The Stories We Need To Tell Ourselves
The tale has survived from ancient times because it was always more than just entertainment. It was an instruction for living. Snow White would have been told to young girls to prepare them for the life ahead. Beware of older women. They will be jealous of your youth and potential and will try to keep you locked in childhood. One day a man will come with a kiss — a metaphorical kiss, though stickier and sweatier — and he will awaken you to a new, adult life where you will find happiness.
Stories are the way we make sense of the world around us.
We’re moving into a new age now, one of unparalleled and accelerating technological change. Every aspect of our existence is being transformed. Hang around in the coffee shops and bars and you will catch murmurs of unease. Old friends are vanishing by the day. Familiar, comforting ways of doing things lost. Nowhere seems safe.
Never has there been a more important time for stories that instruct and guide and explain. A new narrative for a new age.
As a novelist and screenwriter, working for, amongst others, the BBC, I’m regularly in meetings with producers. Recently, I pitched a story that looked at how technology-driven change is shaping the world. Now I love the thrill of this new age and I’m fully-immersed in all aspects of tech. So I was, quite frankly, stunned to realize that I was having to explain at the start of every meeting that, no, this isn’t science fiction. It’s happening NOW.
Not long after, I was meeting a police contact to discuss research for a new TV series. He laughed at the depiction of most law enforcement officers on screen. Twenty years out of date, he said. Shows hired ex-cops to act as advisors, but the knowledge they held was from that distant, fabled time of pre-five years ago. Change was coming so fast, you needed to be on top of it, right now, to reflect it with any accuracy.
Why were all these experienced storytellers failing to keep up? For a start, it’s hard work. And paying attention is time-consuming, when you’ve got characters to create and arcs to develop and themes to sharpen and research to do. Who has the space to keep watching this tsunami of new information that’s engulfing the world?
Back in 1970, futurist Alvin Toffler wrote a book called Future Shock, a term which he defined as “too much change in too short a period of time”. The simple fact is that the majority of people simply can’t assimilate the staggering pace of today’s technological advance, one that grows faster with each passing week. Look away for one moment and so many new things have popped up that it’s easier not to pay attention at all. Get on with your life. It’ll sort itself out. Wrapped up in their jobs and their relationships, they only look up when another touchstone has fallen. And then, seeing what they’re losing but not knowing what they’re gaining, they’re fearful.
Storytellers have a responsibility to those people.
There’s plenty of academic research which shows that information or guidance provided in a tale is more sticky than plain facts taught in a lesson. Our ancestors knew that. Many of our oldest story-forms are packed with facts about agrarian life, the seasons, tree and plant lore, with life-lessons, and psychological insights. Sitting around the fire, the listeners would be entertained, and learn, and understand.
At their heart, stories are all about the human condition. Character. Emotion. Raw human nature doesn’t change — Shakespeare has shown us that. But tales are also about explaining the world around us, and how humans interact when placed under the stresses of the global environment.
Creators have always done that well. Whether it’s responding to 9-11 or the financial crash of 2008, we’ve seen plenty of fictions trying to make sense of those things.
But are they doing enough to reflect the current state of things? I don’t think so.
Part of the problem is that change is happening faster than the traditional production cycles of TV, film and novels. The entertainment industry can’t keep up. Many a time I’ve heard a producer complain about time and money wasted developing an idea that’s out-dated by the time it comes to fruition. It’s easier and more cost-effective to look back to simpler times, familiar story-forms and settings.
That’s what a lot of viewers and readers are doing. But it doesn’t help them.
In this 21st century thrill-ride of constant disruption, rapid change, of terror and hope, we need creators to start illuminating it as it happens. That means looking forward two or three years, taking in vast amounts of information and then creating something which will be relevant the moment it hits the street.
That’s hard. It requires a new way of thinking about stories. Not quite science fiction, not yet science fact. But one aspect of all that rapid change is that the tools to do this are out there, if we’re open to it.
But if creators opt for the easy option — looking around or looking back and then dreaming up their tale — they’re letting down a lot of people who really need their help in understanding what’s happening now.
