
Science Fiction, big ideas, ideology: what is to be done? - pavel_lishin
http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2012/05/sf-big-ideas-ideology-what-is-.html
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DanielBMarkham
_If only because when you stop moving you're dead, and reverting to a late
palaeolithic lifestyle looks like it would be a drag, and that's the most
likely alternative long-term future for our species if we burn all the coal
and oil, wreck the climate, and turn our back on the Enlightenment's
ideological values._

I am reminded of two things. First, Gene Roddenberry's idea that progress
would fix the problems the species had. Second, that if your vision of
industry is such that it eventually destroys the planet, you're going to have
a very difficult time projecting out some scenarios in which most folks would
find both pleasing and challenging. There's your cri de coeur: many writers
have boxed themselves into belief systems in which they are just rehashing old
plots inside of old universes that progress along old lines towards cliched
conclusions.

Big ideas are born out of wide-open ideological spaces. The more we have
groupthink, the less we're going to get real dramatic innovation and the big
ideas that come from it.

The Enlightenment was born out of the idea of individual freedom and power --
even to the point of "hurting" the world and society at large. John Stuart
Mill made an extended argument along the lines that things the majority would
find hurtful are actually good for the species in the long run. We progress
because we maximize local freedom. Not because somehow reason exists to make
the species better by fiat. Or to put it a little more colloquially, if your
enlightenment is broken your fiction will be also.

ADD: Want to restate this for clarity: we have standardized so many facets of
our worldview and what is "good" or "bad" for both characters and society that
we are destroying good fiction. The corporate dystopia of Alien in 1970 is so
pervasive now that writers don't seem to be able to think of equally horrific
possible futures. It's all becoming just so much pre-canned fantasy, because
once you take away by dogma the possibility of tweaking your "what-ifs", you
eliminate huge sections of possible great sci-fi. We're groupthinking
ourselves into two genres: non-fiction and fantasy.

~~~
pjscott
The article _Building Weirdtopia_ , and the comments on it, are a source for a
bunch of unusual future ideas. A fair number of them would be more interesting
settings for a story than the standard ones.

<http://lesswrong.com/lw/xm/building_weirdtopia/>

Mind you, a lot of them have been done already in science fiction, but there's
always plenty of room for more stories.

------
Jun8
I think the two ends of the SF spectrum are: Type-I, where the author tries to
come up with "big ideas" as described in the OP and their ramifications
wherein the idea is the important part, e.g. _Snow Crash_ ; and Type-II, where
the the SF part is just an artifice to expose and explore aspects of humanity
or some deep philosophical issue, e.g. _Solaris_ , _The Handmaid's Tale_ or
the stories of James Tiptree Jr. (you've got to read "Houston, Houston Do You
Read").

Works of the second type don't really need to push big ideas or ideologies. In
fact, for most of these, the SF element is something that will be quickly
introduced and got over with to come to meat of the story, similar to how
better folk tales and fables work: "Let's just assume that animals can talk,
now one day ...", or "Aliens have invented a pheromone/toxin that turns sexual
urges in males into uncontrollable physical aggression, this is what happens
to humanity".

~~~
dredmorbius
Decent distinction, though what I really like about Stephenson is that he does
_both_. His novels are almost always a case of "what if I explore this idea
(or concept) _and_ its implications/impacts on society".

I'd split the line more along the old-school of Clarke v. Asimov, where Clarke
generally has more believable character development and looks at societal
impacts (especially in his later works), and Asimov tends to focus more on
technology and ideas, with more two-dimensional characterization.

There's also the straight-out fantasy / rollicking space-cowboy genres.

------
waterlesscloud
"And there, over in a corner, is Bruce Sterling, blazing a lonely pioneering
trail into the future. [...] He's currently about ten years ahead of the
curve. "

Some time in the 90s, I saw Sterling at a sci fi convention. He was doing a
Q&A session in some small hotel conference room. As he was answering
questions, he did so with a sadness that hit me hard with one thought.

Up until that time, I'd thought it would be cool to always be the smartest
person in the room. But watching him answer questions that obviously sparked
no imagination in him, I suddenly thought, "My god, how truly _terrible_ it
would be to always be the smartest person in the room." I suddenly felt very
sorry for him.

