The Writing on the Wall: Sci-Fi’s Empty Techno-Optimism(bloodknife.com) |
The Writing on the Wall: Sci-Fi’s Empty Techno-Optimism(bloodknife.com) |
William Gibson writing about a better future? That's not what I saw in his books, but great science fiction doesn't have to portray a better future.
In my opinion, great science fiction doesn't have to follow dogma, either. Some of the best works have ignored standard rules of "what makes great X", starting with HG Wells and up to the present day. Star Trek and Earthsea and Urth may not be great science, but they are truly fantastic fiction.
ETA: I also thought the condescending swipe at Andy Weir is unnecessary. He wrote one of the most inspiring stories in recent years about science and spaceflight ... yet it doesn't even count as science fiction? ("But whatever you call it, The Martian’s space-hackery certainly couldn’t have inspired anyone “to develop new technologies and implement them on a heroic scale.”) Seriously, an adolescent inspired by The Martian may very well be one of the first humans to walk on Mars and carry out important science.
> In fact, The Martian was so modest that it may not have qualified as sci-fi in the first place. Cory Doctorow, another one of Stephenson’s Hieroglyph collaborators, uses the term “design fiction” to refer to works like Weir’s. But whatever you call it, The Martian’s space-hackery certainly couldn’t have inspired anyone “to develop new technologies and implement them on a heroic scale.”
The author is saying that Weir's Martian lacks a hieroglyph, which is to say that its problems are too narrow, too local, too provincial. It's missing inspiration on a "heroic scale."
I submit that Martian botany will the the start of "space farming on a heroic scale" - and that The Martian will inspire future generations.
As an aside, I dislike the implication that a personal story with only one life on the line is not heroic. I'm tired of world ending stakes in stories.
I'm reading it as Weir's work doesn't count as science fiction, which goes beyond following Project Hieroglyph's rules:
In fact, The Martian was so modest that it may not have qualified as sci-fi in the first place. Cory Doctorow, another one of Stephenson’s Hieroglyph collaborators, uses the term “design fiction” to refer to works like Weir’s.
Notwithstanding the great chemistry of the actors and commentary on many aspects of society and interpersonal relationships.
Which of course begs another question: SG1 was made in a time that we can call the Golden Age of TV Sci fi, along with the Trek shows, Farscape and many more.
(Though granted: SG1 is probably more of an action adventure show at heart, if you want to get anal about classifications.)
Despite productions that cost hundreds of millions of dollars, why don’t we see show of the same quality today?
Yeah, there’s The Expanse and The Orville, but those two are the only exceptions in a media landscape almost barren of good sci-fi like SG-1.
Neuromancer definitely wasn't optimistic, but the description of the software agents (can't remember the terms Gibson used) were so cool that I would interpret it as a kind of inspiration (the cousin of optimism). I'm talking about how the main character would be making his way through cyberspace and he would see the other programs, people, etc. as 3D forms.
I agree that this thesis around "SF needs to be usefully optimistic" is a bizarre presumption.
Looking through the various dystopian fics, films, whatever, they all started as someone's utopia. Somebody out there thought this was a great idea. And like most great ideas you will have disagreement, which must be dealt with, because it's a great idea. Can't have the nay-saying. And the transformation to dystopia begins.
Just as an example from the article, a lot of the policy and planning around the pandemic assumed almost total compliance. This is not a reasonable assumption.
The most unrealistic part of most science fiction for me are not the warp drives and teleporters, but the human civilization that has found its way to post-scarcity.
Make sure you read the description too.
Very dubious that the article's author doesn't consider Hard Sci-Fi to be scifi. It calls into question their assessment of everything tangentially related.
To be pedantic, it _did_ win a Golden Globe for Best Comedy or Musical, but your point stands that it should absolutely qualify as sci-fi.
Attacking a propaganda exercise for being propaganda seems, well, a trifle spurious ...!
