“Where’s my donut-shaped space station? Where’s my ticket to Mars?”
January 26, 2022 4:45 AM Subscribe
and William Gibson’s cyberspace.” He called these examples hieroglyphs: clear, inspiring symbols of what a better future might hold.
Wait, what?
posted by pompomtom at 5:47 AM on January 26, 2022 [17 favorites]
Wait, what?
posted by pompomtom at 5:47 AM on January 26, 2022 [17 favorites]
There have been a few attempts at generational starships, but almost everyone resorts to FTL travel, which IMO, is never going to happen.
Thus the “fiction” part of “science fiction.”
posted by Thorzdad at 5:50 AM on January 26, 2022 [21 favorites]
Thus the “fiction” part of “science fiction.”
posted by Thorzdad at 5:50 AM on January 26, 2022 [21 favorites]
this is such a ridiculously naïve, literal reading of science fiction in general. to be fair, I do agree about the hokey, self congratulatory science fiction of stuff like the martian - but star trek? come on. the whole franchise is about striving for a better human existence, not technomagic.
posted by AlbertCalavicci at 5:55 AM on January 26, 2022 [29 favorites]
posted by AlbertCalavicci at 5:55 AM on January 26, 2022 [29 favorites]
Hey, now! Hokey, self-congratulatory science fiction is some of the funnest there is!
This is not entirely science fiction-related, but it is SF/F, so I vote it counts: I've been thinking a lot about what an important writer Tamora Pierce is to me, and how powerfully her stuff still resonates with me even though it is almost unilaterally hokey. And a huge part of it is that Pierce, who knows a thing or two about history, is really good at telling hokey stories about people who are The Best At Everything being friends with one another in worlds where things are broken, people get hurt, atrocity has always just happened or is on the verge of happening, and—on top of everything else—her heroes can't save everything. There is always something too big and too strong for them to tackle, always something that just sucks horrendously and they wake up in the middle of the night crying and they wake up and resolve to just do what they can. And that matters so much more to me than fiction that "tells the truth" by showing how everybody winds up miserable and hurt.
I want stories of people fixing the world and making it better, but those stories only matter to the extent that they have at least some levelheaded understanding of what "fixing the world" actually entails. And geez, so many sci-fi people grew up so entranced by a certain myth of science and progress and data and "revolution" that's cold-blooded and technical that they really just don't notice how important the relationship between technology and people is. And that's the most fascinating story anyway: how technology changes people, how human folly gives rise to technology that's wise in some ways and foolish in others, and how the world we build when we feel like nothing we do could ever cause harm winds up being the world that hurts ourselves and others in ways that precisely mirror our own ignorances.
But that's not just true of science fiction. It just says that science fiction is best when it's good fiction, and that that's ultimately about the only thing that matters anyway. Whether or not it's "realistic" isn't as interesting to me as whether or not its realism or unrealism touches upon something meaningful and human.
(I liked this piece! Thank you for sharing it, Strutter Cane.)
posted by rorgy at 6:38 AM on January 26, 2022 [11 favorites]
This is not entirely science fiction-related, but it is SF/F, so I vote it counts: I've been thinking a lot about what an important writer Tamora Pierce is to me, and how powerfully her stuff still resonates with me even though it is almost unilaterally hokey. And a huge part of it is that Pierce, who knows a thing or two about history, is really good at telling hokey stories about people who are The Best At Everything being friends with one another in worlds where things are broken, people get hurt, atrocity has always just happened or is on the verge of happening, and—on top of everything else—her heroes can't save everything. There is always something too big and too strong for them to tackle, always something that just sucks horrendously and they wake up in the middle of the night crying and they wake up and resolve to just do what they can. And that matters so much more to me than fiction that "tells the truth" by showing how everybody winds up miserable and hurt.
I want stories of people fixing the world and making it better, but those stories only matter to the extent that they have at least some levelheaded understanding of what "fixing the world" actually entails. And geez, so many sci-fi people grew up so entranced by a certain myth of science and progress and data and "revolution" that's cold-blooded and technical that they really just don't notice how important the relationship between technology and people is. And that's the most fascinating story anyway: how technology changes people, how human folly gives rise to technology that's wise in some ways and foolish in others, and how the world we build when we feel like nothing we do could ever cause harm winds up being the world that hurts ourselves and others in ways that precisely mirror our own ignorances.
But that's not just true of science fiction. It just says that science fiction is best when it's good fiction, and that that's ultimately about the only thing that matters anyway. Whether or not it's "realistic" isn't as interesting to me as whether or not its realism or unrealism touches upon something meaningful and human.
(I liked this piece! Thank you for sharing it, Strutter Cane.)
posted by rorgy at 6:38 AM on January 26, 2022 [11 favorites]
Your corporate mass-surveillance dystopia is right here, however. And soon, you probably will get flying cars, only they'll randomly drop out of the sky, killing people, and it'll just be accepted as this thing that sometimes happens.
posted by acb at 6:58 AM on January 26, 2022 [7 favorites]
posted by acb at 6:58 AM on January 26, 2022 [7 favorites]
I'm not sure who it was I read that called The Martian "competence porn" but ever since I read it, I thought YES - that's what I'm looking for, mostly in speculative fiction but also in non-sci-fi as well. It doesn't have to be 100% realistically possible, and I don't want Mary Janes, but smart people who care about science and are good at their jobs and take what they do seriously, working together - I just want to see more of that. I get that from a lot of Ted Chiang's work (I loved The Story of Your Life), and a few other places. Is that the same as optimism?
Hyperspace is fun - it's a great way to let imagination play out, and where a lot of the most insightful metaphors for our own society can often be found. I do like the notion of "no hackers or holocausts," though.
posted by Mchelly at 7:05 AM on January 26, 2022 [8 favorites]
Hyperspace is fun - it's a great way to let imagination play out, and where a lot of the most insightful metaphors for our own society can often be found. I do like the notion of "no hackers or holocausts," though.
posted by Mchelly at 7:05 AM on January 26, 2022 [8 favorites]
Thus the “fiction” part of “science fiction.”
The problem is not the presence of fiction, but the lack of science.
posted by CheeseDigestsAll at 7:07 AM on January 26, 2022 [3 favorites]
The problem is not the presence of fiction, but the lack of science.
posted by CheeseDigestsAll at 7:07 AM on January 26, 2022 [3 favorites]
The article seems like a pretty good skewering of Stephenson. Though I wonder if Stephenson has read his own books? Snow Crash is a libertarian dystopia. Though maybe he really thinks a world where individuals run around with a personal nuclear bomb, or start cults on abandoned ships, is a techno-utopia?
However, the author seems to miss that sf has always been a way to express our worries and nightmares about technology, more than our dreams. Even Heinlein wrote about an apocalypse, and yeah, Gibson's vision isn't supposed to be an aspiration.
posted by zompist at 7:20 AM on January 26, 2022 [4 favorites]
However, the author seems to miss that sf has always been a way to express our worries and nightmares about technology, more than our dreams. Even Heinlein wrote about an apocalypse, and yeah, Gibson's vision isn't supposed to be an aspiration.
posted by zompist at 7:20 AM on January 26, 2022 [4 favorites]
Writing about the future does not create the future. Let's say I write a story about a pollution free fusion reactor which runs off seawater and can be easily and cheaply built, and I do so with sufficient detail for engineers to actually make the idea real.
Will that solve global warming? Drive down energy prices?
Or will it captured by the cross between kleptocracy and neofeudalism which will call "Late stage capitalism"?
Ideas are not praxis and praxis does not exist outside the real.
posted by fallingbadgers at 7:20 AM on January 26, 2022 [6 favorites]
Will that solve global warming? Drive down energy prices?
Or will it captured by the cross between kleptocracy and neofeudalism which will call "Late stage capitalism"?