Who knows what he was really thinking or how he actually felt, but it was a
revelation for me in any case.

~~~
ChuckMcM
Not an uncommon reaction, same holds for lots of stuff like celebrity, wealth,
and beauty. Being modestly above average can be so much better for many
things. Maybe one but rarely two standard deviations to the right.

------
javajosh
The real problem Stross _almost_ confronts is that the world doesn't react to
scientific and technological change the way SF writers (and readers) want it
to. There are a couple of choice quotes, but the best one (because it contains
the seed of the answer):

 _> "We're living in the frickin' 21st century. Killer robot drones are
assassinating people in the hills of Afghanistan. Our civilisation has been
invaded and conquered by the hive intelligences of multinational corporations,
directed by the new aristocracy of the 0.1%..."_

He's right, all of that is very sci-fi and it's really happening. (And
personally I think it goes deeper: agriculture changed the world far more than
the iPad, contraception changed the world far more than Facebook or a Saturn
V...). But the thing that he implies but doesn't mention is that the _world
isn't reacting in the way he wants to technological innovation_. Any one of
those things could have been tropes in an SF story, and the author might have
asserted that "the fate of the world" depends on preventing technology from
falling into the wrong hands...but real life shows that the world is actually
pretty resistent to super villains, incompetence and rogue tech.

The Enlightenment values are still alive and well, we just have a lot more
experimental data and we have to work a lot harder to come up with innovations
that both fit current data and inspire the next generation of thinkers,
makers, and doers.

One way to make such a solution easier is to forget about humanity as a whole,
and focus on a narrower partition of people and inspire _them_. I'm not sure
what a good partition is, but thats because I'm not a very good author.

Another, harder solution (which Stross shows his skill at with the above
quote) is to describe reality in a particularly evocative way. "Hive
intelligences of multinational corporations" taking over our society is a
rather more evocative (and dramatic) then gets talked about in the press.

------
stcredzero
I think one of the implications of ebooks and digital publishing, is that Sci-
Fi can afford to greatly decrease its engineering safety-margins. How about
more risk taking in the speculation department? Instead of cosmically huge
ideas in the far-flung future, how about merely big (but society-changing)
ideas in the near future or sideways into an alternate present? (Neal
Stephenson's steel launch tower?)

A book never had to stand the test of all-time to be respected and to be
profitable, but there are authors who wrote with a goal like this in mind. The
price of publishing is going down, and electronic media give us more
flexibility and reduced risk with smaller chunks of text combined with rapid
feedback from audiences. So how about more frequent writing with more risk
taking speculating with greater specificity on the nearer-term future? The
cost of getting it wrong isn't so high anymore, and even the best authors do
so anyhow.

~~~
pavel_lishin
> how about merely big (but society-changing) ideas in the near future

Isn't that the definition of a techno-thriller? You don't need e-books to be
relatively successful in that. You don't even have to go the quasi-military
route of Tom Clancy - how about Daemon and Freedom(tm) by Daniel Suarez, or
Crichton's Next?

~~~
stcredzero
_Isn't that the definition of a techno-thriller?_

Yes, but maybe create a sub-genre of techno-thriller that emphasizes big ideas
and speculation about big societal changes?

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jack-r-abbit
Darn it... SF = Science Fiction in this article... not San Francisco. :(
Moving on...

~~~
pavel_lishin
Ack, edited the title, didn't think about the intended audience :/

------
Tobu
Didn't our estimated writer predict the death of genre to e-book marketplaces
anyway? I've _loved_ his work in the Merchant Princes series
(Fantasy/SF/Economics/Steampunk), but also his take on the difficult and
rewarding exercise of making stories in a near-future society of
interconnected and realistic predictions (hard sf/futurism/sociology, Halting
State and Rule 34). If I can enjoy an author despite apparent genre
schizophrenia, I'll probably continue to enjoy SF even if no consensus is
built to address future shock.