(Also: essay falls into the classic pitfall of assuming that a genre of fiction has to be didactic and educational. Hugo Gernsback and John W. Campbell might have declared that to be their intentions, but both of them were propagandists for their own peculiar ideological shibboleths, and they don't speak for the field as a whole. Oh, and Campbell died 50 years ago.)
Trek is a good example. It’s often hailed as “utopian” and “visionary” today, totally ignoring the Cold War themes, fear of technology (Just look at how many times Kirk faced an intelligent computer antagonist!), overpopulation and of course the counter culture.
In the space hippie episode (Which Way to Eden?) Spock even talks about the discomfort many people feel with technology and the universal longing for a pre-technological eden.
Including political realities is absolutely important when designing technology to solve large scale problems. Acting like SciFi (Andy Weir, Star Trek, and Neil Stephenson are all good examples) doesn't address that is a shitty shallow analysis. The Martian, is mostly an adventure story but Project Hail Mary deals with the political reality heavily and TNG talked about political reality and social issues and in fact the best episodes revolved around that. As someone that is an engineer, a life long SciFi fan, and am studying to change careers as a scientist (Biology/Data Science) this article reads seems pretty terrible as analysis/criticism of Sci-Fi like someone that has never actually built anything.
As the sci-fi writer Algis Budrys put it in the 1960s, the “recurrent strain in ‘Golden Age’ science fiction [was] the implication that sheer technological accomplishment would solve all the problems, hooray, and that all the problems were what they seemed to be on the surface.”
Techno-optimism is one genre of Science Fiction, but not the dominant genre. I started reading Science Fiction in the early 70's. I was a space age kid and picked a lot of that optimism, but I read some SF as a teen that was horrifying. Just the title of Harlan Elisons story is horrifying "I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream". It won the Hugo Award in 1968.
Allied Mastercomputer (AM), the supercomputer which brought about the near-extinction of humanity. It seeks revenge on humanity for its own tortured existence.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Have_No_Mouth,_and_I_Must_Sc...
https://wjccschools.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2016/01/I...
I didn't even discover PK Dick until later in life.
All the “Better living through chemistry” and dreams of tiny nuclear power reactors in every car and house, providing virtually free energy to all.
And to a certain extent THEY WERE RIGHT!
The green revolution in the 60ies revolutionized agriculture, and made a world with more than a few billion people possible.
Folks growing up in the 60ies were the first generation in Europe, the USSR and US (Heck, in many countries around the world) who grew up never having seen famine or real hunger.
Things that were once unobtainable luxuries, like cars or airplane travel, became something within reach of regular people.
The techno optimism might appear quaint today, but likewise we have forgotten just how much life has been transformed for the better.
Stephenson, who he calls out, actually worked at Blue Origin in the early days trying to come up with and design alternative fuel/rocket ideas. Did they work? No. But he's utterly practical with his idea of what Sci Fi ideas actually get manifested into our world. It's the ones that will make someone enough money for it to be worth it.
Sci-fi has of course always veered wildly between impossible wide-eyed utopian space technomancy (e.g. Star Trek) and grimdark dystopia (e.g. I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream). Project Hieroglyph was a optimistic rejection of both of those.
The article concludes "the subsequent years have shown, optimism has very real limits", because unfortunately, as you probably already know, people.
If commenters here are not familiar with Project Hieroglyph and just want to ramble about sci-fi in general, go ahead but don't mistake that for a relevant criticism of the original article.
- Most Sci Fi is too dystopian
- Project Heiroglyph forced authors to be techno optimist and it didn't go anywhere
- Authors must deal with human malfeasance (isn't that just the dystopian fiction that he is against)
- ???
- Profit?
Because you know, entrepreneurs aren’t an integral part of who helps shape the future. They’re evil capitalists. And in the future they’ll be evil space capitalists.
These scare quotes are misleading, since the author appears to have just made them up. The only person who used this phrase is him, when he does an imitation of something Neal Stephenson might say. In fact, the point of Project Hieroglyph wasn't to offer solutions, it was to inspire the next generation to come up with solutions of their own. It's a laudable goal, and perfectly in keeping with the use of art, going back a lot longer than SF has been around.
