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Worlds Without End Blog

Can Science Fiction Save Us? Posted at 10:49 AM by James Wallace Harris

jwharris28

This essay was originally written for SF Signal but was rejected because it discusses religion and politics. I published it on my blog Auxiliary Memory but it got little notice. I thought Worlds Without End readers might be the proper audience. I’m afraid it still references religion and politics, but I’ve rewritten it to be more respectful.


Science fiction has always used world-wide worries to inspire story ideas, and since we have more problems than ever, no science fiction writer should have writer’s block. Science fiction about climate change is a growing sub-genre, and our lists of future-shaking events keeps growing. Any current concern in the news can be extrapolated into the future, becoming a muse for science fiction. But how effective is fiction at solving real world problems? Can science fiction save us?

When I was growing up the future was so bright we had to wear mirror shades. Now, our tomorrows are clouded over by menacing speculative storms. Most of the 7.3 billion passengers on spaceship Earth are so preoccupied with their day-to-day survival that any thoughts about the future are reserved for escapes into imaginary wonderlands. And I can dig that too — who desires realism when its dreary? Anyone who has seen Sullivan’s Travels, a Preston Sturges film about The Great Depression misery, knows that people don’t want stories with messages, but stories that let you forget your problems. I assume Lois McMaster Bujold has more fans than Paolo Bacigalupi.

dark clouds 3

Science fiction has always taken two paths. The first, and most common, is to entertain. The second, and harder to travel, is to philosophize about the discoveries of science and imagine what they mean to the future. Science fiction has always produced wild speculations, but for most of its history, was never taken seriously. SF was often ridiculed, even though it can be considered a cognitive tool for a highly specific task. Serious science fiction can warn us about emerging dangers through extrapolation, but it also has the potential to create desired goals with creative speculation.

Yet, I’ve got to wonder if science fiction can save us. When I was growing up you’d hide your Heinlein inside a copy of Lady Chatterley’s Lover to avoid the embarrassment of being caught reading science fiction. Science fiction was childish fantasies for weirdo kids. Trufans rationalized science fiction was serious stuff, claiming it prepared readers for the future, but that was mostly laughed at. Things changed May 25, 1977 when Star Wars came out, and science fiction became the favorite form of fairy tale for the information age. Now, billions say they love Sci-Fi, but few take it seriously. Should they?

The future is shaping up to be everything we never wanted. Maybe it’s time to reconsider science fiction’s role. Christians believe that studying the teachings of Jesus can save people, at least after they die. I’d like to believe studying science fiction could save our species before we reach self-extinction. I’m not asking that science fiction become boring and pedantic. I’m just wondering if it’s possible for science fiction to imagine desirable futures that are sustainable. Project Hieroglyph was one attempt.

Novels like Among Others by Jo Walton and All the Birds in the Sky by Charlie Jane Anders convey how painful it used to be growing up nerdy. SF fans were outcasts. In my day they’d call us zeroes. But now that the geeks have inherited the Earth, science fiction fans seem to have taken over the world. Is it’s appeal large enough to be influential? Science fiction must compete with two older literary traditions, The Bible and The Quran, for explaining reality. Science offers the only consistent explanation of reality, but evidently the majority of folks on this planet can’t comprehend it. Science fiction is only slightly more rigorous than religion, but it might be a step in the right direction since religion desperately seeks to focus on the past.

Just because pop culture has embraced comics and science fiction, doesn’t mean they have social impact. Can any novel change society? Maybe. Consider George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four. That tale of Big Brother and newspeak did more to undermine communism than all the John Birchers put together. Uncle Tom’s Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe shamed a nation against slavery, so we know novels can help reshape morality. How many Victorian minds were blown by H. G. Wells? And didn’t Catch-22, M*A*S*H and Slaughterhouse-Five convince many Americans to turn against the Vietnam War?

Every day the mass media brings us more stories about how the future is going to bring humanity retribution for its evil ways. Political conservatives and faithful fundamentalists from around the globe have dedicated themselves to denying science. If billions refuse to listen to scientists, why should they pay attention to science fiction? Christianity uses Hell as an effective tool to sell salvation, so why don’t frightening futures work for science fiction? Of course Christianity has made the purchase price of salvation so ridiculously cheap that most people figure why not buy. Saying “I believe” is a micro-payment compared to the painful expense of self-disciplining our souls. This isn’t an atheist’s jab at religion, but lessons I learned from reading The Cost of Discipleship by Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Anyone who has studied The Bible knows how the prophets plead for their followers to take their warnings serious. History shows few people heeded the prophets, so I tend to think few now will pay attention to science fiction.

