Spacing Out
I'm a fan of science fiction & fantasy, which I see as more closely related than not. I write both (under different pen names), and appreciate what each genre brings to the literary table, even though I'm increasingly conflicted about science fiction -- lucky you, I'm going to explain why below...
As an empiricist who greatly appreciates science, the scientific method, inductive (and deductive) reasoning, etc., I have a nagging fear that we're reaching the end of our tether as a species.
Not in terms of actual discovery, mind you; but rather, in how far we're willing to go as a species and a civilization. We're slowly migrating toward an increasingly dystopian existence (do I really need to laundry-list it? Odds are you know already).
In the globalization of Capital, we've seen the entire planet made captive (to varying degrees) to the requirements of capitalism, an 18th century economic system. Even saying that brings out the pain of it -- we're in the 21st century, but capitalism still calls the tune.
But there are clearly things capitalism excels at, and things it's not so good at. It's been very good at making billionaires, and that's precisely part of the problem -- the planet's not big enough for too many billionaires, and because of their outsized political power, they are making decisions that impact the rest of us.
Is the march of civilization anchored in making the world safe for billionaires? How much contortion does the rest of society have to endure to make the world safe for billionaires? How much autocracy are we supposed to swallow?
Don't worry, Gentle Reader -- I'm not going to bore you with some Marxist paean to the working class. However, inasmuch as the SF universe faces down economic reality, it puts us in a quandary.
Some SF worlds leapfrog past the economic question -- society moved beyond classic (or even postmodern) capitalism toward a more benevolent future. Or (cyberpunk, looking at you) society becomes mangled by capitalism into a neon-wrapped crass noir mockery of civilization -- a kind of techno-tyranny of the megacorporation.
There's a ton to unpack in all of this, and I may have to break it up into multiple posts to adequately capture it.
But from a SF writer POV, there's a point when one is really writing what I'd call "technofantasy" -- which is to say, wishful thinking SF (even within dystopian perspectives) -- the idea that somehow humans will survive, despite the literal and figurative meatgrinder that capitalism is. On one level, maybe so. But on another level, it relegates SF into an area requiring a massive narrative leap to imagine that humanity can even get past the massive firewall capitalism has created for us.
If you're not familiar with the Great Filter concept, take a look at it and reflect on our current world.
It feels like we're coming up against the Great Filter in some fashion, where human civilization must either reprioritize its values or face outright extinction (fast disaster or slow erosion, it hardly matters if the end result is our annihilation).
It's kind of like how I've said over the years that it frightens me that the MAD MAX/ROAD WARRIOR post-apocalyptic universe increasingly feels like the most credible SF future for us. Forget the flying cars on the moon, or shopping for shoes on Mars -- no, we may be careening toward Thunderdome as a species, largely because we're captive to capitalism.
Above and beyond questions of carrying capacity for the planet and environmental degradation and scarcity, and Malthusian notions of want and need, there's the cultural degradation of the human spirit embedded in capitalism -- it goes back to the thing I said earlier about making the world safe for billionaires. Or, eventually, trillionaires (chew on that a bit -- is a world with trillionaires in it a success or a monstrous failure? How many must suffer to attain that hurdle?)
Robotics and AI continues to race ahead, and, obviously, to assist the already-rich in getting richer. I think we'll be seeing a revisitation of eugenics in the form of elective improvement for the rich -- always, always for the rich -- the hapless multitudes are just that -- always left out of the innovations that are aimed and intended for the wealthy. The innovations go where Capital decides they go, social justice be damned!
Even old SF tropes such as interplanetary colonization and exploration become fraught when one ponders "space capitalists" -- now, SF has certainly tried to address this over the decades. Absolutely, there are all sorts of good criticisms of society rooted in some of the best SF. I'd never dream of shading any of that, because it's all legitimate.
However, cautionary SF tales aside, society keeps moving on without dwelling on that too much. In the interests of pursuing profit wherever it takes one, humanity is setting itself up for a societal throat-slitting. We need to take proper stock (pun intended more than I care to admit) and reassess what it means to be human, and where we want to go. And SF writers have been doing that for decades.
It's just that the optimism of previous generations, the assumptions that we might endure and/or prosper in those imagined futures (or even evocatively suffer) run up against the wall of that Great Filter.
These days, it feels to me like we're not going to make it as a species -- that, in making a world safe for billionaires, billions of people will suffer and die needlessly, and civilization will tear itself apart in the effort.
And even if it doesn't (somehow), how the hell can one even imagine humanity living on multiple planets? Not even factoring in the colossal expense of space travel, let alone colonization. From the most optimistic appraisals (assuming we could even attain it, which seems a big IF at this point), it would be politically unsustainable -- look at how fractious we are on Earth. Now, imagine a Moon colony, a Mars colony, a colony on Titan, or whatever.
Who calls the tune on those colonies? Who decides how they live and die? How do they relate to one another? It's why "space war" is such a consistent trope in SF -- which is really just another form of technofantasy -- A GAME OF THRONES in space.
Best-case scenario for us as a species: We realign our values toward mutual aid and self-actualization of the individual toward a broader social goal of peaceful prosperity for all. Again, that feels like technofantasy -- the most ardent of liberal wishful thinking.
Or we're doomed to create our own apocalypse and annihilate ourselves as we destroy civilization because it was enslaved to the idea of making the world safe for billionaires.
Any SF writer these days is taking a technofantasy leap of faith in hoping that somehow we get past that Great Filter, but, at least to my eyes, it's growing ever larger in our sight lines -- to the extent that SF writers are likely running out of things to say, in some way. Some have said that SF has a bad track record of predicting the future, and that it's more often a reflection of the limitations of the here-and-now. I get that, and maybe the above is tied to that.