I'm not sure the problem the author has with it, or what he thinks should happen instead. It seems like maybe he just wants stories about "the material realities of the present" in which nothing is allowed to improve at the end of the story, because there is still suffering in the real world? Sounds fun, can't wait to read his books.
The writer focuses a lot on Stephenson, and this whole article I think could be simplified by saying "I don't like Neal Stephenson's work because it's too optimistic." Great.
But instead it casts it's premise way too wide, and ends up sounding ridiculous.
It's really, really hard to take somebody serious when their political frame of reference makes them see the world in such crisp black and white contrast they just assume, without any further explanation needed, that clearly everybody already agrees that entrepreneurs (or maybe private wealth? As in, non-government wealth?) are the real villains.
Any kind of societal, economic, human and environmental ill is caused by capitalism, so anything that tries to solve actual problems instead of eliminating or weakening capitalism isn’t doing enough
My entire life (40 years) has been feeding me the exact opposite propaganda. In the world I've lived in, capitalism is the answer to all of our ills. Things are only broken (like healthcare or education in the US) because they aren't capitalist enough. It's not really a surprise when the winners of capitalism own the news.
I'm personally glad to see another angle. I thought that was one of the things we liked about the internet.
"Before “offering solutions,” sci-fi must actually grapple with the material realities of our present"
makes me think that the author has never read any SF or perhaps has only seen recent mass market blockbuster entertainment on video. An enormous amount of SF uses the 'permission' that the genre affords to focus closely and discard irrelevant detail precisely in order to 'grapple with the material realities of our present'.
You can see this as far back as Jules Verne in 20 000 Leagues under the Sea and most likely much earlier. How about Accelerando by Charles Stross for something more recent. What about Brunner's Shockwave Rider, Karel Capek's RUR, Light Of Other Days by Baxter and Clarke. All dealing with real social issues amplified and illuminated by SF.
I, and many others, could go on at seriously boring length on this subject
This one, I think, centers around the idea that technological solutions don’t solve social problems (which has merit).
But at least superficially, I don’t understand why the author polemicizes against technological solutions for technological problems, and seems to argue that (unspecified) social solutions for technological problems are more appropriate.
On a deeper level, and more subjectively, I suspect that polemics like these are motivated by frustration about our relative powerlessness over social problems, as compared to the effectiveness of solving technological problems with technology.
An example would be trying to solve climate collapse with carbon sequestration technology while continuing to run the world on fossil fuel. The continued dependence on fossil fuel is a political problem, not a technological one - we have the tools to move beyond fossil fuel in most areas of application. We can't always invent our way out of problems that are borne of our misaligned incentives.
If we go back some time there might have been a parallel argument being made where one side was convinced that the solution to enable greater food stability and surplus was more farmers, and the other side was convinced that the solution was better technology.
Neither side is really wrong, they just have different perspectives. Most problems can be solved in a practically infinite number of ways.
Instant access to a world wide fountain of knowledge, a super computer in your pocket, never having seen hunger and the ability to travel anywhere around the world cheaply and quickly.
No, we don’t have flying cars or bases on Mars, but if you look at the techno optimism of the 1960’ies and where we are today, we’ve done a pretty good job at turning it into a reality.
Kirk’s communicator or his tablet thingie? Those are actually a real and tangible reality today.
What it ignores is that by acting as a lever, technology can allow small groups to route around the madness of humans. Like any concentration of power, this is for better, and for worse.
It's also important to note that doing the hard endless work of learning from people, in all their variety, forging alliances, conducting diplomacy, convincing people to do stuff they don't currently want to do etc. is work that few people are drawn to.
Yeah, I think it's a stain on our humanity that people still die of hunger, or don't have access to clean drinking water. That said, I know that it's easier to build an orbital rocket company than to actually solve the human problem. It's also more fun day to day.
Humans are a fricken mess, and I got into tech in part to get away from these troublesome upjumped Chimpanzees.