However, he has a point that there is a risk that the aesthetic of SF is being
co-opted by what are essentially fantasy works which don't really engage with
science, technology, the present, or the big what-ifs. I hope the good stuff
of SF can survive that.

~~~
Tobu
*esteemed, dammit

------
moldbug
Stross answers his own question - he just doesn't want to go there. _Turn your
back on the Enlightenment's ideological values._ Until the 21st century can
accomplish this, it'll stay a tired, stale clone of the 20th.

SF and even fantasy are existentially dependent on plausibility. The more
rules you break, the more you have to obey the ones you don't break. How can
anyone find Enlightenment values plausible in 2012? What Enlightenment
experiment hasn't been tried? Which one succeeded?

There's a lovely bit of counterreality in one of the original Gibson novels -
_Count Zero_ I think - in which US housing projects (UK: "council housing")
have become dynamic centers of green innovation, with windmills on the roof
and everything. Could you believe this in 1983? Just barely. From 2010, the
reality:

[http://secondcitycop.blogspot.com/2010/10/end-of-cabrini-
gre...](http://secondcitycop.blogspot.com/2010/10/end-of-cabrini-green.html)

Don't miss the arguments (between cops!) about whether or not it was safe to
take the elevators. What do your Enlightenment values have to say about that?

The next century (or two) will be about figuring out how to either (a) change
human beings into something else, or (b) reconcile technical change with the
grim, unspeakable reality of the human condition. That's a condition human
beings understood much better _before_ the Enlightenment. You certainly won't
find any Cabrini-Greens in, say, Louis XIV's France...

~~~
ChuckMcM
I think Stross misses the ability to draw inspiration from 'good' stuff
happening. I've challenged my SF writing friends on occasion to start with
some change that really flips the bit. Two interesting starting points are;

Unlimited energy - Lets say Fusion or something like it finally comes around
and now using a couple of hundred _mega_ watts for a an individual a month
isn't out of the ordinary. How does that change things? Imagine that you can
install giant chillers in the ocean and regulate its temperature regardless of
surface air temperature.

Unlimited Biology - lets say we actually figure out how cells work, right down
to every single chemical, its role, its action, its reaction. We gain the
ability to arbitrarily rewrite every cell in our bodies, ok so perfect health
for everyone, no more 'genetic disease', no more 'aging'. What is the world
like in that scenario? Do we stay human formed? Do we keep our emotions?
Things that we evolved for use as cave people, do they still serve us? Fight
or flight instinct?

Its 'easier' in some ways to start from 'now' and delete things and write
about their loss than to add new things. Its the latter stuff we don't see as
much in SF.

~~~
stcredzero
_I think Stross misses the ability to draw inspiration from 'good' stuff
happening. I've challenged my SF writing friends on occasion to start with
some change that really flips the bit. Two interesting starting points are;_

    
    
        - Unlimited energy
        - Unlimited Biology
    

These both have big potentials for bad thing happening as well. I think
Unlimited Biology has already been done a lot, however. I think it's so prone
to weirdness that it tends toward dystopian visions. Also, a lot of this
territory was covered in the 20th century.

Perhaps there's inspiration to be drawn from good stuff happening despite the
tremendous potential for bad?

~~~
pjscott
If you have nigh-unlimited energy -- and crazy people do too -- then planets
become remarkably big targets. And space habitats become a practical
alternative. That could be an interesting setting, and remarkably non-
dystopian.

~~~
stcredzero
What do you mean by "nigh-unlimited?" Even if you have a store of energy that
doesn't run out, thermodynamics will bite you if you try to use too much of it
at once.

 _planets become remarkably big targets._

Even 1970's tech has access to huge amounts of energy for targeting planets
from space, if all you want to do is to destroy stuff.

 _And space habitats become a practical alternative. That could be an
interesting setting, and remarkably non-dystopian_

"Burning Man in the Oort Cloud" has been done. There's still a lot of
potential there, though.

------
goggles99
The big idea space has become somewhat saturated. It is as simple as that.
When this happens, all "Big Ideas" are only variations or combinations of
previous ones. The rate will continue to slow until science opens a new
frontier. After all, Science Fiction inspires science, and science inspires
Science Fiction, It is sciences' turn.

------
iRobot
God this guys got a downer on all things scifi.

Get a life, sci-fi is just entertainment and a little escapeisn, not everyone
wants to read through 500 pages of math and physics to find some underlying
revelation about the universe.

~~~
stcredzero
"This guy" is one of the best Sci-Fi authors currently writing.

~~~
waterlesscloud
Which doesn't change the fact that his blogging is incurably pessimistic.

~~~
olefoo
Pessimistic? I don't think so, he's facing the problems full on; asking hard
searching questions about his chosen field and working for new insight.

That is not a pessimist, that is someone who has faith that he can find a
solution; even if it is not obvious to him at this time.