Either we evolve as a species and a civilization toward something more compassionate, or we fail to do so and are doomed. That's the real story; anything else is a technofantasy.
As an empiricist who greatly appreciates science, the scientific method, inductive (and deductive) reasoning, etc., I have a nagging fear that we're reaching the end of our tether as a species.
Not in terms of actual discovery, mind you; but rather, in how far we're willing to go as a species and a civilization. We're slowly migrating toward an increasingly dystopian existence (do I really need to laundry-list it? Odds are you know already).
In the globalization of Capital, we've seen the entire planet made captive (to varying degrees) to the requirements of capitalism, an 18th century economic system. Even saying that brings out the pain of it -- we're in the 21st century, but capitalism still calls the tune.
But there are clearly things capitalism excels at, and things it's not so good at. It's been very good at making billionaires, and that's precisely part of the problem -- the planet's not big enough for too many billionaires, and because of their outsized political power, they are making decisions that impact the rest of us.
Is the march of civilization anchored in making the world safe for billionaires? How much contortion does the rest of society have to endure to make the world safe for billionaires? How much autocracy are we supposed to swallow?
Don't worry, Gentle Reader -- I'm not going to bore you with some Marxist paean to the working class. However, inasmuch as the SF universe faces down economic reality, it puts us in a quandary.
Some SF worlds leapfrog past the economic question -- society moved beyond classic (or even postmodern) capitalism toward a more benevolent future. Or (cyberpunk, looking at you) society becomes mangled by capitalism into a neon-wrapped crass noir mockery of civilization -- a kind of techno-tyranny of the megacorporation.
There's a ton to unpack in all of this, and I may have to break it up into multiple posts to adequately capture it.
But from a SF writer POV, there's a point when one is really writing what I'd call "technofantasy" -- which is to say, wishful thinking SF (even within dystopian perspectives) -- the idea that somehow humans will survive, despite the literal and figurative meatgrinder that capitalism is. On one level, maybe so. But on another level, it relegates SF into an area requiring a massive narrative leap to imagine that humanity can even get past the massive firewall capitalism has created for us.
If you're not familiar with the Great Filter concept, take a look at it and reflect on our current world.
It feels like we're coming up against the Great Filter in some fashion, where human civilization must either reprioritize its values or face outright extinction (fast disaster or slow erosion, it hardly matters if the end result is our annihilation).
It's kind of like how I've said over the years that it frightens me that the MAD MAX/ROAD WARRIOR post-apocalyptic universe increasingly feels like the most credible SF future for us. Forget the flying cars on the moon, or shopping for shoes on Mars -- no, we may be careening toward Thunderdome as a species, largely because we're captive to capitalism.
Above and beyond questions of carrying capacity for the planet and environmental degradation and scarcity, and Malthusian notions of want and need, there's the cultural degradation of the human spirit embedded in capitalism -- it goes back to the thing I said earlier about making the world safe for billionaires. Or, eventually, trillionaires (chew on that a bit -- is a world with trillionaires in it a success or a monstrous failure? How many must suffer to attain that hurdle?)
Robotics and AI continues to race ahead, and, obviously, to assist the already-rich in getting richer. I think we'll be seeing a revisitation of eugenics in the form of elective improvement for the rich -- always, always for the rich -- the hapless multitudes are just that -- always left out of the innovations that are aimed and intended for the wealthy. The innovations go where Capital decides they go, social justice be damned!
Even old SF tropes such as interplanetary colonization and exploration become fraught when one ponders "space capitalists" -- now, SF has certainly tried to address this over the decades. Absolutely, there are all sorts of good criticisms of society rooted in some of the best SF. I'd never dream of shading any of that, because it's all legitimate.
However, cautionary SF tales aside, society keeps moving on without dwelling on that too much. In the interests of pursuing profit wherever it takes one, humanity is setting itself up for a societal throat-slitting. We need to take proper stock (pun intended more than I care to admit) and reassess what it means to be human, and where we want to go. And SF writers have been doing that for decades.
It's just that the optimism of previous generations, the assumptions that we might endure and/or prosper in those imagined futures (or even evocatively suffer) run up against the wall of that Great Filter.
These days, it feels to me like we're not going to make it as a species -- that, in making a world safe for billionaires, billions of people will suffer and die needlessly, and civilization will tear itself apart in the effort.
And even if it doesn't (somehow), how the hell can one even imagine humanity living on multiple planets? Not even factoring in the colossal expense of space travel, let alone colonization. From the most optimistic appraisals (assuming we could even attain it, which seems a big IF at this point), it would be politically unsustainable -- look at how fractious we are on Earth. Now, imagine a Moon colony, a Mars colony, a colony on Titan, or whatever.
Who calls the tune on those colonies? Who decides how they live and die? How do they relate to one another? It's why "space war" is such a consistent trope in SF -- which is really just another form of technofantasy -- A GAME OF THRONES in space.
Best-case scenario for us as a species: We realign our values toward mutual aid and self-actualization of the individual toward a broader social goal of peaceful prosperity for all. Again, that feels like technofantasy -- the most ardent of liberal wishful thinking.
Or we're doomed to create our own apocalypse and annihilate ourselves as we destroy civilization because it was enslaved to the idea of making the world safe for billionaires.
Any SF writer these days is taking a technofantasy leap of faith in hoping that somehow we get past that Great Filter, but, at least to my eyes, it's growing ever larger in our sight lines -- to the extent that SF writers are likely running out of things to say, in some way. Some have said that SF has a bad track record of predicting the future, and that it's more often a reflection of the limitations of the here-and-now. I get that, and maybe the above is tied to that.
Either we evolve as a species and a civilization toward something more compassionate, or we fail to do so and are doomed. That's the real story; anything else is a technofantasy.
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