Ideas are not praxis and praxis does not exist outside the real.
posted by fallingbadgers at 7:20 AM on January 26, 2022 [6 favorites]
This piece was sort of interesting in that I hadn't been at all aware of this project hieroglyph thing, but I also found it somewhat bizarre in that it sets up a very general premise as a kind of talking point about SFF ("Before “offering solutions,” sci-fi must actually grapple with the material realities of our present"), and then uses only this failed project from 2011 as the foil for this premise. It seems just ... irrelevant to a lot of current sci fi. Maybe that's the point? Not sure. But it seems like one might want to, y'know, figure out what SFF has been doing since 2011 when writing an article with this head/subhead, and this piece really doesn't do that at all. Weirdly, I think a lot of it might support the thesis, in that if you look at e.g. hugo /nebula award nominees/winners since 2011 (this barely mentions a single one of these*) they are broadly obeying the premise, I would argue, and it's pretty hard to read current SFF and imagine that "empty techno-optimism" has even been remotely on trend for some time. But it's much more complicated and interesting, and there's also a definite brand of optimism that's shown up in the form of e.g. Becky Chambers novels that seems to not even be on the radar for this piece, and I will argue to the death with anyone who thinks this is bad for SFF.
* Two exceptions, that I don't think indicate any attempt to grapple with what is happening in SFF: Stephenson's Seveneves received a nebula nom in 2015. It is a completely bananas claim about this novel if the following is supposed to be relevant to it: "Over and over again, Stephenson and his colleagues tried to skirt or obscure human malfeasance." Or, for that matter anything he's written since 2011? (I haven't read his most recent.) Charlie Jane Anders has a Hugo nomination and a Nebula win in 2017 for a novel that might be the work of hers he's alluding to briefly in the mention of climate change, but if so, the allusion is pretty incompetent as a relevant description of the novel. I suspect it's more likely The city in the middle of the night from 2019, though, of which I think it's also a pretty incompetent description.
posted by advil at 7:24 AM on January 26, 2022 [5 favorites]
* Two exceptions, that I don't think indicate any attempt to grapple with what is happening in SFF: Stephenson's Seveneves received a nebula nom in 2015. It is a completely bananas claim about this novel if the following is supposed to be relevant to it: "Over and over again, Stephenson and his colleagues tried to skirt or obscure human malfeasance." Or, for that matter anything he's written since 2011? (I haven't read his most recent.) Charlie Jane Anders has a Hugo nomination and a Nebula win in 2017 for a novel that might be the work of hers he's alluding to briefly in the mention of climate change, but if so, the allusion is pretty incompetent as a relevant description of the novel. I suspect it's more likely The city in the middle of the night from 2019, though, of which I think it's also a pretty incompetent description.
posted by advil at 7:24 AM on January 26, 2022 [5 favorites]
Anytime I read an atricle like this one I'm reminded of the opening lines from Lessons from the Screenplay's analysis of Arrival.
Spaceships, magical realism, etc.; those are all just plot devices to get us to think about what could be in a world where we do things much, much differently. By not modeling it on the present day, it allows us to examine a world without a lot of the existing pre-conditions of our modern society that most of us find ourselves in. It invites us to examine the new world as an outsider. As a mountaineering guide once told me, "The eye of the visitor sees well." Good SF/F allows us to be that visitor.
posted by SegFaultCoreDump at 7:25 AM on January 26, 2022 [23 favorites]
Pure, thoughtful science fiction is never just about aliens, or other worlds, or exciting visions of the future. At it's core, hard sci-fi is about humanity. Our hopes and fears, principles and behaviors.Likewise, Cory Doctorow's recent article adds another twist along those lines:
...science fiction concerns themselves with the same questions: not merely what the technology does, but who it does it for and who it does it to.The recent Expanse adaptation nails this even harder. It is not just a story of strange new worlds made available by the magical Epstein Drive and the Protomolecule, it is fundamentally a story of caste and class warfare and how we as humans react.
Spaceships, magical realism, etc.; those are all just plot devices to get us to think about what could be in a world where we do things much, much differently. By not modeling it on the present day, it allows us to examine a world without a lot of the existing pre-conditions of our modern society that most of us find ourselves in. It invites us to examine the new world as an outsider. As a mountaineering guide once told me, "The eye of the visitor sees well." Good SF/F allows us to be that visitor.
posted by SegFaultCoreDump at 7:25 AM on January 26, 2022 [23 favorites]
Examples include Isaac Asimov’s robots. . . clear, inspiring symbols of what a better future might hold.Hmmm. Did we actually read the same books?
I'm a big fan of optimistic techno-futurism. Watching Star Trek as a kid is probably a not-insignificant part of why I'm a working scientist. I don't think it's given me false hope or a simplified sense of the problems in the world, or that watching romantic comedies turned me into an unhinged stalker. I'm not sure it's important that fiction be realistic. Perhaps, when it is, it leads to discussions about the real world that are useful. But one can have the same discussion about the failure of unrealistic fiction. If you're getting your news about the world from novels, you're already in trouble.
I do hope the project put some useful money into the pockets of good writers while it lasted. (And I'm now wondering whether friends at ASU might be game to propose a crazy boondoggle. . .)
posted by eotvos at 7:44 AM on January 26, 2022 [3 favorites]
I prefer the notion of science fantasy. That frees both elements to go wherever necessary for a compelling story. I sometimes play with the idea of doing a film of The Martian Chronicles exactly as first written while ignoring all the intervening science, reality and disappointing facts...
posted by jim in austin at 7:55 AM on January 26, 2022 [2 favorites]
posted by jim in austin at 7:55 AM on January 26, 2022 [2 favorites]
The sheer arrogance of the Hieroglyph Project is just... a lot.
In order to defuse the situation, Schroeder dreamt up “a set of Big Data visualizations and collaborative decision-making tools” that allowed the two groups [First Nations people and the govt of Canada] to work together.
You know, it could just be that I'm reading this from 2022 and Schroeder is writing from the Before Times, but holy shit.
[...]when he suggested developing a “high-tech panopticon” to keep all of humanity in line at all times.
Christ! What an asshole.
I get the conceit, and it is a conceit in every sense of the word, but where they're going wrong is imagining discrete pieces of future technology instead of ways we could use technology to bind ourselves more closely to natural systems, of which we are undoubtedly a part. I guess I find design fiction more helpful than science fiction for imagining a future?
advil: but I also found it somewhat bizarre in that it sets up a very general premise as a kind of talking point about SFF ("Before “offering solutions,” sci-fi must actually grapple with the material realities of our present"), and then uses only this failed project from 2011 as the foil for this premise. It seems just ... irrelevant to a lot of current sci fi.
Yeah, but "look at how a bunch of scifi authors struggled with 'wherever you go, there you are' in the early 2010s" is less grabby. There's a bigger point to be made about how innovation kind of sucks when it's a top-down thing instead of sprouting organically from groups or networks of people grappling with problems*, but that's a bigger article than Blood Knife was looking for.
* for some good discussion on this, I can recommend Behind the Bastards' episodes on libertarian seasteading efforts.
posted by snerson at 7:58 AM on January 26, 2022 [2 favorites]
In order to defuse the situation, Schroeder dreamt up “a set of Big Data visualizations and collaborative decision-making tools” that allowed the two groups [First Nations people and the govt of Canada] to work together.
You know, it could just be that I'm reading this from 2022 and Schroeder is writing from the Before Times, but holy shit.
[...]when he suggested developing a “high-tech panopticon” to keep all of humanity in line at all times.
Christ! What an asshole.
I get the conceit, and it is a conceit in every sense of the word, but where they're going wrong is imagining discrete pieces of future technology instead of ways we could use technology to bind ourselves more closely to natural systems, of which we are undoubtedly a part. I guess I find design fiction more helpful than science fiction for imagining a future?
advil: but I also found it somewhat bizarre in that it sets up a very general premise as a kind of talking point about SFF ("Before “offering solutions,” sci-fi must actually grapple with the material realities of our present"), and then uses only this failed project from 2011 as the foil for this premise. It seems just ... irrelevant to a lot of current sci fi.
