How sci-fi calculates the future.
What next for science fiction? Science fiction, more than any other literary genre, cannot survive without asking itself that question. Science fiction as we think of it today began with Jules Verne in the 1860s (with Journey to the Center of Earth) and was consummated around the turn of the century by H.G. Wells with a remarkable series of novels that each spawned sub-genres unto themselves. Many of Wells’s novels also came to seem prophetic, some even within his own lifetime; The War in the Air, written a scant five years after the first powered airplane flights, predicted a world war with Germany and Japan as the aggressors that would be largely decided by air power.
This proved astonishingly accurate 30 years later. In the 1941 reprinting, Wells wrote, “Is there anything to add to that preface now? Nothing except my epitaph. That, when the time comes, will manifestly have to be: ‘I told you so. You damned fools.’”
It was partly this surprising predictive power, but mainly the dislocations of the Industrial Revolution, that created the market for modern science fiction. This telling makes for an odd history of sci-fi. There is no other major literary genre that is thought to have sprung into existence roughly 150 years ago. One can point to Gulliver’s Travels, Utopia, and similar political allegories as even earlier precursors, but this doesn’t go far enough either.
Fundamentally, science fiction is asking the question “What next?” and that’s a question that humanity has been asking itself since the beginning of recorded language, certainly, and probably since the beginning of our existence as a species. No one has ever really known “what next,” and no one can ever really know — but that certainly will never stop us from pretending. And when we say “science fiction,” we are declaring that artifice. This is untrue (fictional) “knowledge” (science). The author of a work of science fiction wants the reader to believe that he (or she) possesses knowledge which he does not.
Why, then, should we not consider the Egyptian Book of the Dead as a work of science fiction? The Book of the Dead, alternately referred to as the Book of Going Forth, is an elaborate guidebook for access to the next life. It isn’t a religious text so much as an atlas. The Book gives a comprehensive answer to the question of “What next”: the goddess Ma’at weighs your soul against the “feather of truth,” and if you are found wanting you are fed to the monster Ammit.
If you measure up, then you must confront gods such as, according to Ogden Goelet,“One Who Eats the Putrefaction of His Own Posterior.” Truly frightening. Whoever wrote the Book knew how to keep people reading; each chapter is preceded by a flat statement of what the reader stands to gain: “If this Chapter be known [by the deceased] he shall be declared a speaker of the truth both upon earth and in Khert-Neter, and he shall be able to perform every act which a living human being can perform.” There are dozens and dozens of such statements throughout the text. Each chapter describes a piece of hypothetical technology. Just because the technology hasn’t been proven effective by modern science doesn’t mean that it was regarded by the public in a fundamentally different way from the way that we now regard, say, quantum computers.
Perhaps the reason the Book of the Dead, and other books like it, are not considered science fiction is that as the term is used now, it does not describe literature resulting from the universal human impulse to predict what will happen in the future. Instead, it describes a group of writers in dialogue with one another over the course of the last hundred years who have, between them, developed conventions for talking about the future and about technology
Anyone who has read science fiction is familiar with these conventions. If we’re talking about the science fiction now considered “classic,” which dates from the era of Asimov, Heinlein, and Clarke, around the 1950s, I would say they fall into four broad categories: robots, space travel (often faster than light), artificial intelligence, and aliens. Writers sometimes utilized all four (as Arthur C. Clarke did, to great effect, in 2001: A Space Odyssey), and sometimes restrict themselves to just one, as Asimov did in The Caves of Steel, but in the years leading up to the moon landing, when science fiction was at its most visionary and emphatic, at least one of these dominant motifs was present in most science fiction.
A lot of the science fiction of that time, incidentally, was set now. We’ve conspicuously failed to create huge rotating space stations with art-deco interior design, and we haven’t made it back to the moon since the end of Apollo, let alone Jupiter. And sci-fi writers have had to deal with their disappointment. The last couple decades have been spare times for sci-fi; it isn’t that good sci-fi hasn’t been written, it’s only that it hasn’t happened at nearly the volume or pace that it did at the height of the space race. Only recently have sci-fi writers begun to find their feet again.
The old motifs, though they still permeate science fiction, are no longer sufficient; the public has lost interest in space exploration and the hope among writers and futurists for a headlong leap into the deep cosmos has largely faded.
Contemporary sci-fi writers have addressed the predictive failure of the previous generation by taking a couple different approaches. For one, there has always existed a strain of science fiction more concerned with using sci-fi conventions as a vehicle for philosophical writing than with actually predicting the future. These sort of writers — Ray Bradbury, Philip K. Dick and Ursula K. Le Guin are the best known of the type — were pretty much unperturbed by the non-manifestation of the Space Age.
Then there are the writers of “hard science fiction.” Kim Stanley Robinson is on the forefront of this sub-genre: Robinson writes stories set in the near future, grounds them in hard science, and does not predict too many large leaps in our technological capacities. His epic Mars trilogy reads as much as a proposed method for the colonization of Mars as it does as a fantasy on the subject. More recently, Robinson wrote a trilogy of books on global warming set a scant 20 years in the future.
And finally there are the sci-fi writers who have concerned themselves with a more ambitious characterization of the future. These writers focus on the category of technologies that has made serious advances since the hey-day of space travel: computer science. A huge number of science fiction books today posit powerful forms of artificial intelligence. William Gibson’s novel Neuromancer was an early entry in this category; Gibson coined the term ‘cyberspace’ in the book. Neal Stephenson’s book Snow Crash was equally influential; Stephenson’s vision of a powerfully interactive online experience later spawned Second Life and legions of MMORPGS. Stephenson also penned the sprawling Baroque Cycle, a three-thousand page novel. Although the Baroque Cycle is set in the past, Stephenson makes the case that, as a novel about technology, it qualifies as science fiction.
This category of writers isn’t shy about making predictions about the future. Vernor Vinge spawned a sub-sub-genre focusing on an idea called the ‘technological singularity’ when he proposed that, “Within thirty years, we will have the technological means to create superhuman intelligence. Shortly after, the human era will be ended.”
In the end, asking “What’s next for science fiction?” is not so different from asking “What’s next?” Of course the constant churn of Star Trek books and scientific romances will continue indefinitely. But those books have come to evoke nostalgia more than anything else. Science fiction writers with more ambitious goals have successfully redefined themselves time and again.
Sam Jack ’11 (sjack@fas) is rooting for the Morlocks over the Eloi.