Science Fiction, big ideas, ideology: what is to be done?

http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2012/05/sf-big-ideas-ideology-what-is-.html

by pavel_lishin • 14 years ago

45 41 14 years ago

antipope.org

jack-r-abbit• 14 years ago

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

pavel_lishin2• 14 years ago

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

Jun8• 14 years ago

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• 14 years ago

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.

DanielBMarkham• 14 years ago

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.

pjscott2• 14 years ago

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.

goggles99• 14 years ago

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.

Tobu2• 14 years ago

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.

Tobu2• 14 years ago

*esteemed, dammit

stcredzero11• 14 years ago

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_lishin2• 14 years ago

> 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?

stcredzero11• 14 years ago

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?

moldbug6• 14 years ago

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...

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...

stcredzero11• 14 years ago

Turn your back on the Enlightenment's ideological values.

I think that would make for some interesting stories. I could imagine the adventures of, say, a Bayesian Conspiracy surrounded by a burgeoning idiocracy that was largely sexting in class while the Enlightenment was being covered in history. (So it's not so much that society turns their back, they just don't get it in the first place.) This would be kind of an update of Larry Niven's Fallen Angels.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fallen_Angels_(science_fiction_...

You certainly won't find any Cabrini-Greens in, say, Louis XIV's France...

Are you really claiming that slums entirely arose in the 3 to 4 generations prior to the revolution? Was there a huge pre-industrial revolution shift of population from rural to urban accompanied by huge sovereign debt? (This could be, I just don't remember enough about demographics.)

I would point out that he presided over a country where slavery was legal. (Though in his attempt at reform, he mandated that only Roman Catholics could own them and that slaves should be baptized.)

moldbug6• 14 years ago

Concentration camps and gulags excluded, I don't think there has ever been a human society - anywhen, anywhere - as degraded as the 20th-century tower block/project, a pure product of Enlightenment thought.

It's useful to go back and compare apples to apples when we compare the 19th-century "slum" to the 20th-century slum. You can read Robert Roberts on the Edwardian slum, for instance - a world which he grew up in:

http://www.julielorenzen.net/slum.html

Roberts: However, approximately sixty years after Engels wrote his book, Roberts described the working class as almost being obsessed with cleanliness. A dirty home or even a front step meant lower social status. Roberts wrote “Most people kept what they possessed clean in spite of squalor and ever-invading dirt. Some houses sparkled.”

Or read Riis' How The Other Half Lives:

http://archive.org/details/howotherhalfliv00riisgoog

You can even find an unbiased view of Southern slavery (admittedly milder than Louis XIV's Caribbean version):

http://books.google.com/books/about/A_south_side_view_of_sla...

You won't find anything like:

It never ceased to amaze me how the people could live like that~dirty diapers & sanitary napkins in the hallways, urine & feces everywhere, cockroaches scurrying from one apartment to the other and when you had the unfortunate luck of answering a call on the 11th floor of one of these hell-holes was horrifying! Just going in to see the "moving walls" and the chicken bones on the floor, the stove on for heat even though it was already 140 degrees in there and the stained couches & dirty mattresses on the floor where at least three or four little kids were napping with the roaches! Good times...

Lack of nice material things is one thing. Even in Cabrini-Green they had PlayStations. Louis XIV didn't have no PlayStation. Human degradation is another - and Enlightenment experiments hold the prize. (Especially if you count the "Soviet experiment" to its credit.)

ChuckMcM4• 14 years ago

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 megawatts 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.

stcredzero11• 14 years ago

    - 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?

uvdiv2• 14 years ago

"Unlimited energy - Lets say Fusion or something like it finally comes around and now using a couple of hundred megawatts 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."