(Posted earlier on Medium)
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Good points. I guess it's how you measure it. On the scale you use, it's possible to show that change is slowing down. But when you look at the rate of innovation - new inventions in new areas - that is definitely speeding up; a recent academic report showed that by the time university students reach their third year, parts of what they learned in the first had already become obsolete. That's never happened before. And if you look at the rate of disruption - in business, media, retail, medicine, academics, politics, warfare (all outlined in the recent book, The End of Big), that's also accelerating. Within the next five years, there won't be one aspect of life that hasn't been disrupted in some way; and even the new disruptions are already being disrupted. Interesting times.
"Disruption" is actually narrowly limited to IT applications; which are important, but not overwhelming.IT is still in the steep upward curve of the innovation cycle, where internal combustion engines were in 1910 or aircraft in 1930 or where small arms were in 1880.
Eg., in warfare computers have important applications(*), but soldiers are fighting with small arms and artillery invented 20-60 years ago. The standard US heavy machine gun was invented in 1919 (two years after my grandfather was gassed at Passchendaele)... and nobody has ever been able to build a better one. Soldiers still carry about 80 pounds of gear and fight at about the ranges they have since the introduction of smokeless powder and magazine rifles in the 1890's.
In 1919, a 93-year-old weapon (which is how old the .50 Browning is now) would have been a smoothbore flintlock. We have somewhat better automatic weapons than they did in 1919; in 1819 they didn't have anything but single-shot muzzle loaders, of types which hadn't changed much in 200 years.
(*) what computers do is mainly reduce uncertainty and increase accuracy. Guns and rockets haven't changed much in generations, but precision guidance makes them much more effective. So does something like computerized manufacture of lenses, which enables them to be used instead of iron sights by ordinary soldiers.
Typically, technologies go through an S-curve. They start slow (Babbage to Eniac, or Newcomen to Watt) then take off, go through a phase when it looks like they're going to hit the moon and "revolutionize everything forever", then level off.
The low-hanging fruit is plucked, and the Law of Diminishing Returns sets in. Adding capability becomes harder and harder and more and more expensive and eventually not worth it.
The technology may still -spread- and cause the same sort of changes in less advanced places as it did in the one it was developed in, but it's become "mature", ie., changes only slowly and incrementally.
Science fiction's typical mistake is straight-line extrapolation of the upward part of the S-curve.
Eg., SF from the 20's on is full of astonishingly big, fast aircraft/rockets.
And if you extrapolated the curve of maximum speeds in 1920-1960, we'd have interstellar FTL by now. But we don't. We have air transport very much like that of the best practice in the 1960's, just more of it. SST's belly-flopped.
All those Great Big Heinleinian Rockets. With navigation by slide rule... 8-). Or the steam-powered-everything projected in the Victorian period.
Add in Historical Compression Effect. People tend to think of their own lifetimes as bigger than the same amount of time in the past; but ten years has always been a long time in human terms, fifty years a very long time, and a century effectively "forever".
Innovation, whether technological or political or social, occurs in discrete "bursts".
It's punctuated equilibrium, not the Whig version of forever onward and upward faster and faster.
The period between the 1750's and the 1950's saw more "bursts" at the same time than any period before or since. I strongly suspect that that's about over, apart from the geographical spread of the "clutch" of innovations from the more to the less advanced nations.
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Our lives are much more like those of 1960 than 1960's were like 1900 in fundamental respect; in 1960 my family was living in a suburb. In 1900, they were all farmers and fishermen.
The gap between no phone and phones is greater than that between phones and smartphones; the gap between a guy on a horse and a telegraph is greater than anything since.
Many other technologies like cars, guns and aircraft haven't much changed at all in my adult liftime. We are not traveling to other solar systems, we don't have flying cars. The plane I flew to England in in 1964 travelled at almost exactly the same speed as the one I flew to England in in 2013; the main difference was that the people were bigger and the seats were smaller.
Or to deal in centuries, there was much more change between 1814 and 1914 than between 1914 and 2014.
In 1814, Chicago was a swamp where fur traders passed through, the fastest way to send a message was by horse, and Napoleon was defeated by armies using weapons invented in the 1600's.
In 1914 you could send messages instantaneously around the world, land travel was about as fast as it is now, and all the places in the US that are big cities were already big cities.
Much of the change that's occurred between then and now is a matter of geographical spread -- China is building railways now because thney didn't in the 19th century. Peasants are crowding into factories and their children are learning to read. Haven't I seen this movie before?