Science Fiction Fails the Long View

My friends know that I write science fiction. Some of them treat this fact like a terminal illness–something unfortunate and never to be talked about. Some of them try to be helpful.

This is about one who tried to be helpful. He brought by a whole mess of vintage science fiction magazines and anthologies he’d found in his favorite thrift store. We’re talking obscure stuff here, from Other Worlds of the 50s to Galaxy of the 70s, together with collections from Fantasy and Science Fiction (in hardback, no less) from the 60s.

“Cool!” I thought, flipping through the age-yellowed magazines. I figured I’d skim through them later, and see what massive talents had been lost in the march of time.

But it didn’t work out like that.

As other guests arrived for my little get-together, they immediately gravitated towards the brightly-colored covers of the old magazines. They’d pick them up, turn them over, leaf through a few pages, and put them down. Or they’d comment.

“Hey man, did your 6-year-old paint this cover?” someone asked.

I explained that these magazines came from a different era, when they literally had to jump off the shelf. But, you know, some of the art was pretty amateurish. I wondered how big of an art budget they had, even in the “golden age.” Probably not very large.

And then they started reading. That’s where the fun truly began. “Ha, he just put a tape in his stereo,” one guest said. “And the story is set in 2010!”

“Yeah, and this one has a computer the size of a 150-story building–underground!”

“And we’re still fighting the commies in 2080 here.”

“That’s all right, we had a nuclear war in this one.”

“Wow, what’s a teletype?” (This in a story set in 1996.)

“That computer has tubes? Tubes?!!”

I pointed them at the Fantasy and Science Fiction anthologies, telling them that this was a more serious magazine, and those collections were supposed to represent their best work.

But the howlers continued. Tapes, records, shortwave, teletype, building-sized computers with tubes, commies, nuclear war–they were all there.

Or, in other words, the things top of mind became top of story. By and large, what we saw before us, we wrote. Oh, yeah, we made things smaller and sleeker and faster, but we didn’t invent wholly new things. I haven’t gone through all the stories in all the magazines yet, but the gist is clear: there ain’t a whole lot of visionary going on here!

And I have to wonder if it isn’t the same today. Will we look back on the vast majority of stories today as quaint and small-minded and not very visionary? Probably. Because it’s always easiest to take a single trend and extrapolate it. It’s simplest to write about what is top of mind, right now. It’s really, really hard to weave multiple trends together into a believable whole. Or imagine a wholly new technology that changes everything.

Maybe this is why the current mode of science fiction is dark. We hear about terrible things happening in the world, and we write about them. We see our place on the world stage being supplanted, and our anxiety about this ends up on the page. Wrap it up in a more-advanced, pervasive internet, and we have a modern, sellable story.

But this isn’t the future we’ll be living in.

March 19th, 2008 /