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Science Fiction Writers Discuss The Future
An Anonymous Reader writes "Locus Magazine asks prominent science fiction writers Bruce Sterling, Kim Stanley Robinson, Cory Doctorow, Pat Murphy, Norman Spinrad, and Ken Wharton to extrapolate the future from current trends in the environment, copyright, terrorism, war, world government, and the upcoming Presidential election. How do large groups make decisions on single issues? Are centralized global systems of governance the way to go? Are stateless diasporas the driving force behind the economic development of India and China? Will there always be war? The answer to these questions and more in a round-table conducted by legendary science fiction writer John Shirley."
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Will there always be war?
The war is not meant to be won, it is meant to be continous
Most of the 'hard' SF writers like Niven lean heavily to the libertarian-flavour right, IIRC.
Some questions are hard to formulate - but you carry them around inside you, like Confucius overlong in the womb
Hi,
e ber)?
Does anyone know of a right wing science fiction writer?
John Ringo (http://www.johnringo.com/)? David Weber (http://www.baen.com/author_catalog.asp?author=dw
Baen has a few.
Bye,
Ori
-- Support a free market in the field of government
...if you look at it one way, it's easy. In the simplest sense, the left is about change, the right is about preserving the status quo. Science fiction writers are preoccupied with change because they speculate about the future. Then again, I think that vastly oversimplifies the libertarian tone and anti-fascism of much science fiction. Science fiction authors tend to look into the future and expect the consolidation of powers, which scares them. Because they think more than the average person about the negative side of the current course of humankind, they are more inclined to want to change it.
On economic issues, sci-fi writers seem to run the gamut.
Of course, if you want to read some nutty religious-whackjob fantasy stuff, I'm sure you can find that really popular Revelations-inspired fantasy series at Walmart or your favorite local Christian bookstore, if pseudo-religious drivel is up your alley. I guess that's close to being "right wing" sci-fi.
As for what this is doing in politics.slashdot.org, that truly beats the hell out of me.
http://www.jerrypournelle.com/
"I wondered why the Titans had not attacked Russia first; Stalinism seemed tailor-made for them. On second thought, I wondered if they had. On third thought I wondered what difference it would make; the people behind the Curtain had had their minds enslaved and parasites riding them for three generations. There might not be two kopeks difference between a commissar with a slug and a commissar without a slug."
I've found myself liking what I call the "past-future" more. Things like Sky Captain or that animated feature that will come out later this year about a world powered entirely by steam. These kinds of things seem very interesting to me. If you want to make a movie or book about the question on whether or not replacing people's jobs with robots is good or bad, why set it in the distant future? The robots could be powered by nukes, sure, but you could also power them with steam! Or hampsters! Or SOMETHING other than some kind of atomic battery.
The future has been done. It's time to lay off the true future for a while, and look at the alternate futures that won't be. Use what people thought the future would look like in the 1880s, or the 1920s, or something like that. I've seen enough "future of the 1990s/2000s". Show me something different.
Just a thought.
Comment forecast: Bits of genius surrounded by a sea of mediocrity.
I think that's true. You don't find many current republican SF writers, because Bush turned the Republican party into the Party of the Fundimentalist Church. You don't see anti-stem-cell preaching in SF works.
Guess I've been living under a rock!
Meanwhile, when Vernor Vinge talks about the future, I sit up and listen. Er, read. Whatever.
I read Usenet for the articles.
The legendary John Shirley? I've never heard of him, nor has my sci-fi addicted wife.
You have to admit, science fiction writers tend to be pro-science (duh) and the Bush administration doesn't have a very good reputation with respect to science.
Science fiction writers do seem to be overwhelmingly liberal. Given the recent news story about brain differences between liberals and conservatives, the liberals having more empathy, this makes some sense. Writers need empathy to write from different character points of view. Just a theory.