Yeah, but "look at how a bunch of scifi authors struggled with 'wherever you go, there you are' in the early 2010s" is less grabby. There's a bigger point to be made about how innovation kind of sucks when it's a top-down thing instead of sprouting organically from groups or networks of people grappling with problems*, but that's a bigger article than Blood Knife was looking for.
* for some good discussion on this, I can recommend Behind the Bastards' episodes on libertarian seasteading efforts.
posted by snerson at 7:58 AM on January 26, 2022 [2 favorites]
Part of the problem is that nearly all sci-fi is founded on a lie
What a funny thing to say about works of fiction. Of course, there's a kind of hubris in writing about things that don't exist as if they did, but there's even greater hubris in thinking that our current scientific understanding is complete. Yes, faster than light travel seems impossible given our modern understanding of astrophysics, but the thing about science is, we keep learning new stuff.
I'm not sure who it was I read that called The Martian "competence porn" but ever since I read it, I thought YES - that's what I'm looking for
If you want edge of your seat hard scifi drama, we've had one going recently that's not over yet!
posted by gwint at 8:12 AM on January 26, 2022 [1 favorite]
What a funny thing to say about works of fiction. Of course, there's a kind of hubris in writing about things that don't exist as if they did, but there's even greater hubris in thinking that our current scientific understanding is complete. Yes, faster than light travel seems impossible given our modern understanding of astrophysics, but the thing about science is, we keep learning new stuff.
I'm not sure who it was I read that called The Martian "competence porn" but ever since I read it, I thought YES - that's what I'm looking for
If you want edge of your seat hard scifi drama, we've had one going recently that's not over yet!
posted by gwint at 8:12 AM on January 26, 2022 [1 favorite]
This article, and its premise, makes a nice counter-point to yesterday's post about whether speculative fiction can lead us toward a climate solution. It's telling that the article looks at space stations and not climate related tech.
It's interesting that the article doesn't mention the almost weekly articles of how close we are to this start trek tech and that star trek tech as if shows like that weren't an absolute influence on a generation of nerdy future scientists.
posted by OHenryPacey at 8:18 AM on January 26, 2022
It's interesting that the article doesn't mention the almost weekly articles of how close we are to this start trek tech and that star trek tech as if shows like that weren't an absolute influence on a generation of nerdy future scientists.
posted by OHenryPacey at 8:18 AM on January 26, 2022
the second to last paragraph of the article:
To paraphrase William Gibson, the future is already here, albeit unevenly distributed. Or, as Simon and Garfunkel put it, “The words of the prophets are written on the subway walls and tenement halls.”
Though I think Gibson nailed it with his observation, I've long been of the opinion that those Paul Simon lyrics (from Sounds of Silence) aren't just the WORST of the song, they're some of the worst lyrics ever written. Because Sounds Of Silence, up until then, is a fabulous song, moody and ethereal and sweetly sadly mysteriously evocative and it's all building up to ... ... something a fourteen year old high on marijuana for the first time might have thought profound. It's silly. It doesn't mean anything. It undermines everything that came before ... and I'm pretty sure Mr. Simon agrees. I do recall reading that he was kind of embarrassed by it, he never really knew what the song was supposed to mean, he was just playing with words and mood ... and it didn't just never resolve, he made the mistake of trying to force it to resolve with that climax, those (almost) shouted lines that don't mean anything beyond maybe acknowledging that real wisdom can't be found in any book, which is wrong -- there's all kinds of wisdom to found in books.
Which I suppose could tie into what's wrong with sci-fi these days, the alleged failure of techno-optimism. The failure is in the optimism part, the notion that we should impose necessary improvement of our situation onto our narratives. Just let things play out, I'd argue, and if you feel an abyss approaching, apply the brakes. If it was a movie, there'd be a freeze frame, a fade to black, an ambiguity. Which (I'd further argue) is a fairer representation of the reality of things than either a coming utopia, or impending doom. Or in the case of the Paul Simon lyric, some clumsily imposed romantic profundity.
Confusion is always next ...
posted by philip-random at 8:18 AM on January 26, 2022 [3 favorites]
To paraphrase William Gibson, the future is already here, albeit unevenly distributed. Or, as Simon and Garfunkel put it, “The words of the prophets are written on the subway walls and tenement halls.”
Though I think Gibson nailed it with his observation, I've long been of the opinion that those Paul Simon lyrics (from Sounds of Silence) aren't just the WORST of the song, they're some of the worst lyrics ever written. Because Sounds Of Silence, up until then, is a fabulous song, moody and ethereal and sweetly sadly mysteriously evocative and it's all building up to ... ... something a fourteen year old high on marijuana for the first time might have thought profound. It's silly. It doesn't mean anything. It undermines everything that came before ... and I'm pretty sure Mr. Simon agrees. I do recall reading that he was kind of embarrassed by it, he never really knew what the song was supposed to mean, he was just playing with words and mood ... and it didn't just never resolve, he made the mistake of trying to force it to resolve with that climax, those (almost) shouted lines that don't mean anything beyond maybe acknowledging that real wisdom can't be found in any book, which is wrong -- there's all kinds of wisdom to found in books.
Which I suppose could tie into what's wrong with sci-fi these days, the alleged failure of techno-optimism. The failure is in the optimism part, the notion that we should impose necessary improvement of our situation onto our narratives. Just let things play out, I'd argue, and if you feel an abyss approaching, apply the brakes. If it was a movie, there'd be a freeze frame, a fade to black, an ambiguity. Which (I'd further argue) is a fairer representation of the reality of things than either a coming utopia, or impending doom. Or in the case of the Paul Simon lyric, some clumsily imposed romantic profundity.
Confusion is always next ...
posted by philip-random at 8:18 AM on January 26, 2022 [3 favorites]
this is such a ridiculously naïve, literal reading of science fiction in general. to be fair, I do agree about the hokey, self congratulatory science fiction of stuff like the martian - but star trek? come on. the whole franchise is about striving for a better human existence, not technomagic.
My daughter, who is currently in college getting (among other things) a degree in anthropology, has never seen Star Trek. When I described it to her, I told her she might like it since she liked anthropology: "it's set in a post-scarcity universe, where the government sends out a naval fleet whose primary responsibility is to explore new worlds and meet new civilizations, and whose Prime Directive is never to reveal themselves to any civilization who hasn't already achieved space travel, for fear of negatively impacting those civilizations by alerting them to the Federation's (and just generally alien) existence.
And she was a little blown away, that there would be a show that was, at least in its foundational premise, so thoughtful.
And she's right. As hokey as the show was (and is? I dunno I haven't watched any of the new stuff) it was definitely optimistic. And that optimism was rooted in the idea that People are Good and Want to Help Each Other.
And growing up, I always took it that all the sci-fi parts of that - the warp drive, the holodeck, the beaming to/from the surface of planets - was both the reason that people were able to be so good, and also the reward for being good: by putting our best efforts into Being Good, we were able to come up with tools that made our lives better, and that made us able to be even better. And I will always love Star Trek for that.
posted by nushustu at 8:24 AM on January 26, 2022 [15 favorites]
My daughter, who is currently in college getting (among other things) a degree in anthropology, has never seen Star Trek. When I described it to her, I told her she might like it since she liked anthropology: "it's set in a post-scarcity universe, where the government sends out a naval fleet whose primary responsibility is to explore new worlds and meet new civilizations, and whose Prime Directive is never to reveal themselves to any civilization who hasn't already achieved space travel, for fear of negatively impacting those civilizations by alerting them to the Federation's (and just generally alien) existence.
And she was a little blown away, that there would be a show that was, at least in its foundational premise, so thoughtful.
