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Let me start this post with a piece of personal information that will be completely unsurprising to anyone who knows me even slightly: I read a lot of science fiction. I always have. I like the sense of exploring the realms of what might be, of trying to understand the sociological effects of technology that hasn't been invented yet. I like watching shared jargon and concepts emerge. It's everything that is exciting about watching history unfold except, of course, it happens much faster.
It seems very natural to me that SF really took off in the 20th century -- and wasn't even really a thing before the Industrial Revolution. If technological change in your lifetime is too slow to really track, why would you be thinking about it enough to be interested in SF? The possibility space you could see would just be too narrow. For us, though, dealing with change is a survival skill. I've long considered that being well read in SF makes for an excellent background for dealing with our world. As I once saw someone (rather self-servingly) say: Science fiction is the only form of literature important enough to be pirated on the internet in quanity.
I'm now starting to wonder if this only holds for intermediate rates of technological change, however. I think we might be leaving the period where SF is important. I've been getting the feeling over the last 5 years that the small-s singularity1 is close enough now that SF is losing its relevancy. Not that predictions were ever great, but trying to extrapolate even 15 years out is starting to feel downright ridiculous. Are we moving into a period where we're all too busy trying to understand the present to spend much time guessing what's coming next?
1: That is, just a point beyond which we can't predict because technology weirds everything. Doesn't have to include uploads or AI or smart virii or grey goo. Though that would all be pretty cool.
It seems very natural to me that SF really took off in the 20th century -- and wasn't even really a thing before the Industrial Revolution. If technological change in your lifetime is too slow to really track, why would you be thinking about it enough to be interested in SF? The possibility space you could see would just be too narrow. For us, though, dealing with change is a survival skill. I've long considered that being well read in SF makes for an excellent background for dealing with our world. As I once saw someone (rather self-servingly) say: Science fiction is the only form of literature important enough to be pirated on the internet in quanity.
I'm now starting to wonder if this only holds for intermediate rates of technological change, however. I think we might be leaving the period where SF is important. I've been getting the feeling over the last 5 years that the small-s singularity1 is close enough now that SF is losing its relevancy. Not that predictions were ever great, but trying to extrapolate even 15 years out is starting to feel downright ridiculous. Are we moving into a period where we're all too busy trying to understand the present to spend much time guessing what's coming next?
1: That is, just a point beyond which we can't predict because technology weirds everything. Doesn't have to include uploads or AI or smart virii or grey goo. Though that would all be pretty cool.
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That aside, there's still room for space-travel fiction and alien-encounter fiction, since we're not much pursuing the former and still haven't experienced the latter.
And I still find Cory Doctorow's near-future predictive SF interesting, though I suppose it's as much about trying to understand the present as anything else. I just read his latest short-story collection, "With A Little Help," and while it's kind of spotty in quality, it has a couple of stories that are specifically sociologically/technologically predictive. The one that sticks with me is basically a "What if Google did decide to go evil" story that has, for instance, American border-reentry checks being performed by bored functionaries who Google people coming back into the country and question them about their political and legal opinions based on everything they've ever done or said or read online.