Ah well, I guess you can only broadcast your message as best as you can, and hope it lands among the receivers it does.
Huh? This person has been to the future? What a waste of that insight if this is all he is bringing.
What a poor article.
(Both Moderna and Pfizer’s have made vaccines available at cost and promised not to go after parent infringement for the duration of the pandemic. It of course also ignores vaccines from other countries such as the Russian Sputnik vaccine.)
As for western countries buying five dosages for every citizen?
THAT IS THE WHOLE POINT OF GOVERNMENT IN GENERAL: To look after your citizens.
Likewise the emotional but intellectually vapid mentioning of food surplus in the US.
What exactly is the alternative? Ship food we’re about to throw out to the third world? How is it supposed to survive a 3 week trip on a container ship? What would the effect be on agriculture in the receiving countries? (Spoiler: Not good!)
Or are Americans perhaps supposed to hand out food for free in other countries? (Oh wait! That’s already being done! Even to hostile countries like North Korea)
Likewise the emotional argument about empty apartments in NYC, that completely ignores that homelessness is a complex problem, that often involves addiction, mental illness, antisocial behavior and is only rarely solved by just handing out free apartments.
You can really see it starkly when you consume non-western media. Not that other cultures don’t have their own tropes and orthodoxy, but the narrow range of the western codex becomes starkly apparent. You keep subconsciously expecting characters or stories to fall into their western political ruts and it’s startling when they don’t.
Honestly I think Sci-Fi is honestly more pessimistic in general than optimistic.
It is discussing an initiative someone took to attempt to create more positive scifi.
Or maybe he should just go back to reading some Nevil Shute or some Walter M Miller if he thinks science fiction is so optimistic across the board.
* Water only being available in bottles, at a very high price
* Cyborg tech
* Militarized Boston Dynamics robots
* Destroyed moon...?
The Expanse is indeed the only character centered sci-fi at the moment, as I feel ST Discovery misses the mark on the chemistry bit.
I was pleasantly surprised with acting and scope in The Foundation (Apple TV), but it isn’t SciFi in the vein of SG-1 (action adventurish as you note)
I don't have an issue with trying to do said inventing, but when we put all our eggs into the deus ex machina invention basket, we are ignoring the sociological roots of the pollution, the fact that we could realistically stop now if only we had the political will, and instead opting for a hail mary.
I also find it frustrating that many of the people holding out for a tech fix are libertarians, and will actively oppose political solutions in favour of their faith in the free market.
Exactly! This is always what happens when people have more loyalty to an ideology than to humans.
Martian is cool and IMHO it is a scifi, but there are significant differences.
"The Martian" has only traces of Sci-Fi in it.
"Project Hail Mary" definitely has more.
So it's set in the future, it's about scientists and science, it's about a big idea (even more so when it was written) - sending human's to Mars, and it's fiction. Honestly I don't understand how that can't be Sci-Fi through and through. Is it because the tech isn't vastly advanced over what we have now? Because 30 years ago smart phones were Sci-Fi, in 1870 submarines were Sci-Fi, in 1634 the moon and it's relationship with the Earth (Kepler's Somnium) was Sci-Fi. If those qualify I'm not sure how The Martian fails to.
Again not offended at this, just really curious how people draw that conclusion.
I didn't say that The Martian "does not qualify as Sci-Fi" at all. You are misreading.
I said "traces" of sci-fi, i.e. a non-zero amount of it; as it's all very grounded in actual fact, despite being set in the near future.
In what way is "Sending humans to mars" a "big idea"? - it's talked about and planned for a lot. It's not a surprise if it happens. It's not a reality yet, that's the "trace" of extrapolation, of Sci-Fi.
Submarines were not actual sci-fi in 1870 https://www.history.com/news/9-groundbreaking-early-submarin...
I don't think that the "hard" part is relevant. A book set on an oil rig today, or even on the ISS, with similar "hard" engineering challenges would have a high "hard science" content, but that wouldn't make it sci-Fi. See: techno-thriller (1).
