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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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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.
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.
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
No,no,no. Heinlein lived in a different era. He was definitely anti-Communist, but he was also very anti-authoritarian as well. His books have lots of sometimes kinky sex stuff, promote racial and (sometimes) gender equality. He was, again, more-or-less libertarian and anti-authoritarian (which if you remember was embodied to many of that age by Stalinism) in many ways, though I think his economic views drifted over the course of the spectrum during his life, becoming more conservative with time.
"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.
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
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