Professor of Astronomy, Author of Spider Star & Star Dragon (Tor)
Colonialism...the developing world has been strong-armed into affording IP protection to foreign ideas... A guy in Maastricht worked out that if every Burundi copy of Windows were legitimately purchased, the country would have to turn over 67.65 months' worth of its total GDP to Microsoft. This is the impending disaster, a new form of colonialism that makes the old forms look gentle and beneficent by comparison
I don't know about the historic forms of colonialism appearing "gentle and beneficent", but I think this is a particularly insidious way the developed world can extort from and suppress the developing. Eventually the developed world's fundamentally impalpable IP and financial management of the rest of the world will burst. What will matter in the end is that the manufacturing capacity is in Asia, the cheap farmland and farm labour spread across the third world and the IT solutions in India. Britain lost its position as "workshop of the world" after the 1870s (already happened in the U.S.) and it took only one major war to make it lose its financial centrality (all the U.S. really has left). How long can the developed world as it currently is really hold on to its unnatural domination? Kudus to Doctorow to his very apt parallels between the old and new colonialisms.
In short, science fiction writers have a unique perspective not only on what may happen in the future but what is actually happening right now. So it is very interesting to see what they have to say about a present that is quickly becoming more and more like a science fiction scenario with AIDS, SARS, 9/11, RFID, TIA, ubiquitous computing and ecommunication, etc, etc... Our culture is obsessed with these things so why hasn't Locus done a roundtable like this until now?
and it didn't come directly from any of the sci fi futurists, one of them just mentioned it as his best quote:
"Then I heard Lenny Bruce say: 'If you want to imagine a world government, think of the whole world run by the phone company and nowhere else to go.' "
A-MEN!
NOrman Spinrad has been predicting the end of civilization as we know it, and/or the collapse of the US into fascism, for thirty years that I remember.
Bruce Sterling has been pushing the end of US innovation and the collapse of the economy for most of that time.
I know most of those people, more or less, and while I love much of their fiction, I can't think of any one of them that I would consider other than a negative predictor.
If they are all that worried, we must be in pretty good shape.
A bunch of folks at a party at Pournelle's came up with Star Wars/SDI back in the 80s.
John Shirley was cyberpunk's patient zero, first locus of the virus, certifiably virulent. A Carrier. City Come A-Walkin' is evidence of that and more. (I was somewhat chagrined, rereading it recently, to see just how much of my own early work takes off from this one novel.)
Attention, academics: the city-avatars of City are probably the precursors both of sentient cyberspace and of the AIs in Neuromancer and, yes, it certainly looks as though Molly's surgically- implanted silver shades were sampled from City's, the temples of his growing seamlessly into skinstuff and skull. (Shirley himself soon became the proud owner of a pair of gold-framed Bausch & Lomb prescription aviators: Ur- mirrorshades.) The book's near-future, post-punk milieu seems cp to the max, neatly pre-dating Bladerunner.
So this is, quite literally, a seminal work; most of the elements of the unborn Movement swim here in opalescent swirls of Shirley's literary spunk.
That Oregon boy, with the silver glasses.
* * *
That Oregon boy remembered today with a lank forelock of dirty blond, around his neck a belt in some long- extinct mode of patent elastication, orange pigskin, fashionably rotted to reveal cruel links of rectilinear chrome spring: "Johnny Paranoid," convulsing like a galvanized frog on the plywood stage of some basement coffeehouse in Portland. Extraordinary, really. And, he said, he'd been to Clarion.
Was I impressed? You bet!
I met Shirley as I was starting to try to write fiction. Or rather, I had made a start, had abandoned the project of writing, and was shamed back into it by this person from Portland, point-man in a punk band, whose dayjob was writing science fiction. Finding Shirley when I did was absolutely pivotal to my career. He seemed totemic: there he was, lashing these fictions together and propping them in the Desert of the Norm, their hastily-formed but often wildly arresting limbs pointing the way to Other Places.
The very fact that a writer like Shirley could be published at all, however badly, was a sovereign antidote to thesinking feeling induced by skimming George Scithers' Asimov's SF at the corner drugstore. Published as a paperback original by Dell, in July 1980, City Come A-Walkin' came in well below the genre's radar. Set in a "near future" that felt oddly like the present (an effect I've been trying to master ever since), spiked with trademark Shirley obsessions (punk anti-culture, fascist vigilantes, panoptic surveillance systems, modes of ecstatic consciousness), City was less an sf novel set in a rock demimonde than a rock gesture that happened to be a paperback original.
