About the author:
Descended from old English money, Vidicon was raised by spiny echidnas in the mountainous rainforests of the North American Southeast. Lured back to society by time-traveling gray/reptiloid alien hybrids posing as renegade Jesuits, he has managed to maintain his outsider's perspective and an appetite for crunchy insects. Today, Vidicon is a world-class synchronicity surfer and an unlicensed quantum mechanic. He has a fourth-degree black belt in weird.
About his bi-weekly column:
Tales from the Third Lobe are the unfocused meanderings of the World's Smartest Moron. Topics range widely over the sciences, religion, philosophy, technology, modern culture, mysticism, Vidicon's personal history and viewpoints, and whatever pissed him off in the media last week.
View all articles by Laszlo Q. V. St-J. "Vidicon" Xalieri, 2HC Columnist...
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The Death of Speculation?Three years ago we postponed the launch of TwoHeadedCat by a few days because
some bunch of criminals destroyed life in the United States as we knew it,
leaving prosecution and recovery in the hands of some other bunch of criminals.
The ensuing years have been pretty dark years on all fronts, with impacts where
one would least expect. From where I sit, I see dark tendrils reaching far into
the future.
See, I've been debating with a few of my readers for the
past couple of days whether—and if so, how and why—science fiction and fantasy
and other speculative fiction genres of literature are dying out, and how that
might possibly tie into recent and current events. I discussed part of the
challenge of speculation in my last
article—the fact that in a few decades the possibilities of reality will
defy imagination. In places. For the wealthy.
But what's the problem
today? And why should we care?
Let's start with that last question—and
allow me to rudely force-feed you the answer.
Flip open your cellphone.
And then tell me that science fiction has no purpose in the real world.
See, today's engineers and scientists and product developers watched
Star Trek in the sixties and seventies. When Captain Kirk flipped open his
flimsy plastic communicator onscreen, a handful of neurons in some twenty
thousand brains got welded into place. And twenty-five years later we get
flip-open communicators that work pretty much everywhere in the civilized world.
Thank Gene Roddenberry.
And, less obviously, you can thank author Arthur
C. Clarke for the idea for the communication satellites that make the fuckers
actually work as a global communications toy.
See, science fiction fans
are creating your future. Out of crap literature they read years ago. Because
when someone asks them to come up with an idea to earn a manufacturing company
some money, they don't often come up with something from scratch. They think
back to something they read or saw on television or in a movie and say, "Well,
with how we know the universe to work and with what's available from modern
technology, this concept I remember isn't so far-fetched after all..."
And you get a crappy plastic flip-open communicator. And some
manufacturing company makes a $50 profit.
Trust me. You really really
really want the engineers and researchers of today reading some high-quality
crap literature.
Speculative fiction—science fiction in particular—is in
a perpetual feedback loop. Assuming the writers have any desire to produce
stories that are believable, they stay up on their science and try to predict
what could possibly be available in the time-scales with which they are working.
Otherwise, people stop buying their books after the technology described becomes
ludicrous.
(Raise your hand if you've ever read a story involving a
spacecraft that ran into problems because someone dropped and scattered a stack
of punched cards that were being used to program the computer. Keep your hand up
if you paid full cover price. Point: Authors won't make any royalties on new
editions of a book after the story passes its effective "sell-by" date.)
So SF authors read works of science for ideas, and scientists troll SF
for ideas. That's the feedback cycle.
I'm not completely leaving works
of fantasy and magic out of the loop. Up to now, they've largely been fuel for
escapism (except for the stress-testing of bizarre social scenarios), but that's
not the case any more. Science and technology has progressed to the point where
products are possible that more resemble works of magic than of
science—biological manipulations, regenerative/instantaneous healing,
intelligent animals or objects, spontaneous creation of objects or forces,
voice- or thought-controlled actions, instantaneous knowledge, etc.
In
the coming decades, old works of fantasy will have just as much inspirational
importance as traditional SF. Since you will be the consumers of these upcoming
technological devices, I hope you guys really really like D&D, Tolkien and
Harry Potter....
For instance, the next real "fantasy-style" advances
will be intelligent artificial pets (or perhaps items of jewelry) that perform
the functions of magical "familiars".
