The first time I picked up Minority Report I was aware of when the story was created. I felt that same twang of the premonitory when I read 1984 and again when I slid into Neuromancer and Snow Crash. Fiction—specifically science fiction—used to be about pushing the limits of human understanding by exploring undiscovered technologies and discussing the moral and human fallout of those technologies. In a very real way this is the basis of most of the zombie fiction that has gained traction across the world. Even these stories are, at least peripherally, about the virus and how it came about. That was the message I thought was going to be central to Snowpiercer but wound up merely being a vehicle to get us inside of a train that didn’t make a ton of sense. That is also what is missing in a great deal of the science fiction I’ve been seeing come across the wire.
Twenty five years ago I started playing (and eventually writing for) a game called Shadowrun that mixed together magic and science fiction to launch a parallel world that explored what would happen if magic returned to a world that was slowly being superceded by corporate powers. Shadowrun has evolved ever so slowly to include new science but has not been able to make the leaps that the fiction that (I believe) initially inspired it has. Shadowrun does speak to new technologies but none of it is so far removed from the now, even in the game decade of the 2070’s, that the technology itself seems like magic or feels entirely world-reshaping. That’s the secret isn’t it? Arthur C Clarke wrote that any technology sufficiently advanced is indistinguishable from magic. Nothing feels magical to me anymore. When we see magic we are almost always inclined to decipher and recreate it. We say, that tech is freaking cool and we try to make that tech. In that fashion the scientific cycle is powered by the science fiction cycle. What then is the science fiction cycle powering now?
I fear that too much science fiction is derivative of something that sold well. I know this is at least in part a result of the shaping of the book market. We market what we know people bought before and may be interested in buying again. Lee Child has been writing the same book for decades. At this point I’m not even sure its him putting the words on paper. This is not how we create something new. Instead this is how we foster stagnation and political correctness. This is why ISIL is ‘winning’ because that is the narrative we know sells and the narrative that people are willing to follow to feel, something… I get that I went off the rails just there but its true.. and its also about ten minutes so back to that another day.
Some Thoughts:
- Back in 1857 a series of quakes hit California and then Japan and finally Italy. It was about that time that people started thinking these things could be connected. The science of plate tectonics was already old by then, but the power to publicize and to collate information was just coming into its global form.