In Your Human Machine - No Future Part 3

Science Fiction Double Feature

Returning to Dave Karpf’s post, I want to riff on the bit about science fiction (SF). As I have stated elsewhere, I have a deep affection for SF as a genre, even if I only now irregularly partake*. In the same post, I also label the TechBro Elite “Thermians**” in their relationship to SF (pace Galaxy Quest) although that label may be altogether too kind.

Dave K links to a wonderful essay by SF author Charlie Stross, who is as acute as ever.

What SF writers and the corporate futurists discussed in the previous essay share is that both are writing for a paying audience and there is an inevitable tension between instincts of the creator and the demands of the customer that can only ever be wholly reconciled in one direction. As Stross bluntly states: while in principle SF can be anything in practice it has to be what people want to read if the authors wants to earn a crust.

What if the audience can’t agree on that it wants? Well, that should not matter because there are many books out there and you can chose the future you want. The market has provided. We do not live a Communist state where your annual media ration is Avengers: Endgame. Although I’m sure Disney has plans to implement such a world given enough subscribers.

However a few years ago, a series of events occurred that highlighted some fissures in the SF community. The culture wars came to the Hugos. Named after the very Hugo Gernsback mentioned in Stross’s article, the Hugos are one of two big annual SF and Fantasy fiction awards. The Hugo Awards are democratic - being voted on at the World Science Fiction Convention which in turn is run by the World Science Fiction Society.

The Hugos recognise genre fiction and many of the winners are rollicking good reads - but also genuine works of art. For the more culturally nervous among you, winners include “proper” writers who appear on arts programs and at literary festivals and other arenas of middle class taste like Michael Chabon, Neil Gaiman, and China Miéville. It also features writers who offer different perspectives to those of the white, male Western authors typically associated with the genre - e.g. Ann Leckie, NK Jemisin***, and Cixin Liu. I thought this was all great. Other people did not agree.

The Sad Puppies were a bunch of authors who did not approve of all this literary and diversity malarky. Why couldn’t good old fashioned Space Operas and Military SF win awards and get the headlines like it did in the 50s and 60s? They wanted to Make SF Great Again. After a couple of desultory attempts to use block voting to tilt the slate in their favor, they had a breakthrough in 2015. Meanwhile (because this always seems to happen when a group of reactionaries decide to turn the clock back) a group of outright White Supremacists called the Rabid Puppies put together a slate of their own. N.B. Just because a work appeared on their list, that did not mean that the creator supported their position. In fact some authors were so appalled by this turn of events that they asked for their works to be removed from contention.

The slates from both Puppies largely failed. And after they tried and failed again in 2016, the WSFS changed the rules to prevent bloc voting and the whole thing faded away. The irony that a group of people who claimed to love a genre focused on the future wanted to trap it in its own past seems to have been lost in its instigators. There’s almost enough material for a mediocre short story right there. In short, the kind of retrofuturism that the Puppies peddle is the enemy of humanity.

On the one hand, this shows that when reactionaries and extremists try to grab the levers of power for their own nefarious ends, they can be defeated by individuals willing to take a stand, concerted collective action, and firm governance. On the other, it seems that a bunch of nerds are better at democracy than, say, the United States of America. This is at once heartening and terrifying. Thank heavens Elon Musk did not try to buy the Hugos to safeguard “freedom of speech”.

While the likes of the Sads and the Rabids show that SF can be as reactionary as any artistic endeavour, I like to delude myself that SF is an inherently progressive genre. Our fates are not fixed. What we are told by authority or can see with our eyes is not all that there is. Dreams matter. Other ways of being are possible.

Mark Fisher stated that Capitalist Realism was: “the widespread sense that not only is capitalism the only viable political and economic system, but also that it is now impossible even to imagine a coherent alternative to it.”

Perhaps the lessons from both SF and corporate futurism is that, yes, our ability to collectively image the future is limited by the demands of the market. But these demands are the demands of actual people. And that if we want the futures that we think we deserve, we need to be willing to ask for them. And when they tell us things we don’t like, we cannot shut them up because then those who create them will stop. We need to support the futures that we want.

Demand the future. Demand it of those who want to dream it. Demand it of the society and the economy in which they and we exist. Demand it of yourself.

*It is biographically equivalent to Weetabix for me.

**I was inspired by Dan Olsen in this - although he applies it to a different group of people.

***Jemisin does a fantastic session on worldbuilding here.

BTW Dave Snowden goes deep on his SF loves here - and deservedly gives a whole post to Ursula Le Guin.

Yes, yes, I know what you’re thinking…