(I already have arguments with the
computer in my car. And it was built in 1991. I call the computer "Abby"—a
Young Frankenstein reference.)
Have I made my point yet? The
imaginations of authors who produce these forms of literature that get no
respect whatsoever steer the way your world unfolds into the future.
Amateurs
have made it into space. Your cellphone is smarter than your dog. Los Alamos
created a Buck-Rogers-style "freeze ray" ten
years ago. Your car can tell you where to go for a good time. Some
high-schooler made a breeder-reactor out of aluminum foil and duct tape.
From here, almost anything is possible. Speculative fiction should be having a
mother-fuckin' heyday.
What the hell happened?
On first
analysis, I'd say demand for speculative fiction is low.
In the current
socio-econo-political climate, people feel like significant portions of their
life are out of their control. So they demand more escapist fantasy. As has been
pointed out by one of my readers, people spend lots of time watching "reality"
shows which are anything but real. They show "ordinary" people in extraordinary
situations that would never happen without Hollywood investors and producers.
"Reality" programming is wish-fulfillment fantasy of the most obvious
and blatant kind. It teaches us nothing but how dumb the ordinary person
is—because all you do when you watch it is say, "If that had been me in that
situation, I'd have done better." And it makes you feel better, whether or not
you are actually deluded about being smarter than the person in the show....
That kind of consumption edges out the speculative fiction market. Why
buy beer when you need liquor?
If you won't pay for speculative
fiction, then no one will pay writers to write it. And so, instead of starving,
they write romances, self-help books, and essays on religion and science and
political diatribes instead. And poof, no more visions of the future. And in the
absence of fresh ideas, our engineers have to stick with churning out crap
products inspired by The Jetsons.
Which, I guess, is better than
nothing.
And there's a second idea—maybe you, the consumer, are more
comfortable with the "Jetsons" idea of the future—the same old problems as
always: traffic jams (in mid-air), the problems of providing well-balanced meals
(in pill-form), the complete lack of charm of a nine-to-five job (in a
completely automated factory), dealing with (robotic) household staff, etc.—than
you are with actual advancement. In which you might get better
healthcare, shorter workdays, more leisure time, and a completely renovated
quality of life in exchange for dealing with totally new problems.
I tie that to the first reason, partially. If the present weren't so
damned scary, it would be easier for the average Joe to face the horrors of the
future. A screwed up present demands more attention be paid to the present....
A third possibility is that science is getting more and more
complicated. In order for SF to remain plausible, an author has to stay current
on dozens of interrelated fields of science and technology and manufacturing—or
else tell a really small story of interest to a correspondingly small number of
people who can understand it. For instance, while my own mother has been known
to read science fiction in the past, I'm sure I would be very hard-pressed to
explain to her the details of nano-manufacturing, dark matter/energy, quantum
entanglement, and spintronics....
By the time she was thirty-seven years
old, Mom just had to master the concepts of action-reaction, electromagnetic
radiation, general and special relativity, and basic computing in order to
comprehend what SF had to offer, or even to be able to produce her own SF
stories. In just the same number of years, I feel I have to pack my head ten
times more full in order to be able to compete in the SF market. Not that I've
been able to sell any.
If you have to work harder to understand more to
sell less to fewer people, why bother?
My chief debate partner on this
topic claims that for any literature of real imagination to be produced, the
authors have to do some real living and have some real experiences. Well, for
the best literature, this is always true. If all you do is process and
regurgitate other information that has been handed to you already predigested,
then your results will be unlikely to include any new combinations. (Consider
the Latin roots of the word "novel".)
I wonder how possible it is to do
any real living on the forefront of speculation and exploration, but it's not
impossible, I'll concede, if you're a real researcher and scientist. But if an
author doesn't do any real living, then the real parts of the characters
and situations and drama in his or her stories will look fake, and that's
unforgivable.
That's the most important part of the story. Who cares
what the future has to offer us if we can't see how real people will react to
it?
I suspect that the best new speculation will come from researchers
in the field—and I hope they can write worth a damn, and put in lots of sex
scenes and explosions, otherwise we'll never hear about it.
Because if
we don't see any resurgence in speculative fiction, we'll be going back to
The Jetsons.
[*]
Vidicon has been the buddha, but the pay was
lousy. |