And she's right. As hokey as the show was (and is? I dunno I haven't watched any of the new stuff) it was definitely optimistic. And that optimism was rooted in the idea that People are Good and Want to Help Each Other.
And growing up, I always took it that all the sci-fi parts of that - the warp drive, the holodeck, the beaming to/from the surface of planets - was both the reason that people were able to be so good, and also the reward for being good: by putting our best efforts into Being Good, we were able to come up with tools that made our lives better, and that made us able to be even better. And I will always love Star Trek for that.
posted by nushustu at 8:24 AM on January 26, 2022 [15 favorites]
Honestly my take away reading this is that he's on to something with the "homework" thing but it is a less fundamental problem than he thinks. It sounds like most of the stories didn't work on the artistic level. Themed collections are a publisher's gimmick, and they don't all fail, but when they do it absolutely feels like a bunch of writers getting prompts in class, producing mediocre assignments and moving on.
I just tracked down Elizabeth Bear's contribution and stand by my assessment. I'm not bothering to link to it because IMHO it's a bad work from a good writer. It's also about serial killers and violence against women and I would say the problems with it have nothing to do with naivete.
Optimism has been a sort of side conversation among SF writers for a while, who've noticed they're writing a lot of dystopian fiction. I don't think the reason for that is so confusing. Even before you get to the point that the devil gets all the best lines--Inferno has always been read with more enthusiasm than Paradisio. But it's just as selective in its own way as optimism.
Kind of a rambling way to say I think that mostly what he's done is find one uninspired collection that everyone involved seems to have agreed didn't really work and moved on. I don't think it makes sense to generalize from it.
Christ! What an asshole.
Also not part of of Project Hieroglyph. Not even a science fiction writer. The asshole in question is a philosophy professor at Oxford.
posted by mark k at 8:28 AM on January 26, 2022 [1 favorite]
I just tracked down Elizabeth Bear's contribution and stand by my assessment. I'm not bothering to link to it because IMHO it's a bad work from a good writer. It's also about serial killers and violence against women and I would say the problems with it have nothing to do with naivete.
Optimism has been a sort of side conversation among SF writers for a while, who've noticed they're writing a lot of dystopian fiction. I don't think the reason for that is so confusing. Even before you get to the point that the devil gets all the best lines--Inferno has always been read with more enthusiasm than Paradisio. But it's just as selective in its own way as optimism.
Kind of a rambling way to say I think that mostly what he's done is find one uninspired collection that everyone involved seems to have agreed didn't really work and moved on. I don't think it makes sense to generalize from it.
Christ! What an asshole.
Also not part of of Project Hieroglyph. Not even a science fiction writer. The asshole in question is a philosophy professor at Oxford.
posted by mark k at 8:28 AM on January 26, 2022 [1 favorite]
Isaac Asimov’s robots. . . clear, inspiring symbols of what a better future might hold
Yeah, I have to doubt that the writer ever read any Asimov. The I, Robot stories are puzzles. The Three Laws of Robotics are the rules, and the stories explore how the rules can be broken. The very first story, Runaround, has the long-suffering robot engineer, Mike Donovan, struggling to deal with what happens when the Laws conflict with each other.
posted by SPrintF at 8:43 AM on January 26, 2022 [11 favorites]
Yeah, I have to doubt that the writer ever read any Asimov. The I, Robot stories are puzzles. The Three Laws of Robotics are the rules, and the stories explore how the rules can be broken. The very first story, Runaround, has the long-suffering robot engineer, Mike Donovan, struggling to deal with what happens when the Laws conflict with each other.
posted by SPrintF at 8:43 AM on January 26, 2022 [11 favorites]
Frankly after the last decade and especially after the last two years, I'm pretty sceptical of humanity's ability to grapple with any of the catastrophes confronting us. It's really hard to work up a whole lot of optimism about the future right now.
posted by octothorpe at 8:47 AM on January 26, 2022 [5 favorites]
posted by octothorpe at 8:47 AM on January 26, 2022 [5 favorites]
Ctrl + F 'Solarpunk': Phrase not found.
*sigh*
posted by eclectist at 8:55 AM on January 26, 2022 [5 favorites]
*sigh*
posted by eclectist at 8:55 AM on January 26, 2022 [5 favorites]
Christ! What an asshole.
Also not part of of Project Hieroglyph. Not even a science fiction writer. The asshole in question is a philosophy professor at Oxford.
You're right, I excerpted that statement without including the actual guy who was suggesting it - Nick Bostrom in 2019 - so it seemed I was attributing Karl Schroeder. I apologize for the unclear phrasing, thanks for catching that, mark k.
posted by snerson at 8:59 AM on January 26, 2022 [1 favorite]
Also not part of of Project Hieroglyph. Not even a science fiction writer. The asshole in question is a philosophy professor at Oxford.
You're right, I excerpted that statement without including the actual guy who was suggesting it - Nick Bostrom in 2019 - so it seemed I was attributing Karl Schroeder. I apologize for the unclear phrasing, thanks for catching that, mark k.
posted by snerson at 8:59 AM on January 26, 2022 [1 favorite]
A lot of sci-fi is here, and it's already so mundane as to be unnoticed. The rest is just misused and stolen from us by capitalism.
We could have gleaming, shining "cities of the future" if pollution and other externalities were properly handled. If public transportation and other public services were actually well-funded.
Our cell phones are basically tricorders, aren't they? It's just that the money is in developing addictive apps instead of useful tools.
posted by explosion at 9:08 AM on January 26, 2022 [5 favorites]
We could have gleaming, shining "cities of the future" if pollution and other externalities were properly handled. If public transportation and other public services were actually well-funded.
Our cell phones are basically tricorders, aren't they? It's just that the money is in developing addictive apps instead of useful tools.
posted by explosion at 9:08 AM on January 26, 2022 [5 favorites]
Part of the problem is that nearly all sci-fi is founded on a lie: that humans can travel through space in durations of time that are mind-numbingly long. There have been a few attempts at generational starships, but almost everyone resorts to FTL travel, which IMO, is never going to happen.--CheeseDigestsAll
The multi-generational thing is somewhat of a myth, assuming you can get close to the speed of light. The time dilation only occurs relative to Earth's clocks. If you don't care about time on Earth, about generations passing there, then we can reach anywhere in the galaxy within a person's lifetime. But then again, leaving Earth for good is not optimism. That means we messed up at home.
posted by eye of newt at 9:08 AM on January 26, 2022 [1 favorite]
The multi-generational thing is somewhat of a myth, assuming you can get close to the speed of light. The time dilation only occurs relative to Earth's clocks. If you don't care about time on Earth, about generations passing there, then we can reach anywhere in the galaxy within a person's lifetime. But then again, leaving Earth for good is not optimism. That means we messed up at home.
posted by eye of newt at 9:08 AM on January 26, 2022 [1 favorite]
Writing about the future does not create the future.
LOUDER FOR THE PEOPLE IN THE BACK.
posted by Halloween Jack at 9:11 AM on January 26, 2022 [3 favorites]
LOUDER FOR THE PEOPLE IN THE BACK.
posted by Halloween Jack at 9:11 AM on January 26, 2022 [3 favorites]
Horowitz goes off on a cruel rant about Stephenson, who IMO has always been something of a disappointment. Stephenson has such a history of building up titanic crescendos of tension that get resolved in the end by pure deus ex machina tactics that I wonder why anybody pays attention to him. But already I digress.
Historically, SF is blinded by a lot more than the neoliberalist moralism that Horowitz notices in Stephenson. I mean, consider how in Red Planet the humans are casually going about modifying the ecology of a planet to suit themselves, even though the planet in question already has people on it who will presumably be killed by the Atmosphere Project, and the ethics of that don't deserve even a passing glance.