Shirley made the plastic-covered Sears sofa that was the main body of seventies sf recede wonderfully. Discovering his fiction was like hearing Patti Smith's Horses for the first time: the archetypal form passionately re- inhabited by a debauched yet strangely virginal practitioner, one whose very ability to do this at all was constantly thrown into question by the demands of what was in effect a shamanistic act. There is a similar ragged-ass derring- do, the sense of the artist burning to speak in tongues. They invoke their particular (and often overlapping, and indeed she was one of his) gods and plunge out of downscale teenage bedrooms, brandishing shards of imagery as peculiarly-shaped as prison shivs.
Mr Shirley, who so carelessly shoved me toward the writing of stories, as into a frat-party swimming pool. Around him then a certain chaos, a sense of too many possibilitics -- and some of them, always, dangerous: that girlfriend, looking oddly like Tenniel's Alice, as she turned to scream the foulest undeserved abuse at the Puerto Rican stoop-drinkers, long after midnight in Alphabet City, the visitor from Vancouver frozen in utter and horrified disbelief.
"Ignore her, man," J.S. advised the Puerto Ricans, "she's all keyed up."
And, yes, she was. T
The weather in the eastern half of the US has tended to wetter than usual for at least 4 years in a row. Locally, we just had our fourth August where rain was never more than 3 days apart, when we used to always see a two week dry stretch somewhere in August, and only call it a drouth if the whole month was dry. The southwestern USA has the exact opposite problem, again showing a solid tendency to hang in there(Noticed all those forest fires each summer and fall in CA, Ariz, Nv. N. Mex., and so on? There really are more of them lately.).
All that may be an early sign of global warming trends, which would imply it's going to keep changing. and likely in the same direction. My house isn't really built for a rain forest, and it's already costing me and other people to adjust to what increasingly looks to be a solid trend. I'm very glad to be 800 feet above the local flood plain, and to have at least a few grocery stores up here with me. I'm glad I'm not a farmer, trying to figure out what to plant next year.
Some global warming models predict more and bigger hurricanes, and the arguements there look both backed up by some specific facts and pretty logical even to an average joe lay-meteorologist like me. How would everyone in Florida vote this November if they thought those models were definitely true? Just at a guess, Global Warming would suddenly become the biggest issue they would be considering in casting their votes, and for many of them, the only one.
Some other models suggest a big southward shift in the Atlantic current is coming. If those are true, the world gets warmer on average, but at least the eastern part of those Canadian territories gets colder, against the general trend. So does Europe, and the Russians probably don't want them all moving east 3,000 miles to get to the warmer parts of Siberia, because that's where the Russians are moving, and the Overheated Chinese.
In this worst case scenario, the European population can go southeast instead, right after the newly depopulated middle east stops glowing. As these last two situations show, Global Warming is frequently considered to have strong potential to destabilize the international situation, (that's UN'ese for "someone uses nukes."). Hope this explains why some of us are at least a trifle concerned.
Who is John Cabal?
This is a really good point, because quite a lot of the "right-wing" science fiction writers like Heinlein were certainly not socially conservative. Orgies/incest appeared in a lot of Heinlein's books. Someone above made the point about Niven being Libertarian, and that's certainly more consistent with the default right-wing sf writer from the ones who come to mind.
Professor of Astronomy, Author of Spider Star & Star Dragon (Tor)
Hmm... maybe I really missed something while skimming the article, but the tone I got was disappointment, not hate. These people seemed to really care about the direction that the US is going. Do we now equate criticism with hate in this country? I think that mentality scares me more about the right-wingers than anything else about them.