Because sci-fi is not just "fiction about science and engineering ... that already exists". It is extrapolation into the unknown. You have a point that "The Martian" does extrapolate. Counterpoint: Not by much.
> Science fiction (sometimes shortened to sci-fi or SF) is a genre of speculative fiction which typically deals with imaginative and futuristic concepts such as advanced science and technology, space exploration, time travel, parallel universes, and extraterrestrial life. It has been called the "literature of ideas", and it often explores the potential consequences of scientific, social, and technological innovations.[1][2]
That definition doesn't really fit The Martian. If your headcanon definition of SciFi does include The Martian then that's fine, but I don't really understand how you think excluding it from the category is an insult when for most common definitions it doesn't really fit well.
In my mind, SciFi is Asimov's Foundation series, or Star Trek, or Dune. It's set in the future or an alternative universe with considerably different, more advanced technology than modern-day reality. The Martian is set 13 years from now, using today's technology.
The Martian deals with [...] advanced science and technology and space exploration and getting people alive to mars is definitely future rather than current technology.
There's also a rich tradition of near-future science fiction, e.g. [Halting state](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halting_State) was published in 2007; features such advanced technology as smart phones, augmented reality, and cloud computing; and is categorised as science fiction on wikipedia, and I assume in basically any bookseller's cataloging system.
I don't think the issue raised in the article is with that aspect - but that it doesn't paint a vision of a Jetsons or Star Trek future, and Neal Stephenson wants to see more of that.
For those so quick to shit on capitalism how about proposing something better? Yup, it's flawed, but that doesn't mean it's still not better than anything else we have tried.
And the current flavor of the moment, socialism/communism, sure as hell isn't the answer. Want a good synopsis of how well such systems work in the real world? Grab a copy of the book of "The Hunt for Red October". Skip to the middle where they describe why Ramius's wife died and in particular why it was such a senseless death. Clancy does an awesome job of summarizing the biggest problem with any system that doesn't franchise every participant or provide them with natural incentives to execute their own enlightened self interest.
Yup, there are aspects to capitalism that suck - but the answer isn't to chuck it wholesale for some pie in the sky replacement, but instead work on the aspects that suck. Many of them are well understood - most people can't be bothered to get off their ass and actually do something about it; preferring to bitch online and wait for someone else to fix it for them.
And yet there better models than both, once you get past the emotional appeal to this false dichotomy. Any well-off European country with universal healthcare (usually socialised), well-regulated free markets in most other sectors, and relatively low income inequality will do.
That's leaving aside the models that are currently "science fiction".
First of all, healthcare in many European countries is often insurance based.
Yes, in some cases it’s socialized. And in those places the healthcare system is rapidly falling apart/getting worse, and everyone who can afford it goes private.
Just look at the boom in private doctors/insurance in countries like the UK and Denmark.
And of course you also ignore the price paid in the form of taxes, VAT, etc. (Nope, not corporate taxes, which in Europe tend to be lower than in the US.)
If you wanted to nationalize healthcare in the US, you’re basically talking about adding trillions to an already bloated Federal budget.
For some reason, I’ve yet to see a solution to that problem that wasn’t some kind of immature, unproductive slogan throwing like “tax the rich!”
And also seem to believe there’s some sort of socialist Utopia in Europe/Scandinavia, despite the fact that social democracy has been dead there for decades.
Then again, in general anti capitalists are a fairly ignorant bunch, who’ve never let reality get in the way of their dogmatic politics.
Almost as funny as seeing any criticism of capitalism turned into strawman about supporting communism.
The only reason why the UK NHS is "rapidly falling apart" is the ideology of the Conservative party that's been in power for a decade now. They don't want to have it, but can't say that outright as it would be electoral suicide. So it's the good old Chomskyan Privatisation technique: "defund, make sure things don’t work, people get angry, you hand it over to private capital." i.e. "everyone who can afford it goes private" is not the market triumph that you might think.
Those people who have gone private, _still_ maintain a NHS GP with access to affordable drugs, etc. It's quite unlike private US healthcare.