All of this is totally unconnected with why there are no doughnut-shaped space stations or tickets to Mars. The absence of those is easy to understand. It's just that Stephenson has not grasped how badly off the storytellers of his childhood were, when it came to understanding how technically hard those things would be to pull off. Also that the storytellers of his childhood never came to terms with the how, when you get to the asteroid belt or the icy rings of Saturn, there is nobody there to rob or enslave, and nothing to pillage or plunder. Which makes the whole enterprise uneconomical.
posted by Aardvark Cheeselog at 9:59 AM on January 26, 2022
Historically, SF is blinded by a lot more than the neoliberalist moralism that Horowitz notices in Stephenson. I mean, consider how in Red Planet the humans are casually going about modifying the ecology of a planet to suit themselves, even though the planet in question already has people on it who will presumably be killed by the Atmosphere Project, and the ethics of that don't deserve even a passing glance.
All of this is totally unconnected with why there are no doughnut-shaped space stations or tickets to Mars. The absence of those is easy to understand. It's just that Stephenson has not grasped how badly off the storytellers of his childhood were, when it came to understanding how technically hard those things would be to pull off. Also that the storytellers of his childhood never came to terms with the how, when you get to the asteroid belt or the icy rings of Saturn, there is nobody there to rob or enslave, and nothing to pillage or plunder. Which makes the whole enterprise uneconomical.
posted by Aardvark Cheeselog at 9:59 AM on January 26, 2022
Yeah, the comments about Gibson and Asimov show a worrying lack of engagement with, or understanding of, the material they're ostensibly analyzing.
Though it's interesting that not only isn't Gibson aspirational, he himself pushes back on the usual "dystopian" label he's given in a way that speaks to the issue of sci-fi "grappling with the material reality of the present":
Though it's interesting that not only isn't Gibson aspirational, he himself pushes back on the usual "dystopian" label he's given in a way that speaks to the issue of sci-fi "grappling with the material reality of the present":
INTERVIEWERposted by star gentle uterus at 10:08 AM on January 26, 2022 [21 favorites]
The world of the Sprawl is often called dystopian.
GIBSON
Well, maybe if you’re some middle-class person from the Midwest. But if you’re living in most places in Africa, you’d jump on a plane to the Sprawl in two seconds. Many people in Rio have worse lives than the inhabitants of the Sprawl.
I’ve always been taken aback by the assumption that my vision is fundamentally dystopian. I suspect that the people who say I’m dystopian must be living completely sheltered and fortunate lives. The world is filled with much nastier places than my inventions, places that the denizens of the Sprawl would find it punishment to be relocated to, and a lot of those places seem to be steadily getting worse.
yeah, I was always more inspired by the idea of the Sprawl than depressed. It at least spoke of plausible future in which the air could still be breathed, people could still have a sense of freedom, culture still took strange and alluring twists and turns. No zombies. No year zero nuclear wars. Just humans continuing to be human, trying to make the best (or worst) of available technology and whatever junk was lying around.
Really not that much different than the now from where I'm sitting.
posted by philip-random at 10:22 AM on January 26, 2022 [5 favorites]
Really not that much different than the now from where I'm sitting.
posted by philip-random at 10:22 AM on January 26, 2022 [5 favorites]
Part of the problem is that nearly all sci-fi is founded on a lie
What a funny thing to say about works of fiction.
Yeah, it’s missing the point. That particular critique reminds me of an anecdote from a friend: She was in college at The New College of the University of South Florida, in Sarasota, and one Sunday decided to check out a nearby church. She was astounded and appalled when the preacher began his sermon with “Ya know, frayends, ah don’ read fiction! Ya know WHAH?? Cuz it AIN’T TRUE!”
posted by Philofacts at 10:30 AM on January 26, 2022 [3 favorites]
What a funny thing to say about works of fiction.
Yeah, it’s missing the point. That particular critique reminds me of an anecdote from a friend: She was in college at The New College of the University of South Florida, in Sarasota, and one Sunday decided to check out a nearby church. She was astounded and appalled when the preacher began his sermon with “Ya know, frayends, ah don’ read fiction! Ya know WHAH?? Cuz it AIN’T TRUE!”
posted by Philofacts at 10:30 AM on January 26, 2022 [3 favorites]
I'm not sure why anyone would take the pandemic years as anything other than inspirational when it comes to techno-solutions. Governments, business and individuals proved willing and able to make massive, rapid, changes; highly effective vaccines were developed and distributed quickly; the economy and markets recovered faster from the initial shock than anyone thought possible, and goods and services were been delivered without anything remotely close to existential interruption.
As a special case -- this made me find "Don't Look Up" to be particularly weird - McKay had a real-world example of how the U.S. government and media would react to something that was a couple of orders of magnitude less threatening than a ELE comet. There a very different set of reasons why politicians and businesses don't react to ACG the way many would prefer ... but they aren't that anyone ignores something that could kill 1% of the population in a year, to say the least of 100%.
posted by MattD at 10:53 AM on January 26, 2022
As a special case -- this made me find "Don't Look Up" to be particularly weird - McKay had a real-world example of how the U.S. government and media would react to something that was a couple of orders of magnitude less threatening than a ELE comet. There a very different set of reasons why politicians and businesses don't react to ACG the way many would prefer ... but they aren't that anyone ignores something that could kill 1% of the population in a year, to say the least of 100%.
posted by MattD at 10:53 AM on January 26, 2022
And growing up, I always took it that all the sci-fi parts of that - the warp drive, the holodeck, the beaming to/from the surface of planets - was both the reason that people were able to be so good, and also the reward for being goodnushutu came closest above to what I came here to say: that the warp drive technomagic of Star Trek was related to how it could imagine such an optimistic future.
It's right there in the opening crawl: Space, the Final Frontier... Reading about the Metaverse and the recent FPP on NFTs, I think how cramped our actual future appears, creating virtual worlds and virtual values to act as a money-making frontier, so inward-looking. Recycling the same entertainment franchises in endless sequels.
The idea of space as final frontier has problems if it's evocative of the European era of exploration, which went along with genocide and slavery and colonialism and exploitation. Star Trek imagined: what if an age of exploration, a frontier to explore, but benign?
posted by Schmucko at 11:27 AM on January 26, 2022 [6 favorites]
I've been a fan of SiFi and Fantasy for a long goddamned time. It's been my escape from the hard aspects of reality that I'd rather not deal with 24/7. As a kid I read Heinlein, Asimov, Clarke and that crew. As I got older I moved on to Sterling, Gibson and those folks. Now, I'm fucking old. I'm done with you're the world is terrible, let me show you how we can make it worse dystopian bullshit. I like reading Becky Chambers, Martha Wells, and Ursula Vernon. You can choose to wallow in this shithole and where it may go if you want. I'm pretty sure I can still see this hellscape for what it is. Look if leaning in is what gets you through this modern world, lean in. It's not for me though.
posted by evilDoug at 11:28 AM on January 26, 2022 [7 favorites]
posted by evilDoug at 11:28 AM on January 26, 2022 [7 favorites]
If humans were the problem, maybe someone could have thought up a hieroglyph that fixed us.
There are centuries of utopian writing, including fiction, which have attempted this.
posted by doctornemo at 11:42 AM on January 26, 2022
There are centuries of utopian writing, including fiction, which have attempted this.
posted by doctornemo at 11:42 AM on January 26, 2022
It's good to learn a bit about what happened to Hieroglyph.
But the author is wildly wrong to generalize from that one publishing venture to all of science fiction. Sf has always engaged with issues beyond technology, including everything brought up in the article. Start with Mary Shelley's 2 sf novels, which address (among other things) class, political injustice, lookism, knowledge, and more. Want sf about gender, the environment, government, prejudice? There's plenty!
posted by doctornemo at 11:45 AM on January 26, 2022 [2 favorites]
But the author is wildly wrong to generalize from that one publishing venture to all of science fiction. Sf has always engaged with issues beyond technology, including everything brought up in the article. Start with Mary Shelley's 2 sf novels, which address (among other things) class, political injustice, lookism, knowledge, and more. Want sf about gender, the environment, government, prejudice? There's plenty!
posted by doctornemo at 11:45 AM on January 26, 2022 [2 favorites]
The problem...well, no, not the problem with Star Trek, but why I don't think Star Trek is actually germane to all this is because it posits better people without ever actually explaining how they got better. It says it's a post scarcity society, but can't even provide a reasonable vision of how that works on a day to day basis outside the hierarchical system of Starfleet, much less how things got to be that way. (Because it doesn't know, obviously. If you really had an actionable road map to a just, peaceful, and abundant way of life for all people, hopefully your first idea wouldn't be to make commercial entertainment out of it.)
