Attention Conservation Notice: This is a long rambling post about what I think The Future means (and doesn’t mean) today. It also has some pics and trailer for the new Disney movie 😉

If we’re living in a science-fictional world, does this mean the future, as a concept, no longer exists?

Was the “future” just an aberration of 18th to 20th Century thinking? An Industrial era concept. The idea that the change we were experiencing was progressing to some perfect world? Was this something only imaginable once change started ramping up? The end result of Progress.

Does this also imply an end to the usefulness of history – wherein history had provided a guide for what is happening. Current drivers of change, like Commons-Based Peer Production have no precedent, making it difficult to extrapolate as to what will develop from them.

Cory Doctorow’s spoken on this in recent interviews(Trashotron, RU Sirius Show). Predicting the present, glancing sideways seems to hard enough for some today.

Maybe its no surprise that there’s so much alternate timeline speculative fiction being written at the moment. Steampunk‘s been around for a while and now there’s Clockpunk too. Authors are gazing backwards, instead of forwards. Data-mining the historical and re-writing, nay optimizing the path of progress.

Instead, it seems like the “future” is a retro idea. Witness blog sites like Paleo-Future documenting the nostalgia for past futures.

The new Disney movie Meet the Robinsons doesn’t even seem to be trying to present a believable notion of the future and just looks like an updated Jetsons.

Even sf movies don’t seem to know what comes next. Sunshine takes place in a time when the sun is dying. But it’s spaceship seems something right out of the present.

The Fountain seems to be a rare exception of modern sf, not even pretending to show the technology powering its spaceship hurtling towards a dying star.

I’m now gonna quote liberally (and selectively) from Judith Berman’s essay Science Fiction without the Future (italics mine):

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Golden Age sf: hope for the future of technology. Millennial sf: fear of the present, fear of technology? If this is what’s happened, no wonder younger readers aren’t drawn into the field. The changes that frighten older people–they don’t perceive as change. How much more archaic will baby-boom anxieties seem to my son’s generation?

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And even if both these things were so, examination of a subsequent year-plus of Asimov’s–the issues leading up to the start of the twenty-first century–shows that the overwhelming majority of the stories in this sample avert their gaze to some degree from both present and future. As the age of most of the authors is unknown to me, I have to suppose that an anxious, backward-looking perspective is distributed well beyond the baby-boom generation.

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Where the history is of another timestream, there are no Dickian alternate presents to be found. The stories are concerned with alternate past history: Theodore Roosevelt chasing Jack the Ripper; a Civil War Jason and Medea pursuing hidden gold; a present-day hero playing god in pre-Columbian Mesoamerica (Resnick 12/00, W.J. Williams 10-11/99, Reed 5/00). Of special interest here is Greg Egan’s “Oracle,” in which fictional versions of Alan Turing and C.S. Lewis debate whether unbridled technological change, especially advances in computation and the development of artifical intelligence, is good or evil (7/00).

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The future stories that remain grapple with current issues or have a contemporary flavor (e.g., Reynolds 12/99, Marusek 3/00, Kress 6/00, Reed 8/00, Langford 9/00, Kelly 6/00, MacAuley 7/00, and Purdom 10-11/00). (Wadholm’s story, 10-11/99, mentioned above, probably belongs in this group.) These, what I would term “real futures,” make up only a quarter of the total sample–one or two stories out of the 86 in the sample are nearly impossible to categorize, so the figure is not exact.

And even here the fiction is not all as forward-gazing as it might appear. Most of these “real futures” exhibit anxiety, even dread, with respect to technology and its consequences (e.g., Barton 1/00, Duchamp 2/00, Purdom 3/00, Rusch 3/00, Sheffield 3/00 and 6/00, MacLeod 6/00, Kress 8/00, Stableford 8/00, Taylor 9/00, Arnason 10-11/00, Bell 12/00). That leaves us with no more than a handful of the stories in the sample that look forward to the future in both senses of the phrase.

With so many writers apparently uneasy about the state of the world, I would expect plenty of mordant commentary on our entanglement in the wheels of the runaway technological locomotive. But almost none of the stories in these 13 Asimov’s issues–not even those set in a “real future”–offer a genuine critique of technology, of its use by and its impact upon humanity. David Marusek’s biting “VTV,” about new extremes of media manipulation, is a standout exception (3/00). Critique requires that its author gaze unflinchingly at present and future, ugly and perverse as those might appear. What we have instead here is a pervasive techno-anxiety that for the most part looks away from the source of its fears.