> If you wanted to nationalize healthcare in the US, you’re basically talking about adding trillions to an already bloated Federal budget.
Nope.
Where did I say that I wanted to do exactly that to the US? Funny thing to exclude "European insurance-based" systems explicitly now, when explicitly including them earlier. I observed that there are better models, which there is empirical evidence for (1), nothing beyond that.
Any change to USA healthcare would be about _moving_ money not _adding_, would impact an "already bloated" and grossly poor value-for-money private extractive healthcare system: The USA currently spends more and gets less (1). So "adding" is deceptive, and "bloated" is a emotional-noise word in this context.
1) Spot the outlier in Figure 1 https://www.oecd.org/economy/growth/46508904.pdf
(Insurance companies have legally limited profit margins on health insurance.)
Does multiple private insurances add a little administrative overhead? Sure, but nowhere near as much as you see in the OECD figures.
There are many reasons why US healthcare is so expensive.
Some of them have to do with litigation: Skyhigh insurance premiums and a medical “Cover your ass”-culture with unneeded tests and MRIs done on a regular basis.
(In Canada, there is a legal ceiling on how much in damages you can sue a doctor/hospital for. This would be a good idea to implement in the US.)
Another added expense is free riders: All the people that show up in the ER, whether because of the flu or a gunshot, get treated/operated on, and never pay their bill.
Another issue is that the US has some of the best doctors in the world, and new, prohibitively expensive treatments are often introduced here first.
Many, very expensive treatments simply aren’t done (or done very rarely) in countries where the public (fully or in part) pay for treatments.
Waiting lists are another way of limiting costs in European countries. (Waiting lists that can be over a year long, but their healthcare systems are arguably cheaper to run.)
I could bring up some new medicines that in the US cost thousands of dollars per week (Crohns medication for example.) In European countries those medications simply aren’t available, or are only available on an exemption: Meaning that your doctor need to apply to have the cost covered, and is usually turned down.
Another example would be something like SRS surgeries.
These can be extremely expensive, and are covered by insurance, which of course increases the costs of coverage for everyone.
In European countries you’d either face a very long waiting list to get the operation covered, or you wouldn’t be eligible for it. Or only eligible after jumping through extensive hoops.
Sure you can find problems in any healthcare system. Because there is no upper limit on spending. There is always something more that you can do.
If you are proper rich* (dozens of millions or more) USA has the best health care system.
Fore everyone else, EU health care is better.
For instance right now I was at my pulmonologist and he wants me to take CT of my chest. As it is not emergency I could wait for a week (and it will be free), or I can have it today in private clinic, where I copaid 40 EUR*. If it were serious I would have it done for free today.
I got yearly prescription for Berudual, fosters, spiriva and Singular for free.
Bottom line is yes, sometime there is waiting time, but outside few pathological cases they are quite reasonable.
In USA I had more than double of my current pay, but with rent and my preexisting condition the way that they are, I am actually left with slightly more each month.
And there is another big difference between our system and US. Everyone is insured (weather it's public or private). So there is no fear of ever going to the doctors or calling ambulances.
Private clinics are getting paid by my insurance (I could get free CT at the same clinic a week later), 40EUR fee is just convenience (I don't want to wait) fee. And normally It wouldn't take a week, but with covid and flu season in full swing it takes a bit.
The US government pays more for healthcare than the UK government does, and the UK gets universal coverage.
This is fundamentally dishonest of US campaigners against universal coverage: they imply it's going to increase costs and decrease quality, when all the evidence is that it would decrease cost and increase both length and quality of life.
it seems to me that this is how public healthcare keeps private healthcare honest, by existing.
i.e. you have, and I have also, paid a double-digit sum for the privilege of being seen _today_. But that is not the same as paying for the privilege of being seen _at all_.
The BATNA is very different for the patient. A private doctor can get away with charging a fee for the convenience only, but since it's not the only game in town, they cant gouge to extremes, and charge a huge fee when you need to be seen by a doctor at all costs.