Star Trek's not about how we can become better people. It's about how cool it would be if we were better people with awesome starships and we could go explore the galaxy being better. The better people are just as much a piece of the techno fantasy as the warp drives and the matter replicators.
And more on point for the main discussion, see also hopepunk.
posted by Naberius at 12:54 PM on January 26, 2022 [4 favorites]
Star Trek's not about how we can become better people. It's about how cool it would be if we were better people with awesome starships and we could go explore the galaxy being better. The better people are just as much a piece of the techno fantasy as the warp drives and the matter replicators.
And more on point for the main discussion, see also hopepunk.
posted by Naberius at 12:54 PM on January 26, 2022 [4 favorites]
Notably the perhaps foremost example Star Trek gives us about how we get there from here (or, well, from the mid-nineties) is about riots forcing social change right about now-ish.
posted by Navelgazer at 12:57 PM on January 26, 2022 [2 favorites]
posted by Navelgazer at 12:57 PM on January 26, 2022 [2 favorites]
The Martian’s space-hackery certainly couldn’t have inspired anyone “to develop new technologies and implement them on a heroic scale.”
The book came out in 2011 - the year of the tsumani in Japan, the Greek debt crisis, the mass shooting in Norway, the shooting of Congresswoman Giffords, and the Bin Laden raid. The Martian doesn't offer us new technology, it offers us a vision of humanity where a great many people invest a lot of intelligence, effort, ingenuity and resources to save another human being, including across geo-political & ideological lines. Maybe that's the hieroglyph there?
On the far opposite side of the spectrum, there was Star Trek, whose fantastical gadgets had fascinated viewers for decades. Where Weir offered elbow grease and gumption, Star Trek wowed us with visions of warp drives, holodecks, replicators, teleporters, and a slew of other high-tech wish-fulfillment devices. There was only one problem: Many of these technologies could never actually exist
Again, I would argue that beyond the wild tech of Star Trek, the vision it offered of society - where scarcity, race, etc., were things of the past (and yes, it did not do this perfectly) is the true hieroglyph. A grand vision that was put out there, of a society where people of different species, genders, ethnicities worked together to overcome challenges and problems. Is that not a new frontier worth exploring? Is there not a similarity there to the idea of the Fisher King, and how if our state of being/leadership isn't right, that the land and the people are unwell; that perhaps the technowizardy of Star Trek was the result of us as a species getting it right, not the other way around?
And how many engineers and other scientists cite their love of Trek for why they are in their career path?
If humans were the problem, maybe someone could have thought up a hieroglyph that fixed us.
Maybe that hieroglyph isn't technological? Maybe there is no single silver techno-magical bullet that will fix us, instead it's going to be found in envisioning futures where people can work together and unite behind common causes, for the common good? Maybe depicting situations or societies where this happens is the true hieroglyph, is all I'm trying to say, and the technology bling is there as the wrapping.
Read wider, I would say to the author this piece, and think broader.
posted by nubs at 1:47 PM on January 26, 2022 [9 favorites]
The book came out in 2011 - the year of the tsumani in Japan, the Greek debt crisis, the mass shooting in Norway, the shooting of Congresswoman Giffords, and the Bin Laden raid. The Martian doesn't offer us new technology, it offers us a vision of humanity where a great many people invest a lot of intelligence, effort, ingenuity and resources to save another human being, including across geo-political & ideological lines. Maybe that's the hieroglyph there?
On the far opposite side of the spectrum, there was Star Trek, whose fantastical gadgets had fascinated viewers for decades. Where Weir offered elbow grease and gumption, Star Trek wowed us with visions of warp drives, holodecks, replicators, teleporters, and a slew of other high-tech wish-fulfillment devices. There was only one problem: Many of these technologies could never actually exist
Again, I would argue that beyond the wild tech of Star Trek, the vision it offered of society - where scarcity, race, etc., were things of the past (and yes, it did not do this perfectly) is the true hieroglyph. A grand vision that was put out there, of a society where people of different species, genders, ethnicities worked together to overcome challenges and problems. Is that not a new frontier worth exploring? Is there not a similarity there to the idea of the Fisher King, and how if our state of being/leadership isn't right, that the land and the people are unwell; that perhaps the technowizardy of Star Trek was the result of us as a species getting it right, not the other way around?
And how many engineers and other scientists cite their love of Trek for why they are in their career path?
If humans were the problem, maybe someone could have thought up a hieroglyph that fixed us.
Maybe that hieroglyph isn't technological? Maybe there is no single silver techno-magical bullet that will fix us, instead it's going to be found in envisioning futures where people can work together and unite behind common causes, for the common good? Maybe depicting situations or societies where this happens is the true hieroglyph, is all I'm trying to say, and the technology bling is there as the wrapping.
Read wider, I would say to the author this piece, and think broader.
posted by nubs at 1:47 PM on January 26, 2022 [9 favorites]
Weird that the author picks on Stephenson, whose latest book is about trying to reverse climate change, and all of the unintended consequences and political ramifications that result.
Also, Kim Stanley Robinson has been writing science fiction for years which tries (with varying degrees of success) to take politics and group dynamics into account.
I think if you're going to pick out a couple novels to trash, you should also hold up some examples of what you appreciate.
posted by DJI at 2:42 PM on January 26, 2022 [1 favorite]
Also, Kim Stanley Robinson has been writing science fiction for years which tries (with varying degrees of success) to take politics and group dynamics into account.
I think if you're going to pick out a couple novels to trash, you should also hold up some examples of what you appreciate.
posted by DJI at 2:42 PM on January 26, 2022 [1 favorite]
The blurb at the end says the guy is about to publish a book, which I could not help but feel might be relevant to the article. I might have liked a "this group failed but we can do better: I have tried" explicit statement.
The Martian’s space-hackery certainly couldn’t have inspired anyone “to develop new technologies and implement them on a heroic scale.”
Balderdash. To start with it's very inspiring if you want to design what we call circular systems, and getting those deployed is heroic. Turning waste into useful is our best thing.
posted by clew at 2:57 PM on January 26, 2022 [2 favorites]
The Martian’s space-hackery certainly couldn’t have inspired anyone “to develop new technologies and implement them on a heroic scale.”
Balderdash. To start with it's very inspiring if you want to design what we call circular systems, and getting those deployed is heroic. Turning waste into useful is our best thing.
posted by clew at 2:57 PM on January 26, 2022 [2 favorites]
Stephenson has such a history of building up titanic crescendos of tension that get resolved in the end by pure deus ex machina tactics that I wonder why anybody pays attention to him
I think anyone who likes Stephenson is there for the ideas and the effortless sense of scale, and acknowledges that he's pretty shit at endings
posted by Merus at 4:28 PM on January 26, 2022 [10 favorites]
I think anyone who likes Stephenson is there for the ideas and the effortless sense of scale, and acknowledges that he's pretty shit at endings
posted by Merus at 4:28 PM on January 26, 2022 [10 favorites]
Thanks for sharing the article. And just to share my homework narrative concept in brief here, especially if it irritates mean people who try to intrude on my idealistic space dreams:
One day, somebody tripped while walking home from the store. Just, veggies and baguettes, all over the sidewalk. They looked up at the moon and proclaimed, "that's it. I'm going there. Somebody's got to do it, and I'm ready for a world where tripping and spilling groceries is at least different."
