Last night, I was fortunate enough to see William Gibson speak at the Watershed in Bristol. He read a chapter from his latest novel, Zero History, and then answered questions for about an hour. His replies were entertaining, thorough, and frequently self-depreciating. At one point he liked his most famous novel Neuromancer (1984) to a Chinese dragon costume, saying it was all shiny and dancing on the outside, but the man inside (him) saw only the Chinese newspaper and balsa wood from which it was made.

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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:

1. To entertain
2. 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.