The Future of Science Fiction is a bunch of fantasy books based on the Bible.

[pmb]

Modern sci-fi has a problem. It can be summed up in two quotes:

[The present is] too complex, with too many huge sci-fi tropes: global warming; the lethal, sexually transmitted immune-system disease; the United States, attacked by crazy terrorists, invading the wrong country. Any one of these would have been more than adequate for a science-fiction novel. But if you suggested doing them all and presenting that as an imaginary future, they'd not only show you the door, they'd probably call security.

--William Gibson

The other is not from a sci fi author, but instead from a conversation between Stanslaw Ulam and John von Neumann, as related by Ulam:

One conversation centered on the ever accelerating progress of technology and changes in the mode of human life, which gives the appearance of approaching some essential singularity in the history of the race beyond which human affairs, as we know them, could not continue.

Science fiction authors have this horrible problem, which is basically that the future they imagined (minus easy space travel) is already here, but is more shlocky than they anticipated, and the future human condition that lies ahead is, with non-zero probability, by definition unimaginable due to our tiny human brains. Into this void steps Charles Stross (cool enough to have had a vi-powered website since 1993) with his novel Singularity Sky, and the blurb on the back is that Where Charles Stross goes today, the rest of science fiction will follow tomorrow. Well, if that's true then the future of science fiction is to sidestep all this singularity stuff and to instead tell the story from the point of view of the unmodified humans who are still just people, but are now surrounded by this unimaginably complex system capable of astounding feats and asserting bizarre rules which it enforces with an iron fist.

Basically, it looks like the future of sci-fi is looking more and more like we're going to see lots of variants of Left Behind that substitute the word "nano" every time the Left Behind series (I imagine) uses the world "holy". As in, "Be careful, that thing has a nano-weapon which will annihilate you from the face of the earth!" I'm not sure how I feel about this, but it seems like the most plausible way of writing about an unimaginable future - just tell the story about the normal people and treat the unimaginable parts as mostly magic. But it also means that, unlike the sci-fi of the past, the heroes of these future stories are now going to be mostly luddites instead of technophiles, because the technophiles will have already been taken up by the rapture uploaded their consciousness and the luddites are the only ones that have a story to tell that is easily relatable to our current condition.

Comments

[jes5199.livejournal.com]

I've enjoyed Iain Banks' novels about post-singularity civilizations... his shortcut is that, sure, you could live forever or increment your brain indefinitely, but mostly human-people will be satisfied by being smart and beautiful under the care of friendly city-size AIs. but there's plenty of human/AI intrigue and the AIs often have motivations that are comprehensible

and Rudy Rucker's Postsingular was geeky and fun, if not particularly well written. (it follows the stories of early-adopter humans)

for ineffable AIs done right, I'm trying to remember who wrote the story about the collection of thousands of competing Von Neumann Replicator AIs on Mars from every civilization that has ever existed in the galaxy, who are watching Earth to see what we're going to launch

[drinkywinky.livejournal.com]

I was about to mention Banks also. He's good, but not great, but I also don't think Sci-Fi is really my genre.

It sounds like a lot of Banks' books are similar to Stross in that the deep thinking (research and running whatever politics exist) is done by artificial intelligences. I wouldn't call the people stupid, but they do tend to be impediments or irrelevant to the main plot.

It looks like you (PMB) are implying a larger point here. Am I reading too much in?

[pmb.livejournal.com]

I'm not sure if I'm trying to imply something deeper. It's just a musing that I don't have time to follow up on right now. But the musing is that the heroes of sci fi have gone from the people operating at the edge of what is possible - the heroic uberengineers and hackers and scientist-warriors of Heinlein and Clarke and Asimov and pretty much everyone who wasn't writing dystopic fiction - to heroes that not only aren't these people, but can't be these people, because those people have augmented themselves beyond what the author can explain well. How does it affect a nominally forward-looking genre like sci fi to have the protagonists be mostly luddites?

I have been told by offline people that there are other books that explore the forefront of these technological things instead of the backlash and the lives of those left behind, so I'll have to check those next.

[patrissimo.livejournal.com]

I think the Gibson statement is now-centered bullshit.

There have always been real sci-fi tropes in the present, as long as there has been sci-fi. What they were keeps changing. In the 60's, they were worried about overpopulation ("The Population Bomb"). There was global cooling. Satellites. Space trvel.

I mean, AIDS is the best example of what a stupid statement it is. He's saying the present has more sci-fi tropes because we have this one creepy disease? Hello, we have less creepy diseases than at any time in history! How about the black plague killing a third of Europe or whatever - now that's creepy!

the future human condition that lies ahead is, with non-zero probability, by definition unimaginable due to our tiny human brains

Is this really that much more true than it used to be? People have always been bad at imagining the future - there is plenty of historical evidence for that. I guess we have more technology, and faster technological change, so the window of uncertainty starts sooner and spreads wider. But it is a change of degree, not of kind, and one that leaves plenty of room for plenty of SF.

One of the marvelous things about SF is that it is a way of exploring the impact of potential technological changes on our world. More impending changes means more great stuff to explore. A standard technique is to fix most aspects, and vary only a few. Books which want to explore the impact of uploading can follow that thread. Books that don't can fix uploading technology and vary other things. I don't think the Vorkosigan series lost any SF awesomness because it featured minimally-modded humans, do you?

[cabanasloth.livejournal.com]

the future they imagined ... is already here

I wonder about this... I suspect one could make a pretty decent case that science fiction writers, like most other people, have on average been quite bad at predicting the future. For instance, the only prominent aspect of Gibsonian cyberpunk fiction that we've actually got these days is a global computer network, and it's way less cool than he thought it would be. You dismiss "easy space travel" as the one thing sci fi authors got wrong, but to be fair, wasn't space travel a major plot element in almost every piece of science fiction from 1950 to about 1990? This argument could probably be fleshed out a lot more, but I'll just say that it's far from clear that science fiction authors have historically had any statistically significant success whatsoever at predicting the future. (See "confirmation bias".)

(Not that I consider this a problem with the genre - it's not about predicting the future, but about shedding light on the human condition by putting characters in situations that were never actually possible, or whatever. I freakin' love Iain Banks, whether he's got the M or not.)

Anyway, I think I agree with Patri that this problem is no more true now than it has ever been. On a somewhat related note, I consider this whole "singularity" business to be narrowminded millenarian bullshit propagated by affluent men who really should get out from behind their computers more often. It's all well and good as a scifi trope, but to consider it a description of an actual likely future is equally sad and silly.

So there, internet!

[pmb.livejournal.com]

Anyway, I think I agree with Patri that this problem is no more true now than it has ever been. On a somewhat related note, I consider this whole "singularity" business to be narrowminded millenarian bullshit propagated by affluent men who really should get out from behind their computers more often. It's all well and good as a scifi trope, but to consider it a description of an actual likely future is equally sad and silly.

Nice to hear an actual combination neuroscientist/computer scientist weigh in on the issue.

[misuba.livejournal.com]

Is the best analogy A) the Rapture, or B) the way most people already feel about technology?

[pmb.livejournal.com]

Either way, the heroes aren't at the forefront of it anymore. Are you opining that our current level of technology is already indistinguishable from magic?

[misuba.livejournal.com]

I'm opining that, to most of Earth's population, it's indistinguishable from a world they can never enter.

Although cell phones seem to be getting out there pretty well. Does Stross have any interesting thoughts about the ways in which the left-behind do use technology, or does that amount to the folks in Left Behind who convert too late?