(Sometimes I think that if we all had a group-god-therapist, they'd at this point in our interstellar-evolution discussion kind of open their hands, look around, and say--"hey, maybe you keep things simple? Building that base on the moon is still pretty cool and it counts as progress, right?")
posted by circular at 4:41 PM on January 26, 2022
One day, somebody tripped while walking home from the store. Just, veggies and baguettes, all over the sidewalk. They looked up at the moon and proclaimed, "that's it. I'm going there. Somebody's got to do it, and I'm ready for a world where tripping and spilling groceries is at least different."
(Sometimes I think that if we all had a group-god-therapist, they'd at this point in our interstellar-evolution discussion kind of open their hands, look around, and say--"hey, maybe you keep things simple? Building that base on the moon is still pretty cool and it counts as progress, right?")
posted by circular at 4:41 PM on January 26, 2022
“The words of the prophets are written on the subway walls and tenement halls.” [...] aren't just the WORST of the song, they're some of the worst lyrics ever written.
still trying to wrap my head around this one. Delete if this is an unforgivable derail, but why has this particular sequence of words so offended thee, philip-random? would you like people to propose worse candidates? because this is how you end up with getting all kinds of song lyric poo flung at you
posted by elkevelvet at 4:52 PM on January 26, 2022 [2 favorites]
still trying to wrap my head around this one. Delete if this is an unforgivable derail, but why has this particular sequence of words so offended thee, philip-random? would you like people to propose worse candidates? because this is how you end up with getting all kinds of song lyric poo flung at you
posted by elkevelvet at 4:52 PM on January 26, 2022 [2 favorites]
I said it in my comment. I think it's such a great song, everything building up to ... a complete letdown. I still think it's an okay song, but it definitely trips over itself when it should be triumphing.
I am probably guilty of hyperbole.
posted by philip-random at 6:03 PM on January 26, 2022
I am probably guilty of hyperbole.
posted by philip-random at 6:03 PM on January 26, 2022
I am probably guilty of hyperbole.
Naw.
The ending of Sound of silence is like Deus Ex Machina.
"And the people bowed and prayed
To the neon god they made
And the sign flashed out its warning
In the words that it was forming"
sure, sounds like your aboard Wonka's chocolate pontoon boat going down the river Styx...Domo arigato, Mr. Roboto, domo, domo. So we have people in modern times creating and worshipping a neon god cobbled from modern stuff, lack usually.
So the God Lack, in silence watches people as the sign starts flashing, fools beware, words on walls are the reflective goosebumps of urban mysticism. "Frodo lives" to lewd pictures of Ceaser, Banksy gets it.
great song about a dream and all that it implies but what about the neon god.
Science Fiction as a genre is old but what was the subject matter before science became legal to write about.
God. The age of mystical raison d'etat.
They had me at neon god and then just went all billboard with allusionary wisdom missed in some silent mist.
posted by clavdivs at 6:11 PM on January 26, 2022 [2 favorites]
Naw.
The ending of Sound of silence is like Deus Ex Machina.
"And the people bowed and prayed
To the neon god they made
And the sign flashed out its warning
In the words that it was forming"
sure, sounds like your aboard Wonka's chocolate pontoon boat going down the river Styx...Domo arigato, Mr. Roboto, domo, domo. So we have people in modern times creating and worshipping a neon god cobbled from modern stuff, lack usually.
So the God Lack, in silence watches people as the sign starts flashing, fools beware, words on walls are the reflective goosebumps of urban mysticism. "Frodo lives" to lewd pictures of Ceaser, Banksy gets it.
great song about a dream and all that it implies but what about the neon god.
Science Fiction as a genre is old but what was the subject matter before science became legal to write about.
God. The age of mystical raison d'etat.
They had me at neon god and then just went all billboard with allusionary wisdom missed in some silent mist.
posted by clavdivs at 6:11 PM on January 26, 2022 [2 favorites]
Watson's, 'Chekhov's Journey' is a sliver but perhaps addresses the rift of sci-fi that being history first:
"literature is not a discourse that can or must be false.... it is a discourse that, precisely, cannot be subjected to the test of Truth; it is neither true nor false, to raise this question has no meaning this is what defines its very status as "fiction""
-Todorov.
what's interesting about the book is it's examination of history and continuity and it's implications for the future.
"past events can be altered. history gets rewritten. well, we've just found that this applies to the real world too...Maybe the real history of the world is changing constantly? and why? Because history is a fiction. it's a dream in the mind of humanity, forever striving....towards what? Towards perfection"
posted by clavdivs at 6:28 PM on January 26, 2022 [1 favorite]
"literature is not a discourse that can or must be false.... it is a discourse that, precisely, cannot be subjected to the test of Truth; it is neither true nor false, to raise this question has no meaning this is what defines its very status as "fiction""
-Todorov.
what's interesting about the book is it's examination of history and continuity and it's implications for the future.
"past events can be altered. history gets rewritten. well, we've just found that this applies to the real world too...Maybe the real history of the world is changing constantly? and why? Because history is a fiction. it's a dream in the mind of humanity, forever striving....towards what? Towards perfection"
posted by clavdivs at 6:28 PM on January 26, 2022 [1 favorite]
I think anyone who likes Stephenson is there for the ideas and the effortless sense of scale, and acknowledges that he's pretty shit at endings
Most of the time, I would agree with this, but have you read his Baroque Cycle? Because I thought that had a pretty satisfying ending. I know that of his work it's the least sci-fi, but it still has elements of "magic" in it, and characters/objects that show up in some of his other cyberpunk work. Honestly it's my favorite of his stuff.
posted by nushustu at 9:29 PM on January 26, 2022 [1 favorite]
Most of the time, I would agree with this, but have you read his Baroque Cycle? Because I thought that had a pretty satisfying ending. I know that of his work it's the least sci-fi, but it still has elements of "magic" in it, and characters/objects that show up in some of his other cyberpunk work. Honestly it's my favorite of his stuff.
posted by nushustu at 9:29 PM on January 26, 2022 [1 favorite]
I loved the Baroque Cycle, in particular the middle volume -- The Confusion -- and how it reflects on what we're going through today. More than one paradigm shifting (ready or not). I do like Stephenson's response to why he chose to write something outside of the science fiction realm.
"It's a historical fiction concerned with the birth of science as we know it. How is that not science fiction?"
Or words to that effect.
posted by philip-random at 10:07 PM on January 26, 2022
"It's a historical fiction concerned with the birth of science as we know it. How is that not science fiction?"
Or words to that effect.
posted by philip-random at 10:07 PM on January 26, 2022
Can someone more learned in the history of science fiction please help me understand how these concerns differ from those that gave birth to the new wave of science fiction in the 1960s? As I understand it, part of that development was a movement away from a sole focus on technology toward one that encompassed human relations and more realistic understandings and portrayals of relationships and systems including much more nuanced portrayals of the consequences of technology development and use. Have we landed right back in the same place?
posted by ElKevbo at 11:20 PM on January 26, 2022 [1 favorite]
posted by ElKevbo at 11:20 PM on January 26, 2022 [1 favorite]
because this is how you end up with getting all kinds of song lyric poo flung at you
Which is exactly what I was about to do. Thank you for saving me from myself.
posted by Chitownfats at 8:03 AM on January 27, 2022 [1 favorite]
Which is exactly what I was about to do. Thank you for saving me from myself.
posted by Chitownfats at 8:03 AM on January 27, 2022 [1 favorite]
Because Sounds Of Silence, up until then, is a fabulous song, moody and ethereal and sweetly sadly mysteriously evocative and it's all building up to ... ... something a fourteen year old high on marijuana for the first time might have thought profound.