Parents will scold their children when they misbehave, but that does not mean that they hate them. They scold them because they love them and they care how they develop. America is still a young country, and it does still do stupid shit -- and will under any party. But we should never let our country get to the point that the citizens cannot condemn the actions of our govenment when it does do something wrong. We citizens are still the stewards of our government.
the growth in cynicism and rebellion has not been without cause
Ironically, both of which have collaborated on more than a few books. If you want some modern space history done 'right', go and hit Weber's 'Honor' series. I'm talking the modern day rise, decay and fall of socialism framed in the future tense spanning at least, what, is it six books now? Social and political depth combined with a deep tactical warfare drama that's infinitely more readable than Tom Clancy's stuff. It's a stark contrast to half the scifi's out there featuring communism and socialism being the pinnical of human government, which is even more scifi fantasy than the material itself in light of human nature.
Personally, I want the budget of Lucas' next movie put into his books just for the epic fleet engagements alone. My favorite author to date.
You need a FREE iPod Nano
Finally, the king, John Shirley. The grandfather of cyberpunk, he wrote "City Come A Walkin'" (of which Gibson says was his major influence), and later the Eclipse trilogy. He's all over the map in terms of writing styles, but he's been doing SF & horror for a good thirty years. He might not be as famous as Clarke or Asimov, but his writing style is very slick and his works are all eminantly readable.
Granted, these folks might not be the most famous SF writers, but they are certainly talented. When Shirley speaks, *I* sit up and pay attention.
Condemnant quod non intellegunt.
You, sir, are a master of understatement.
Science fiction writers do seem to be overwhelmingly liberal.Given the recent news story about brain differences between liberals and conservatives, the liberals having more empathy, this makes some sense. Writers need empathy to write from different character points of view. Just a theory.
If by "liberal" you mean "open-minded," sure. If you mean "liberal" as "leftie," there are plenty of counterexamples in science fiction, such as Robert A. Heinlein, and (ugh) ol' homphobic Orson Scott C*rd.
Cory Doctorow "A guy in Maastricht worked out that if every Burundi copy of Windows were legitimately purchased, the country would have to turn over 67.65 months' worth of its total GDP to Microsoft. This is the impending disaster, a new form of colonialism that makes the old forms look gentle and beneficent by comparison."
"Those with money and power are approaching Hari Seldonesque abilities, gradually steering public opinion using knowledge of how groups think" -- Ken Wharton
At the risk of jumping on him for what might be a comment that has been taken out of context:
That's an interesting way to envision how the unpredictable actions of huge collectives could be predicted: just assume that they will be manipulated by demagogues, and that the demagogues' aims will be obvious from their (necessarily public) rhetoric.
Still, I don't buy it, except over such short timespans that no particular skill is required to make predictions. For example, "bin Ladin Determined to Strike within the United States." What was their first clue? His declaration of war on the US in 1998?
The lessons of the post-Cold-War period are that history is driven as much by chaotic regions like Afghanistan as by tightly controlled ones like North Korea. By definition, events in chaotic regions cannot be predicted.
Another source of chaos is diseases like SARS and AIDS. Just as Chernobyl hastened the end of the USSR, poor government responses to such diseases could result in the collapse (or reform) of those governments. We could quibble about whether a disaster like Chernobyl was or was not predictable in the decaying USSR. We can also debate about whether it's all that important in the grand march of history -- maybe it sped up the collapseof the USSR but not by much. OK, but (for those who credit Reagan for ending the Cold War by playing chicken with the USSR) consider how different history might be, had John Hinckley's aim been a little different.
Control, and predictability, are illusions. At least, to the degree proposed in Foundation. I seem to recall however that Foundation acknowledged the difficulties posed by unruly leaders coming from out of nowhere.
...and based on that, I'm completely disinclined to listen to anything else he has to say. They marketed the talk around the idea that it would be based on his vision of what the world will be like when manufacturing processes catch up with simulation technology, but it was really just one big self-indulgent orgy of buzzwords and vapid counterculture. I'm a pretty intelligent guy, I love science fiction, and I'm perfectly willing to listen to smart people propound off-the-wall viewpoints, but I also have a pretty good bullshit detector, and Bruce literally didn't say anything the entire evening. I don't know how he got away with it: I guess you make up enough weird terms like "spime wrangling" and people just assume you must be cool.
