Science Fiction Writers Discuss The Future 250
An Anonymous Reader writes "Locus Magazine asks prominent science fiction writers Bruce Sterling, Kim Stanley Robinson, Cory Doctorow, Pat Murphy, Norman Spinrad, and Ken Wharton to extrapolate the future from current trends in the environment, copyright, terrorism, war, world government, and the upcoming Presidential election. How do large groups make decisions on single issues? Are centralized global systems of governance the way to go? Are stateless diasporas the driving force behind the economic development of India and China? Will there always be war? The answer to these questions and more in a round-table conducted by legendary science fiction writer John Shirley."
Re:Does anyone know of... (Score:4, Informative)
Story in case of /.ing (Score:1, Informative)
The Social Future as seen by six SF Writers:
Cory Doctorow, Pat Murphy, Kim Stanley Robinson, Norman Spinrad, Bruce Sterling and Ken Wharton
Organized and with commentary by John Shirley
Some questions are hard to formulate -- but you carry them around inside you, like Confucius overlong in the womb, waiting for a way to ask them. I wanted to know about the quality of life in the future. I wanted to know about our political life; the scope of our freedom. I wanted to know what it was going to be like on a daily basis for my son and my grandson -- I wanted to know if perhaps my son would do better to have no children at all. Those are general yearnings, more than specific questions. The questions I came up with still seem too general, and approximate. "I think it helps to use Raymond Williams' concept of 'residual and emergent,'" Kim Stanley Robinson told me, "...and consider the present as a zone of conflict between residual and emergent social elements, not making residual and emergent code words for 'bad and good' either." Residual and emergent: yes. But what will reside and what emerge? From here, the future is just that unfocused. So I simply I asked the only questions I had... and six science fiction writers answered.
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1) In the past you've written science-fictionally about the social future. What's changed in your estimate of the social future since then? Do you have a sharper picture of where we're going, socially?
Ken Wharton: "I've been pondering psychohistory lately -- not Asimov's big sweeping trends, but how large groups make decisions on single issues. Those with money and power are approaching Hari Seldonesque abilities, gradually steering public opinion using knowledge of how groups think, and I only see that trend increasing as basic human instincts are incorporated into more realistic game theory models. Individuals, on the other hand, often don't have the time and/or inclination to dig into any particular issue for themselves -- meaning that many people will tend to make decisions using the very instincts that are most easily manipulated."
Considering the revelations in the documentary Outfoxed, about right-wing control of news content on the Fox channel, it's a timely comment. It seems to dovetail with Kim Stanley Robinson's: "It also helps me to think of us as animals and consider what behaviors caused our brains to expand over the last two million years, and then value some of those behaviors."
Norman Spinrad: "The biggest change, one which I didn't get at the time, was the rise to dominance of the American Christian fundamentalist far right. Where are we going? If Kerry should be elected, back to the Clintonian middle. But if Bush is re-elected, straight into the worst fascist shitter this country has ever experienced. We're on a cusp like that of the Roman Republic about to degenerate into the Empire. Though in many ways it has already."
Pat Murphy is thinking more about our health risks, the burdens we may have to carry: "I don't know if it's sharper, but it's definitely bleaker. Here are two of the trends I'm currently watching: The emergence and spread of certain diseases -- fostered by human activity. Consider the rapid spread of the SARS epidemic by international travelers, the emergence of Mad Cow Disease (which spread when sheep by-products were put in high-protein livestock), the role that global warming may play in increasing the geographic range of mosquitoes that spread malaria. The increase in children with Asperger's syndrome and autism. Though generally described by the medical establishment as 'disorders,' both Asperger's syndrome and autism are caused by a neurological difference. Affected individuals think differently, particularly with regard to communication."
Cory Doctorow is thinking about control of information and technology as the deciding factor -- leading to a new colonialism: "As you'd expect, I think the social future is tied up intimately with co
Re:Does anyone know of... (Score:4, Informative)
Does anyone know of a right wing science fiction writer?
John Ringo (http://www.johnringo.com/)? David Weber (http://www.baen.com/author_catalog.asp?author=dw
Baen has a few.
Bye,
Ori
Re:Does anyone know of... (Score:3, Informative)
Robert Heinlein (Score:2, Informative)
"I wondered why the Titans had not attacked Russia first; Stalinism seemed tailor-made for them. On second thought, I wondered if they had. On third thought I wondered what difference it would make; the people behind the Curtain had had their minds enslaved and parasites riding them for three generations. There might not be two kopeks difference between a commissar with a slug and a commissar without a slug."
Re:The Past-Future (Score:3, Informative)
If you are referring to the fantasy side of SF, then what you say is very valid. But, at least with the SF writers here, the point of science fiction and their view of the future is to provide a commentary of society today by emphasizing certain issues. Fantasy is about escapism; this sort of SF is about current ideas and provoking thought about our present situation and is really the opposite of escapism. That sort of science fiction really doesn't get old, in my opinion, if it continues to be relevant to our society and encourage discussion and thought about it.
William Gibson on John Shirley (Score:5, Informative)
John Shirley was cyberpunk's patient zero, first locus of the virus, certifiably virulent. A Carrier. City Come A-Walkin' is evidence of that and more. (I was somewhat chagrined, rereading it recently, to see just how much of my own early work takes off from this one novel.)