You know this is the same song that starts with "Hello Darkness, my old friend", right?
posted by Navelgazer at 9:41 AM on January 27, 2022 [2 favorites]
You know this is the same song that starts with "Hello Darkness, my old friend", right?
posted by Navelgazer at 9:41 AM on January 27, 2022 [2 favorites]
Science Fiction as a genre is old but what was the subject matter before science became legal to write about.
Fairy tales, folk tales, midrash, mythology.
I wanna tell her that I love her, but the point is probably moot.
posted by Mchelly at 9:46 AM on January 27, 2022 [1 favorite]
Fairy tales, folk tales, midrash, mythology.
I wanna tell her that I love her, but the point is probably moot.
posted by Mchelly at 9:46 AM on January 27, 2022 [1 favorite]
Can someone more learned in the history of science fiction please help me understand how these concerns differ from those that gave birth to the new wave of science fiction in the 1960s? As I understand it, part of that development was a movement away from a sole focus on technology toward one that encompassed human relations and more realistic understandings and portrayals of relationships and systems including much more nuanced portrayals of the consequences of technology development and use. Have we landed right back in the same place?
My short answer is no.
My long answer is that there is a wide swath of science fiction out there that this article either outright ignores or is unaware of that very much addresses human relations, the intended and unintended consequences of technology, and a bunch of other things. For the SF the article mentions, it is very narrow and selective in focus in terms of only looking at them in terms of their depictions of technology, and ignoring the fact that there are other elements regarding human relations and large systems present in them as well.
posted by nubs at 10:16 AM on January 27, 2022 [2 favorites]
My short answer is no.
My long answer is that there is a wide swath of science fiction out there that this article either outright ignores or is unaware of that very much addresses human relations, the intended and unintended consequences of technology, and a bunch of other things. For the SF the article mentions, it is very narrow and selective in focus in terms of only looking at them in terms of their depictions of technology, and ignoring the fact that there are other elements regarding human relations and large systems present in them as well.
posted by nubs at 10:16 AM on January 27, 2022 [2 favorites]
Have we landed right back in the same place?
Are you asking if the state of current sci-fi is like pre-New Wave SF? The answer is absolutely not. If you look at the Hugo winners and nominees for the last 10 years, you'll see books like Gideon the Ninth, The Goblin Emperor, The Broken Earth trilogy and so on; I'm not going to characterize them here but they are all beloved of MeFites and absolutely unrelated to the topics in the article.
The article is not talking about mainstream SF despite the general-sounding headline; it's not even really talking about a sub-genre, or if it is it's making a poor case for that. It's talking about a specific failed effort from a decade ago that really can't be generalized even to the other works of the contributing authors, IMO.
For example, take Stephenson's Diamond Age. Stephenson spearheaded the collections highlighted and is guilty of getting geeky excited about tech and science and clever people. So is his writing all golden age SF optimism? Well, Diamond Age is full of cornucopia machines and miraculous medical options and nigh-magical nanobots. Tech triumphalism! But people with IP rights control who benefits, the medical options are used to harm people too so there's really no net benefit, and there is still crippling, indeed fatal, inequality. So it's not exactly naive about how humans will use technology or that we need more than just cooler gadgets.
That being said I do think there is a fundamental difference between the approaches and imagination of writers like Stephenson and ones who owe more to the New Wave tradition, so I don't think the article is completely off base. But I think it'd take a lot more to get at the relevant bits.
posted by mark k at 10:25 AM on January 27, 2022 [1 favorite]
Are you asking if the state of current sci-fi is like pre-New Wave SF? The answer is absolutely not. If you look at the Hugo winners and nominees for the last 10 years, you'll see books like Gideon the Ninth, The Goblin Emperor, The Broken Earth trilogy and so on; I'm not going to characterize them here but they are all beloved of MeFites and absolutely unrelated to the topics in the article.
The article is not talking about mainstream SF despite the general-sounding headline; it's not even really talking about a sub-genre, or if it is it's making a poor case for that. It's talking about a specific failed effort from a decade ago that really can't be generalized even to the other works of the contributing authors, IMO.
For example, take Stephenson's Diamond Age. Stephenson spearheaded the collections highlighted and is guilty of getting geeky excited about tech and science and clever people. So is his writing all golden age SF optimism? Well, Diamond Age is full of cornucopia machines and miraculous medical options and nigh-magical nanobots. Tech triumphalism! But people with IP rights control who benefits, the medical options are used to harm people too so there's really no net benefit, and there is still crippling, indeed fatal, inequality. So it's not exactly naive about how humans will use technology or that we need more than just cooler gadgets.
That being said I do think there is a fundamental difference between the approaches and imagination of writers like Stephenson and ones who owe more to the New Wave tradition, so I don't think the article is completely off base. But I think it'd take a lot more to get at the relevant bits.
posted by mark k at 10:25 AM on January 27, 2022 [1 favorite]
The Writing On the Wall: Sci-Fi’s Empty Techno-Optimism. Before “offering solutions,” sci-fi must actually grapple with the material realities of our present.
Yeah, sci-fi doesn't have to do any such thing. They're fictional stories, not political campaigns. I do see where the article is coming from: the tech industry has been making non-stop promises of driverless cars and AI automation and "make the world a better place" but so far has only delivered Bitcoin pyramid scams, mass surveillance, and mediums of disinformation that are *checks clipboard* hastening the destruction of democracy itself.
The naivete isn't in science fiction and it's not even among tech industry leaders (I've worked in Silicon Valley and when they think you're one of them, those vampires happily let you know that they are well aware of what they're doing), but rather the naivete is in the public narratives that the tech industry leaders tell about themselves.
Daddy Elon isn't going to take you Mars no matter how much many space lottery tickets you buy from him in Dogecoin.
posted by AlSweigart at 11:04 AM on January 27, 2022 [1 favorite]
Yeah, sci-fi doesn't have to do any such thing. They're fictional stories, not political campaigns. I do see where the article is coming from: the tech industry has been making non-stop promises of driverless cars and AI automation and "make the world a better place" but so far has only delivered Bitcoin pyramid scams, mass surveillance, and mediums of disinformation that are *checks clipboard* hastening the destruction of democracy itself.
The naivete isn't in science fiction and it's not even among tech industry leaders (I've worked in Silicon Valley and when they think you're one of them, those vampires happily let you know that they are well aware of what they're doing), but rather the naivete is in the public narratives that the tech industry leaders tell about themselves.
Daddy Elon isn't going to take you Mars no matter how much many space lottery tickets you buy from him in Dogecoin.
posted by AlSweigart at 11:04 AM on January 27, 2022 [1 favorite]
Most of the time, I would agree with this, but have you read his Baroque Cycle?
I have not, because I've read his earlier books that had quite terrible endings and realised I was committing to a three part series from an author who routinely does not stick the landing
posted by Merus at 6:04 AM on January 28, 2022
I have not, because I've read his earlier books that had quite terrible endings and realised I was committing to a three part series from an author who routinely does not stick the landing
posted by Merus at 6:04 AM on January 28, 2022
Daddy Elon isn't going to take you Mars no matter how much many space lottery tickets you buy from him in Dogecoin.
Or perhaps he is, only if you check the fine print, you'll notice that there's no way back, and you are essentially selling yourself into slavery in an environment that makes the Siberian gulag look like Cancún, but, hey, it's cool, because it's uWu the Technoking Meme Lord.
posted by acb at 7:16 AM on January 28, 2022 [1 favorite]
Or perhaps he is, only if you check the fine print, you'll notice that there's no way back, and you are essentially selling yourself into slavery in an environment that makes the Siberian gulag look like Cancún, but, hey, it's cool, because it's uWu the Technoking Meme Lord.
posted by acb at 7:16 AM on January 28, 2022 [1 favorite]
I'm a big fan of Transmetropolitan for this reason. What if we had makers and gene therapy....and people still sucked?
posted by es_de_bah at 4:51 AM on January 29, 2022
posted by es_de_bah at 4:51 AM on January 29, 2022
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