The highlight of his address was when he claimed that Steve Jobs has cancer because the air isn't clean enough. After that, I basically stopped listening.
You might try L. E. Modesitt Jr.; he held a (very minor) post during the Reagan adminstration. Like much of the right (and like Dubya), his characters largely have no qualms about the ruthless use of military force when the solution requires it. In particular, you might consider "The Parafaith War", and moreover it's sequel "The Ethos Effect"-- which can easily be read as simultaneously as strong support for the recent invasion/demolition/whatever of Iraq, and a thorough damnation of the US administration that did it.
On the other hand, while his characters will use force, they tend to make sure it is the absolute last resort, and will accept the consequences if the guess wrong. As an example, were Dubya a major secondary hero in a Modesitt novel, he would indeed have struck unilaterally on the suspicion of WMDs... but when the evidence turned up so thoroughly negative, would have resigned, and agreed to extradition for a trial at the Hague on charges of Conspiracy to Wage an Agressive War.
Also, his characters largely have a respect for the environment that makes a Greenpeace anti-whaling ship look like the crew of the Exxon Valdez; I suspect "Club of Rome" leanings. He also seems to have a distinct bias against religious fanatics of all sorts, exhibited in his Ghost of the Revelator and Parafaith War series, as well as his newest.
On yet another the other hand, his characters seems to have the "most people are morons" attitude I get from the few conservatives I associate with.
On the last limb of this octupoid, I should note that it's may be a mistake to assign the views of a character to an author. He may just be taking an interesting position, not one he agrees with.
//Information does not want to be free; it wants to breed.
"[Orson Scott Card] refers to himself as a Democrat."
Yeah, and my mother refers to herself as '39'.
Self-description is generally inaccurate. In Card's case, there is no doubt whatsoever that his opinions and writings adhere closely to what even an American would call Right Wing. That said, his stories don't leave the tenets of fascism unquestioned, and he invariably uses conscience as a leavening factor in his plots.
Crumb's Corollary: Never bring a knife to a bun fight.
Talk about the history sure brings John Titor to mind..
:/
http://johntitor.strategicbrains.com/
Apparently he is a time traveller from 30 years in the future who got lost in our time and foretold that in this year, there will be a civil war starting in the states, which would escalate to WW3 until 2011
Well, I don't know what to make of it, but look at today's headlines, so korea set of a nuke. I can see that there are many in the US who are sick of GWB, but without any doubt, through weird 'election policies' and 'political contributions' who can you see as president of the US of A?
John Kerry? Come on, don't kid yourself. We all know the outcome now, what with E-voting and such.
This year is gonna be a fun year if that guy is for real
Online backup with Mozy, sounds like Ozzie, but more!
(b) It is probably true that there's a "left wing" bias among SF writers, but then, there's a similar bias among the population of people who are literate and well-educated.
Point (b) there is nothing to be particularly smug about, of course -- if we tried hard we could probably come up with examples of intelligent and well meaning people screwing things up, and we could also find examples (not necessarily the same ones) of people who regard themselves as really smart, but on closer examination seem to have an inflated opinion...
But there does indeed seem to be a correlation between the dumbing down of the United States and the the swing to the right. Take your choice: Cause, effect, or coincidence.
Actually, I have several books of Niven, and of Niven and Pournelle, and of Pournelle only, and it seems to me that Pournelle is more the right-wing type than Niven.
If you have read Pournelle's monthly columns in Byte, you can gather his right-wing stances from the comments in between too.
Here are my answers:
1. I have learned a lot more different viewpoints, and I have learned to appreciate the insight they give.
2. My heart say no to stronger government, but my brain say that it does help against terrorism. Countries with a strong government are much better at preventing terrorism than weak governments. Even though US and EU are they main enemies as defined by the islamic world revolution, after 9/11 most "successful" terrorist actions are done in third world countries.
However, the strength of the government is more closely linked to how free of corruption it is, than to how many secret agents it has. This is why Russian government is weak. Thus, cultivating a free press (to combat corruption) is more important than giving more powers to the secret police. Giving up to much liberty will lead to a weaker government.