Attention, academics: the city-avatars of City are probably the precursors both of sentient cyberspace and of the AIs in Neuromancer and, yes, it certainly looks as though Molly's surgically- implanted silver shades were sampled from City's, the temples of his growing seamlessly into skinstuff and skull. (Shirley himself soon became the proud owner of a pair of gold-framed Bausch & Lomb prescription aviators: Ur- mirrorshades.) The book's near-future, post-punk milieu seems cp to the max, neatly pre-dating Bladerunner.
So this is, quite literally, a seminal work; most of the elements of the unborn Movement swim here in opalescent swirls of Shirley's literary spunk.
That Oregon boy, with the silver glasses.
* * *
That Oregon boy remembered today with a lank forelock of dirty blond, around his neck a belt in some long- extinct mode of patent elastication, orange pigskin, fashionably rotted to reveal cruel links of rectilinear chrome spring: "Johnny Paranoid," convulsing like a galvanized frog on the plywood stage of some basement coffeehouse in Portland. Extraordinary, really. And, he said, he'd been to Clarion.
Was I impressed? You bet!
I met Shirley as I was starting to try to write fiction. Or rather, I had made a start, had abandoned the project of writing, and was shamed back into it by this person from Portland, point-man in a punk band, whose dayjob was writing science fiction. Finding Shirley when I did was absolutely pivotal to my career. He seemed totemic: there he was, lashing these fictions together and propping them in the Desert of the Norm, their hastily-formed but often wildly arresting limbs pointing the way to Other Places.
The very fact that a writer like Shirley could be published at all, however badly, was a sovereign antidote to thesinking feeling induced by skimming George Scithers' Asimov's SF at the corner drugstore. Published as a paperback original by Dell, in July 1980, City Come A-Walkin' came in well below the genre's radar. Set in a "near future" that felt oddly like the present (an effect I've been trying to master ever since), spiked with trademark Shirley obsessions (punk anti-culture, fascist vigilantes, panoptic surveillance systems, modes of ecstatic consciousness), City was less an sf novel set in a rock demimonde than a rock gesture that happened to be a paperback original.
Shirley made the plastic-covered Sears sofa that was the main body of seventies sf recede wonderfully. Discovering his fiction was like hearing Patti Smith's Horses for the first time: the archetypal form passionately re- inhabited by a debauched yet strangely virginal practitioner, one whose very ability to do this at all was constantly thrown into question by the demands of what was in effect a shamanistic act. There is a similar ragged-ass derring- do, the sense of the artist burning to speak in tongues. They invoke their particular (and often overlapping, and indeed she was one of his) gods and plunge out of downscale teenage bedrooms, brandishing shards of imagery as peculiarly-shaped as prison shivs.
Mr Shirley, who so carelessly shoved me toward the writing of stories, as into a frat-party swimming pool. Around him then a certain chaos, a sense of too many possibilitics -- and some of them, always, dangerous: that girlfriend, looking oddly like Tenniel's Alice, as she turned to scream the foulest undeserved abuse at the Puerto Rican stoop-drinkers, long after midnight in Alphabet City, the visitor from Vancouver frozen in utter and horrified disbelief.
"Ignore her, man," J.S. advised the Puerto Ricans, "she's all keyed up."
And, yes, she was. T
Re:Does anyone know of... (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Does anyone know of... (Score:2, Informative)
Current conservative philosophys have a fundamental hopefull cornerstone that free people can make their lives better. So you select a panel with a moderator and 4 out 5 members who regularly conjure dystopias and bemoan the world is going to heck in a handbasket yes you get a very left leaning presentation. Cory Doctorow is the only one of the panelists who sees technology as an empowering and positive force.
As to Rightwing sciencefiction writers if you look to science fiction writers who are actually technologists you find plenty of them. This is not to say all but more than enough. Jerry Pournelle wasn't there, Marc Steigler wasn't there, nor F Paul Wilson, Heck he didn't even get Vernor Vinge or John barnes. While he is no longer with us I give you probably the greatest of all time Robert A Heinlein.
What you saw in that forum was a typical problem with know it ails of both the left and the right. You got a preselected group of people together so they could engage in groupthink. There wasn't room for dissent and they knew they were right/
Re:I've been reading science fiction all of my lif (Score:3, Informative)
Finally, the king, John Shirley. The grandfather of cyberpunk, he wrote "City Come A Walkin'" (of which Gibson says was his major influence), and later the Eclipse trilogy. He's all over the map in terms of writing styles, but he's been doing SF & horror for a good thirty years. He might not be as famous as Clarke or Asimov, but his writing style is very slick and his works are all eminantly readable.
Granted, these folks might not be the most famous SF writers, but they are certainly talented. When Shirley speaks, *I* sit up and pay attention.
Re:Does anyone know of... (Score:2, Informative)
"[Orson Scott Card] refers to himself as a Democrat."
Yeah, and my mother refers to herself as '39'.
Self-description is generally inaccurate. In Card's case, there is no doubt whatsoever that his opinions and writings adhere closely to what even an American would call Right Wing. That said, his stories don't leave the tenets of fascism unquestioned, and he invariably uses conscience as a leavening factor in his plots.
Re:Does anyone know of... (Score:3, Informative)
Actually, I have several books of Niven, and of Niven and Pournelle, and of Pournelle only, and it seems to me that Pournelle is more the right-wing type than Niven.
If you have read Pournelle's monthly columns in Byte, you can gather his right-wing stances from the comments in between too.