After The Future Ended

[coalescent]

In the Sunday Times this week was this piece on the decline and fall of space exploration, featuring comments from JG Ballard, Brian Aldiss and Stephen Baxter. Ballard is brutal ("Nasa should be closed down. They’ve served their purpose. They’re just going to go on killing astronauts,") Aldiss is melancholy ("I feel very sad. When Mars was last as near as this, homo sapiens hadn’t left Africa. It seems terrible that we don’t have a spaceship to cover the brief distance,") and Baxter talks about throwing nuclear bombs under rockets ("The fall-out would have been dreadful, but if all had gone well you could have looked at reaching the moons of Jupiter by the 1980s"). Along the way Aldiss also opines about the state of the genre as a whole:

Aldiss, author of such key works as Non-Stop, Billion Year Spree and the Helliconia series, remembers the childhood thrill of reading HG Wells and Robert Heinlein, who wrote about moon landings long before they became reality. Later, Astounding Magazine became his inspiration.

"I read it avidly. I think science fiction now has gone haywire. There’s too much magic, too many wizards, too many dragons," he says.

In part, Aldiss blames the first moon landing, which hit the circulation of SF magazines. Reality could not match the dream. "Science fiction centred around the idea of manned space travel. And now the dream has gone. I think that sort of future has passed."

I'm inclined to think Aldiss is right here. You can count the number of hard SF writers - or at least the number of hard SF writers near the front of the field - on one hand, and it's tough going once you get beyond Baxter and Egan. Meanwhile, the big new things are Overclocked - Stross, Doctorow et al - the New Space Opera - Al Reynolds, Light and so on - and The New Weird - China Mieville, Justina Robson and the crew from The Third Alternative - and what all these movements have in common is a commitment to the aesthetic. Style currently trumps plausibility - which is not to say that the ideas aren't there, but that they're less grounded in reality. It's an attitude of 'don't let the facts get in the way of a good story,' with the implicit assumption that the facts will get in the way. The 'Accelerando' stories may originate in computer science, but they turn on the indistinguishability of sufficiently advanced technology from magic; and even Ted Chiang, possibly the most rigorous writer of the last decade, slides along the edges of fantasy as he sees fit. You can see it in TV spec-F as well; the triumph, if not of fantasy, then at least of the fantastic. At the same time, I think maybe there's an expansion of the self-reflective vein of nostalgia that's always been part of the field into something more melancholy - 'New Light On The Drake Equation,' 'Off On A Starship,' 'A Year In The Linear City' - or outright critical - The Light Ages - of dreams and wonder, and almost of the genre itself.

Baxter's take is different, as you might expect, but he's starting to sound somewhat isolated:

Despite the setbacks, Baxter believes the participation of science-fiction writers is as vital as ever. "Their role is that you have to conceive of being able to go to the moon or Mars before you can start the engineering. We’ve always been optimistic."

Comments

[snowking.livejournal.com]

and even Ted Chiang, possibly the most rigorous writer of the last decade, slides along the edges of fantasy as he sees fit.

He wrote about angels. FUCKING ANGELS. That's a mite more than sliding along the edge!

[coalescent.livejournal.com]

You have no sense of poetry, dude.

Also, Tom's got this theory about why Chiang's a proper hard SF writer even though he writes about angels. I've never managed to get him to write it down, though.

[snowking.livejournal.com]

He's probably too busy ranting about 15 year old Japanese girls having all the fun.

[coalescent.livejournal.com]

...Lost me in the middle, there. What?

[snowking.livejournal.com]

Tom spent some time at the weekend explaining why people who play the Cube are having more fun.

[coalescent.livejournal.com]

I thought that was just people who play Rez...?

[snowking.livejournal.com]

No, the theory on Rez was "Niall's too cheap to buy acid and rent Tron".

[coalescent.livejournal.com]

OK, I'm thinking of a different conversation.

[immortalradical.livejournal.com]

Aldiss's assessment is itself tinged with a little bit of nostalgia, I think. There was a fair amount of science fantasy produced in 'his day', without a shadow of a doubt. Most of it was silly, too. But some of the best SF has been fantasist from Aldiss's point of view. Take 'The Stars My Destination' - none of it is particularly based in 'real' science, but it's still a fine SF novel.

Either way, I'm not so sure that the retreat from 'hard' SF is particularly relevant, anymore than a retreat from realism in some mainstream literary fiction may be. If SF is at its best when it explains the present rather than predicts the future, does it matter if its future may never happen, particularly given that the best of predictions will likely be nowhere near the reality? 'Real' science is defined by our own limitations. The future presumably won't be. (As I've just finished reading it, I can say that 'Stand on Zanzibar' is a fascinating study in this very issue.)

It all boils down to the old question I suppose: 'which aspect of science fiction is more integral to its being - the science or the fiction?' I've always gone with the fiction, but I'm just a nasty artsy person.

