other fantasies were greenlit immediately following the success of The Lord of the Rings beware. The men in suites will look at Eragon's failure and proclaim that fantasy is dead, without ever once considering that maybe John Malkovich is a poor substitute for Ian McKellen and that cheaply CGI'd Dragons are no match for the decade plus of painstaking, loving, obsession that went into bringing Tolkien to the screen. But why should they when an easy excuse is close at hand?