This is the wrong question. Energy isn't limited any more than any other industrial product; the cheaper it is to manufacturer physical things, the cheaper it is to harness energy (and the cheaper it becomes). And conversely, in most uses of energy, you have a lot more "work" to do assembling whatever it is that uses the energy, than whatever harnesses it. It's really a problem of industry itself; and the more efficient that gets (in a fully-automated, AI-controlled industry -- many orders of magnitude), the more available it becomes. To get abundant energy you need industrial wealth (and vice versa); energy isn't an isolated problem and isn't the important one.

And on this note, there's practically no magic in fusion power. They can't drastically undercut "primitive" fission reactors, because much their infrastruture would be identical (heat exchangers, steam generators, power generation, the power grid...) Add up the costs of modern power, and fusion also carries most of them. It's like a "factor-of-two" miracle in the most optimistic fantasy -- not an order-of-magnitude, not earth-shattering magic. (Less optimistically, I don't see how anything like tokamaks or laser ICF machines can be anything but more complicated and costly than conventional power, and I haven't see any physically-sound alternatives.)

Sure, the fuel is "cheap and abundant" (if you fantasize D+D fusion becoming technically viable -- it's not so if you try the far-easier D+T using lithium-bred tritium) -- but that's exactly the wrong solution, because again, the costs are all elsewhere, on the physically-building-things part of the equation.

Heat rejection can be very serious. The current world looks like ~10^13 watts direct, anthropogenic heating (basically "energy use"), compared to a radiative forcing of ~10^15 W of anthropogenic global warming (closest figure of merit I believe) and ~10^17 W total terrestrial irradiation. (N.B. the greenhouse effect is a pretty huge "amplifier" of anthropogenic heating -- burning a ton of coal yields a certain amount of heat directly, but some 5 orders of magnitude more heat indirectly through AGW (if you integrate over the 10^3-10^4 year atmospheric residence time... don't quote me on this, I'm unsure)). Greenhouse heating is solvable, but at a couple orders of magnitude higher power consumption (say 10^15 W -- 100x present, think 10^10 people at 100 kW(th)), anthropogenic heating becomes a comparable climate issue. Approaching 10^17 W (think 10^10 @ 10 MW, if it goes there) you need geoengineering -- blocking parts of the sun (cliche), or increasing the emissivity of large swaths of the surface.

Beyond 10^17 watts you can't keep the earth anything like its natural state: even you completely block out the sun, you more than make up for it with the heat you generate on earth. The only way to dissipate heat from the earth ultimately is into space (forget ocean chillers at this point!), and the only way to do that is the way it's being done now -- radiatively. (Modulo material properties, emissivity/abosprtivity) the power you can dissipate per area goes as he 4th power of temperature (T^4) in absolute units (rel. absolute zero). So there's exactly two options: one, to drastically increase the surface area, which will look like "moving into space" -- creating a habitable world far larger in aggregate surface area than the earth (though not in mass). The other is fairly dystopian, to heat up the earth's surface beyond the habitable point -- e.g. moving into refrigerated underground cities (this is thermodynamically sound). With this insanity you could dissipate 10^22 W with a solid-carbon surface around 4000 Kelvin -- about 50,000x the current solar budget or 10 million times the current anthropogenic budget. Maybe you could still run computers at this temperature.

Anyway, 10^8 watts per capita => 10^18+ watts is no longer an "earth" solution -- you either push it off-earth, or alter the earth beyond recongition to solve heat dissipation.

(I'm actually not imaginative enough to figure out how to spend 10^8 watts. That's the order of the (average) power of launching a space shuttle once per day -- and you could probably fit a hundred people in something on that size, 1 MW per person. Even rocket-powered spaceplanes at Mach 20 aren't that costly...)

waterlesscloud2• 14 years ago

"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.

ChuckMcM4• 14 years ago

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.

iRobot• 14 years ago

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.

stcredzero11• 14 years ago

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

waterlesscloud2• 14 years ago

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

jcmhn• 14 years ago

I find his work unreadable, but I suppose that is a minority opinion among SF fans.

javajosh• 14 years ago

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.

Science Fiction, big ideas, ideology: what is to be done?

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