Near-future SF *is* possible
Filed under General • 25-10-2008 •
Charles Stross recently wrote something on his blog that I really disagree with:
We are living in interesting times; in fact, they’re so interesting that it is not currently possible to write near-future SF.
The thrust of his argument is that the international situation is changing so rapidly that any book of near-future SF written today will be obsolete before it can be published, much as many Cold War thrillers were rendered obsolete by the sudden end of the Cold War.
That’s a fair point. But I don’t agree that you can then extrapolate from here to say that it’s now impossible to write near-future SF. Sure, times are challenging and it’s tough to make predictions about the near-future geo-political and economic landscape - but the role of SF is so much wider than that.
For me, the two purposes of any kind of fiction are:
- To entertain
- To say something about the human condition, about what it means to be alive, here and now.
If you’re writing about characters, about people and what makes them tick, then whether you set your story ten, twenty or fifty years into the future, you’ll still find people falling in love, trying to earn a living, screwing each other over, and hanging out with their friends… things they’ve been doing for hundreds of thousands of years. Those basic primate sex, power and death motivations will still be there.
I don’t see SF as a dry, intellectual game of prediction. I don’t feel the need to be proven right by posterity. If the immediate economic future looks a little uncertain, I’ll fudge a little. I’ll make my best guess and hope for the best. I’ll write a story about people.
After all, this kind of uncertainty is hardly new. Science fiction writers in the 1980s had to consider the fact that the futuristic stories they were writing could be rendered obsolete at any moment by a full-scale global nuclear war – but they kept on writing. They made some basic assumptions and they went for it.
For instance, William Gibson wrote Neuromancer in the early Eighties, at the height of the Cold War, when the superpowers were on the brink of a holocaust, and as far as he knew, he could have been vapourised before finishing the novel, but he finished it anyway.
Greg Bear’s novel Eon was first published in 1985, a year after Neuromancer, and assumes the tension between the USA and USSR continues until the year 2000, and then erupts into a full-scale nuclear war. Does that mean we can’t read it now, in 2008? Obviously not, or Orion Books wouldn’t be re-releasing it with an arty new cover. The fact is, Bear’s book is an epic adventure with the pace of a thriller and characters that draw the reader’s sympathy – so it doesn’t matter that he got a few details wrong, any more than it matters that Orwell’s vision of 1984 didn’t come to pass in that particular year.
I guess what I’m saying is that it’s always been difficult to make accurate predictions of the near future, but that’s no reason to stop doing it. As long as your story’s based on more than simple prediciton, and if it’s an entertaining tale with involving characters and a serious point to make, it’s worth writing. You may get some aspects of the future wrong – but so what? As long as you give it your best shot, no-one can ask more of you than that.
Interesting post, Gareth. I agree that it’s very difficult to agree that near-future SF is impossible for the same reasons you outline here. First, that science fiction is fiction first and science second. To be fiction, it should tell us something about humanity. The science bit doesn’t have to be predictive in order to work; it could be entirely wrong but still be justifiable. If science fiction must be correct in its predictions in order to be termed science fiction, then any science fiction that is not correct cannot be science fiction, and the field disappears in a puff of logic.
Hi Gareth, great post! I’ve been hearing that a lot lately, how it’s impossible to write near-future sci-fi right now. I couldn’t agree with you more. As I was reading your post I was thinking of 1984 and 2001, and of course there you mentioned it! Sure at the time they were written they weren’t considered “near future” but the fact is, those dates have now passed and they were wrong, and yet those books are more popular than ever.
I agree with you completely, Gareth. The operative word that Stross uses that invalidates his argument is “impossible”. Had he chosen “difficult” or “challenging” then there may have been no reason for you reply to him. Very little is “impossible”, especially within the realms of human imagination. I also anticipated 1984 before you mentioned it. 1984 was completely incorrect in its assumption of the actual year 1984, but of course Orwell was not writing about an actual 1984, but rather a year that was 40-odd years away from his writing about it. To wit, one could argue that, had the Axis powers not lost WWII, many of those assumptions may very well have realised themselves.
I would see Stross’ comments as a challenge to write even more. And it looks as though you have. Good on you, G.
Eon was about USA / USSR tension? I will have to re-read it again!
I’m guessing that Stross likes his near-future SF to have a real sense of accuracy. I love hard SF – technical based stuff, but I agree that it’s the story telling aspect of SF that entrances me.