Recently, io9.com published an essay by Charlie Jane Anders which wondered outloud whether you can actually set Science Fiction in the future any more, an article I skimmed because any mention of The Singularity instantly makes me sleepy. The jist of it is, since The Singularity is going to be Teh Biggest Game-Changer Evah, there’s no point. To wit:
“since we can’t imagine life after the Singularity, it’s almost impossible to write about”
Now, that’s a fun thing to discuss at Con panels or over your sixth round at a bar, but of course it’s ridiculous. The Singularity itself is little more than a fun SF concept, at least right now. The fact is, we never know anything about the future, and yet we write about it all the time. Hell, smarter con men than me are creating entire careers out of making shit up about the future and selling it as being a “Futurist” (yay!). I could just as easily cobble together some half-assed scientific background and declare that the human race is on the verge of evolving into pure energy, so why bother writing any stories where corporeal folks do boring matter-based things.
The Singularity is comforting, of course. I’d certainly like to think that I’m going to be alive when Everything Changes – it’s the same mindset for people who are convinced The Rapture is coming, the assumption that they are important or lucky or whatever enough to be part of Ultimate History. It’s like, oh, you were there when the Berlin Wall came down? Pffft, I was here when JESUS CAME DOWN FROM HEAVEN AND JUDGED THE WORLD! Or, oh, you witnessed the Moon Landing? Shucks, I was alive WHEN WE MERGED WITH TECHNOLOGY TO BECOME IMMORTAL DEMIGODS!
Heck, it’s a seductive concept, being that lucky and/or important. I’m not lucky or important. I woke up this morning to find cat shit all over the bathroom floor. The Singularity, frankly, can’t come fast enough, but I fear, in the words of Robert Zimmerman, that It Ain’t Me, Babe.
What really offends me about the idea that writing SF set in the future is now impossible is the idea that our imaginations are so limited that we can’t imagineer our way around this. I mean, let’s stipulate for a second that The Singularity is not just a Futurist Fever Dream and might Actually Happen (and let’s ponder for a moment how many Capitalized Phrases Jeff can cram into this essay). Is the assumption here that our brains are not powerful enough without nanobot assistance to imagine what that might be like? Hell, I can imagine a lot of trippy things. Hot damn, I’m doing it right now.
Of course, this doesn’t mean that the increasingly fast advance of science and technology isn’t making it damn hard to imagine the future, because things keep happening faster than we can imagine them. Just yesterday I had an idea that some characters in my books might wear contact lenses or similar that overlaid instant information on what they looked at, but goddammit if that isn’t already being worked on. By the time I work that into a published book people are already going to be wearing huge sunglasses with that technology; by the time we make it into mass market paperbacks they’ll have scaled it down to contacts. I mean, damn. Used to be you could imagine things and have a comfortable 50 year cushion before any chance of it actually happening. Today it’s like 50 weeks, at best.
Ah, but that’s just a challenge, isn’t it? Gird your loins and write some SF, dammit. If you write a good story with compelling characters, no one is going to care much if the actual science gets a little dated; Neuromancer‘s concept of cyberspace doesn’t reduce its glory, and if Frederick Pohl has had occasion to lament that the science in some of his HeeChee books is now deprecated, it doesn’t make them bad books. Go forth and imagine, and take your chances.
Late last year, Jo Walton discussed this issue over on the TOR website.
I wrote a response to that here (http://www.rimworlds.com/thecrotchetyoldfan/?p=3080) and a few other blog entries that essentially agree with your take.
The one pithy summation I came up with goes something like this: have we forgotten that in the 40’s, 50’s, 60’s, just about every piece of SF concerned a future that we could ‘not possibly imagine’?
Point of fact is that ‘that Buck Rogers Stuff’ was so far out there as to be ridiculed by most of society, yet authors of that era had no problem wading in. I think the current situation is really a ‘crises of confidence’, rather than any real problem.
An episode of Torchwood had the contact lens technology you’re talking about. I’m waiting for contact zoom lenses myself.
Steve,
You hit the nail on the head – every generation seems to think they’ve had an original idea. The Singularity is a fun idea, and if it happens I’ll be first in line, maybe, but right now – let’s just write some cracking stories with good ideas, eh?
J
DA,
DAMN THEM! Stealing my ideas. That was faster than usual. Ah well, another lawsuit. I’ve got to win one eventually, right?
J