3. I hope we in the future will have better models for describing social changes, and that we in the future rather than blaming the past for making mistakes, understand why these mistakes were made.
4. We, in the rich part of the world, are in no serious environmental danger. The climatic changes will not be more catastrophic than we can deal with them. At the local level, the environment has become steadily more healthy in the "rich west" for decades. In the "booming east" the same will start happing soon, as material wealth will lead to a larger concern for the environment. Africa is screwed, environmentally, as in any other way.
5. The current trend is a strong religious and national backslash to the globalisation project, which threatens modernism (civil liberties, democracy, secularity...) as well. Of course, the tide will turn again. Look at Iran for an example, where the teocracy is increasingly out of touch with the young population.
6. I believe stronger international organisations and global wealth will eventually make war an exception. Look at Europe, a continent which has been at war with itself for all of written history. Today, war between the EU members seem impossible, and EU is expanding in a way that is pacifying rather than aggrevating its neighbours. The EU rules for joining requires appicants to settle border conflicts, and to treat minorities within the borders respectfully.
7. In a sense, we already have a world government. It is called WTO. I do not believe we will have a world government in the sense of the national governments, there are too much cultural difference for that. But I can see a pressure for WTO to become more transparent, more democratic, and to take on non-economic considerations affecting trade, such as global enironment. This could lead to a convergence with other transnational organizations, such as UN and the international court.
8. I'm not sure the gap between rich an poor is widening, on a global scale. The biggest economic growth are in China and India, with more than a third of the world population, and both comparable poor countries. I see this trend continuing, and eventually even reach AFrica, which is currently left behind. On a local geographical scala and scort time scale, I see a widening in the rich countries, as the middle and lower classes are pressured by the developing countries, and a scrinking in the developing countries, as the new jobs create a new middle class, which need to be serviced thus improving conditions for the lower class. As long as we manage to handle the population growth (and it can be done), I see the living condition growing for most people, which is more important than the size of the gap.
9. You should have asked about the population growth, how to handle it, and what changes it will cause.
I have no idea who will win the US election. In a sense, it is a small version of the battle mentioned in point 5. Kerry representing modernism, and Bush the religious and natinalist backslash.
You don't give him enough credit. Have you read Songmaster, with protagonists in homosexual relationships without hint of negativity? While he definitely opposes gay marriage, you can't write off his attitudes/opinions with a simple "dang homophobe." There's a lot more complexity to it than that.
It was very intersting reading this round table article trying to understand each participant. Here are some conclusions about each author (based on their remarks, books not taken into account):
:) Avoid Pat Murphy and Kim Stanley - they are just some two boring guys.
:)
Ken Wharton - interesting and intelligent ideas. He is optimisting about our ability to handle the climate change (though he [stupidly] thinks we should have stabilised the population long ago). He seems to understand future technology the most.
Kim Stanley - pretty confused guy
Norman Spinrad - left-winger, hates Bush and the American hegemony, hates Christian fundies
Pat Murphy - panic-monger, less government is good
Cory Doctorow - anti-copyright guy, against more government too, doesn't like high American debt
Bruce Sterling - fascinated by other countries and cultures (as always)
So if you want good SF, I suggest you check out Divine Intervention by Ken Wharton (haven't read it, but it must be good), if you want to have an anti-RIAA circle-jerk*, invite Cory. If you want to whine about Bush*, do it with Norman Spinrad. And if you want to watch some anime or eat sushi, call Bruce.
Some things that the authors agree on:
- More government is probably bad
- too bad we wrecked the environment
- we'll have to deal with the global warming
- war will change shape in the future
- and they don't know who will win the elections.
* - not that I am pro-Bush, pro-copyright or anything, but I don't need a science fiction author for that.
P.S. I just hated the "The world seems dangerously chaotic" comment in the beginning. Yeah, as if it never was. Heck, Toffler wrote about it 25 years ago - everyone in the 21st century will be affected by a desease called "Future shock". Too bad, noone (besides him) realises that it is a desease and that it's irrational and harmful to think this way.
Future Wiki -- If you don't think about the future, you cannot have one.