SF

[gfish]

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.

Comments

[randomdreams.livejournal.com]

Stanislaw Lem once said -- and I paraphrase not only because I don't know the exact wording but also because he said it in Polish -- that if all knowledge of literature were wiped from our minds, the first thing we'd start writing would be science fiction. His intent was that good scifi is at its core an extended parody of what could happen to us if we stick blindly to the path we're on.
Since I'm generally on-board with that, I think that good scifi, the unhappy stuff, is probably going to continue to be relevant and illustrative for the indefinite future. I'm just not sure there's a lot of good scifi out there.

[woremore.livejournal.com]

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[rollick.livejournal.com]

I'd be really interested in seeing a list of, say, your top 5 or 10 SF books you most respect as specifically being interesting or apt or inspiring or thoughtful in their predictions, as opposed to just books you like for style or story.

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.

[damiana-swan.livejournal.com]

Two quick comments. :)

First, porn. The internet has hosted and continues to host far more written porn than SF. "The internet is for porn" does still hold true here.

And second, while it's possibly true that we're at a bit of a pause in terms of what new possibilities SF can help prepare us for dealing with... have you noticed the amount of political turmoil going on, and perhaps coincidentally, the rising popularity of strong political elements in both fantasy and science fiction?

Yeah, that. Our world is transitioning, big time, and as a result, one of the things people are finding, well, comforting, are books whose plots involve a lot of political turmoil with political transitions that end in "and they all lived happily ever after" or some variant thereof. I can think of *at least* four different well-known books or series fitting that category. You?

[ilmarinen.livejournal.com]

I found it interesting to note that both Gibson and Stephenson have moved away from writing in-the-future scifi (cyberpunk) to contemporary and/or historic work settings.

-B.