[coalescent.livejournal.com]

But some of the best SF has been fantasist from Aldiss's point of view.

It's possible I'm putting words in Aldiss' mouth when I say he's bemoaning a lack of hard SF; what he's actually bemoaning is the rise of fantasy, and I'm putting that together with the fact that there is a lack of hard SF, but they're not exactly the same thing.

I'm not so sure that the retreat from 'hard' SF is particularly relevant, anymore than a retreat from realism in some mainstream literary fiction may be.

Well, if a trend is widespread enough then I think it has to be relevant to something; and I see reason enough to at least raise the argument that the world today doesn't want reality and fact, it wants fantasy and imagination, so that's what they're getting.

If SF is at its best when it explains the present rather than predicts the future, does it matter if its future may never happen, particularly given that the best of predictions will likely be nowhere near the reality?

In terms of the quality of the writing, not in the least. I think I'm already on record as saying that the quality of current SF is, in general, extremely high; all the authors and works I listed in my post are well worth reading. But that said, it does make me a little sad that techno-optimists of Baxter's ilk seem to be so far out on the sidelines.

Something Mike was arguing at the weekend was that we should want to change the terminology; 'science fiction' is just Egan and Baxter, and everyone else is writing 'speculative fiction,' in which the science doesn't matter. That way, you can mix up the speculative mainstream with the newly weird science fiction into one big pot, with the realists, the outright fantasists and the science fictionalists as smaller groups around the fringes. I don't know that I agree entirely, mind...

[immortalradical.livejournal.com]

It's possible I'm putting words in Aldiss' mouth when I say he's bemoaning a lack of hard SF; what he's actually bemoaning is the rise of fantasy, and I'm putting that together with the fact that there is a lack of hard SF, but they're not exactly the same thing.

Yeah, I know. :) There was something of the Aunt Sally in my post, I admit. I accept that the fantastic has succeeded in edging out the scientific, particularly in the area of TV/film. (Although it's possible to argue - ask pikelet - that hard SF is impossible on TV in anything but an anthology series.) But I'm not so certain there's a huge difference.

Well, if a trend is widespread enough then I think it has to be relevant to something; and I see reason enough to at least raise the argument that the world today doesn't want reality and fact, it wants fantasy and imagination, so that's what they're getting.

Possibly; or the turn-around could have its basis within creative circles rather than outside them. As modernism was a reaction against Victorian realism, is magic realism a reaction against staid post-modernism? I have to say, though, that I'm not certain the world of any day has ever really wanted hard SF - that was only ever consumed by a fringe. Perhaps more precisely, SF has been assimilated into the mainstream - by such phenonema as Star Trek and Star Wars ... which are of course more science fantasy/space opera than anything else. The reason the field is leaning that way, perhaps, is more to do with the desire to widen the audience and make more money than it is a loss of interest in technology.

Something Mike was arguing at the weekend was that we should want to change the terminology; 'science fiction' is just Egan and Baxter, and everyone else is writing 'speculative fiction,' in which the science doesn't matter.

Could be something in this, but I do wonder if it's worth ghetto-ising SF in that way. Certainly, by those strictures, you may be able to argue that there is rarely a true SF film and perhaps never a true SF TV show. And your list of 'true' SF books would swiftly diminish, too, perhaps. Would Phillip K. Dick or Ray Bradbury be allowed into that club anymore, for instance? If you start defining true science fiction as that which uses real science, wouldn't that mean you had to go back every few years and root out older works that use dodgy premises now we've investigated a little further?

Yep, still Aunt Sally-ing away. :)

[sclerotic-rings.livejournal.com]

Despite the setbacks, Baxter believes the participation of science-fiction writers is as vital as ever. "Their role is that you have to conceive of being able to go to the moon or Mars before you can start the engineering. We’ve always been optimistic."

Ah, there's nothing quite like the hubris of skiffy writers to assume that they get some say in how space exploration is supposed to go. Some may say "optimistic", but "onanistic" is a bit more appropriate, especially from the failed NASA engineers who become skiffy writers in the hope that someone will find them relevant.

[peteyoung.livejournal.com]

Niall, would you like to write an expansion of this piece (which is very good) for Zoo Nation #4? I'd certainly like to include it.

[coalescent.livejournal.com]

I'm flattred, so - sure! How long does it need to be, and when do you need it?

[peteyoung.livejournal.com]

Great!

Really, you can make it as long as you think it needs to be to cover anything else you may want to say ... If you think it's the right the length already then that's fine too, but I'd suggest including the gist of the article as a preamble, your astute commentary, and perhaps the direction in which you think things may head.

I'd need it sometime this month, preferably ASAP! I have to finalise everything I'm including by the end of September so I can lay it all out and print in October, in time for Novacon in early November.

Many thanks! :-)

[coalescent.livejournal.com]

I'd need it sometime this month, preferably ASAP!

Well, I was wondering what I was going to do this weekend... :)