When I proposed a few weeks ago that we were, collectively, enduring a post-millennial malaise, I knew that I was likely not the first person to sense that or to write about it. But what I did not realize was that Alex Steffen, co-founder of WorldChanging.org, had posted -- three years earlier, almost to the day -- a strikingly similar article on the topic, titled "Science Fiction, Futurism and the Failure of the Will to Imagine."
Actually, most of Alex's piece was drafted in 2002, but not published until he saw this article in Popular Science that made him think, 'Hey, I already said that!'
Here's a little of Alex's original lament:
...a growing number of science fiction writers and critics contend that works which tackle the future with true originality are becoming something of an endangered species.
"There's still plenty of space opera out there, with heroes running around in galactic Disneylands," says author Bruce Sterling, "but almost no one is addressing the nature of the 21st Century, or putting together, like, genuinely novel visions of life in the year 2050."
In the 80's, Sterling notes, it gave young SF writers such as himself "a hormonal rush" to see their wildest predictions begin to come true a decade later; in the 90's, that lag had run to a couple years; now, he says, between the time a SF writer can predict something and his publisher can get it on the shelves, reality will have caught up. "Genuinely novel ideas about the future have a short shelf-life these days."
...Sterling sees a larger problem, a sort of "cultural anemia" in our society. Americans' confidence in the future has been rocked by events like the 9-11 bombings and the Dotcom collapse. We no longer have any "new, exciting destination myth," Sterling says. "Space certainly isn't it. Our space program has become a hollow symbol, something like one of those giant Stalinist statues of the worker and the peasant, full of rust and crumbling brick."
A simpler explanation, though, seems to make the most sense: the world is an increasingly complicated place, changing more and more rapidly, and finding ways to tell stories which make sense of the nature and direction of those changes is becoming more and more difficult. The accelerating pace of change is making the present harder to predict.
And here are some further thoughts that Alex added in 2004:
I now believe that the failure of futurists and writers of speculative fiction to "see around the corner" is a failure of the will, a symptom of too much closed-loop thinking. For while folks who think about the future pride themselves on being out there, the kind of out there that gets you kudos as a SF writer or corporate futurist has become utterly predictable. There are few shockingly new visions, I think, not because it's impossible to envision the future, but because an increasingly narrow band of visions resonate with these communities.
So, we've all been thinking the same thing, in 2002, in 2004, and today (in 2007), and the situation doesn't seem to be getting much better. Harrumph!
I should mention, by the way, that following the re-publishing of my "Post-Millennial Malaise" article by the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies (IEET), I received notes from a couple of science fiction authors who quarreled with my complaint about the dearth of big ideas in current SF, and referred me to their favorite recent novels (including some they themselves had written).
Okay, so not everyone agrees about the malaise.
Mike Treder
Tags: nanotechnology nanotech nano science technology ethics weblog blog
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