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All together, then, “real future” science fiction appears in one in four stories in Asimov’s and fewer than one in seven in F&SF. I have to believe the numbers for booklength sf fall more or less in the same range. We have a field that is increasingly fearful of the present, looking ever more wistfully toward the past. Meanwhile the thoughtful future dealing with fresh themes is becoming rare–even endangered.

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Cowan’s sonde-ballon seems emblematic of millennial sf: in a trend presaged by steampunk, the archaic and the antique are replacing the techno-futuristic as the source of the very coolest things. Our more primitive past–in this case industrial and polluting rather than pastoral–has become, in Levi-Strauss’s words, good to think.

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At the turn of the century, we who live in this city have been doing precious little new development, and that seems cosmetic: a new awning on the AI building, a little sandblasting applied to the sooty bricks of the colony-ship high-rise. Time-traveling paleontologists visit the Silurian rather than the Cretaceous. The post-holocaust survival tale takes place in rural Alaska rather than the continental west.

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But I would argue that in fact we need to let go of our field’s equivalents to Judy Garland and Cary Grant and find new stars to celebrate, new ideas to explore. We need to find vehicles that could never have been thought of before now to travel the twenty-first-century Mindscape. The survival and renewal of sf depend on the degree to which we can annex new territory to our city, or tear down and rebuild that city for our own ends, for the new uses of the present age.

Because if the past succeeds in crowding the future out of sf, the entire field will die. By this I do not mean to invoke some academic definitional debate over whether you can still have what we are used to calling “science fiction” without the future. I’m talking about original print science fiction in the inclusive sense: about its increasing unattractiveness to younger generations of readers and its declining relevance to the culture at large–its failure to attract not just the young, but any readers who don’t share its current anxieties.

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If sf is truly a vital, evolving field, why should readers under 30 know or care who Robert Heinlein is? I think it’s sometimes forgotten that Stranger in a Strange Land, for example, predates the Vietnam War–and how close and relevant is that for anyone under 40 today? Did boomers in the 1960s need to know the canon of Depression-era blues in order to groove to the Rolling Stones?

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How to be human is a universal problem in any time and space. It’s not the same issue as quarreling with the present. Quarreling with the present is the territory of the Luddites, and William Morris inveighing against industrialization, and the origins of today’s pastoral, pseudo-medieval genre fantasies. Quarreling with the present is a hair’s-breadth from being reactionary. Are we going to use the great speculative toolbox of sf to de-imagine the present? Is sf becoming anti-sf?

We can’t imagine the future if we can’t even look at the present. To connect with a wider, growing, more youthful audience, sf has to grapple with millennial horrors and alienation, with the rootlessness and ferment and absurdity, and, yes, with the millennial fear of the future, in ways other than to say, “I wish things weren’t like this. I liked it better in the past.” Without a vital link to the ever-changing Zeitgeist, sf will become a closed system where recycling subject matter and theme is all that’s possible. And science fiction right now seems to be not only losing its connection to and its interest in the Zeitgeist, but becoming antagonistic to it. Of course that brings with it declining relevance to anyone outside the narrowing circle.

The crux of this whole thing for me is that sf has always provided a vision of what to strive towards. Verne/Clarke/Heinlein directly inspired the engineers of the US Space Program. The cyberpunk writers drove computer-scientists to develop the internet. Snow Crash basically provided a blueprint for MMO‘s, in particular Second Life.

Does the lack of a future simply mean our collective imagination is failing us? Is there nothing more to strive towards? And as such, has sf lost its great driving roles? Instead, do we just become consumers for the latest updated gizmo? Life in perpetual beta? Bruce Sterling recently said (in his SALT lecture) that SF doesn’t need to posit future technologies, that that role is taken by gizmo magazines/blogs but focus on how it feels to live with them. But he also said that future is a verb and we should never stop futuring.

I look to sf for that full on head-tingle. The great new idea/take on things I’d never encountered before. That I can literally feel re-shaping my neurons. And that won’t be fulfilled by naval-gazing re-writes of history. And I can’t just keep re-reading Accelerando.

So in the meantime, I’m gonna try and gather together a list of the new ideas I’d love to see explored. And I’m pretty sure time-travel isn’t one of them 😛