Where the rubber hits the road to tomorrowland is the fact that we all need to change the way we live. Most people can’t lose weight even when the incentive is not to die a miserable death. As a species we’re very adaptable at surviving in diverse environments, but we can’t adapt ourselves to stabilize the environment. In 1968, I read Stand On Zanzibar by John Brunner. I was horrified by his vision of 2010. Brunner claimed two common themes would exist, worldwide terrorism, as well as daily TV news stories about crazed individuals committing mass killings. I really didn’t want to grow up to live in that future. But we all have. Could we have studied Brunner in the sixties to avoid the now in which we live? Brunner didn’t offer any prophecy. By the way, prophecy isn’t about predicting the future, but about convincing people how to live, so as to create a desired future. Read The Prophets by Abraham J. Heschel to see what I mean.  Can any science fiction novel be truly prophetic? Science fiction can create elaborate extrapolations leading to scary tomorrows, but can it find paths to greener pastures? The prophets of history tried to convince folks to build a better future, and I think that’s what some science fiction writers want to do too.

How often has the fate of the Earth been the plot driver of science fiction? 99% of the purpose of science fiction is entertainment, and even that 1% of serious speculation needs to be entertaining secondarily. Some science fiction writers have been prophets. Unfortunately I have to say this again, as people who read The Bible know, few people listen to prophets, which probably answers my title question.

I bring up this question now after reading All the Birds in the Sky by Charlie Jane Anders, the first SF/F book I read for 2016. Anders’ book is getting great reviews and buzz around the net. It’s a wonderful YA/SF/F/Literary mashup about many things, including the forces of magic and the forces of science separately fighting climate change. Not to give anything away, but I found their desperate solutions rather horrifying, which I think was Anders intention, but other recent science fiction stories have also come up with similar solutions that are even scarier.

The most extreme example is Interstellar, which preaches sacrificing all to build spaceships to seed other worlds before Earth collapses. Their logic is we’ve used up Earth, so let’s abandon it and go find a new home. There was never any suggestion that we try to save our planet. It’s the ultimate example of disposable consumerism. Our home world is a used Kleenex, so toss it out and get a new one.

In Seveneves, the latest novel by Neal Stephenson, the Earth is destroyed by an astronomical event, but humans were given enough time to build a fleet of Noah’s arks in space. This avoids the ethical issue of self-destruction. The story is extremely optimistic about our technological potential. But one of the common reasons now given to justify the colonization of other worlds is that we need to get all our genetic eggs out of one basket. Even scientists like Stephen Hawking are promoting this idea. And it’s logical. We could claim that science fiction inspired this philosophy. If we ever spend the money to colonize the Moon or Mars, we can give science fiction the credit. However, humans haven’t left Low-Earth orbit for over forty years, even after an explosion of science fiction popularity since the last man walked on the Moon. Taking care of Earth should be our prime priority — but it seldom is in science fiction. When will everyone realize that Earth might be our only home for millions of years?

We’re starting to see more science fiction deal with climate change. One very vivid novel last year, The Water Knife by Paolo Bacigalupi, focused on water wars. Bacigalupi doesn’t offer any instructions on how to avoid that future, but does paint such a horrifying picture of climate change’s side-effects that he’s trying to scare us straight. The novel got some good reviews, but I’ve yet to meet anyone else who’s read it and haven’t heard any buzz about it on the net.

Is preaching fire and brimstone futures the only tool science fiction has to convince us to avoid our life of sin? And let’s fess up here, climate change, mass extinction, polluted land, sea and sky, economic inequality, sexism, racism, xenophobia, and all the rest, are our sins. Yes, the world sometimes ends in a comet collision, gamma-ray burst or super-volcano eruption, but most of the time, Earth gets trashed by us.

There’s a growing library of climate change science fiction (Cli-Fi). But will reading such stories make us consume fewer resources? How many people read science fiction? Well, not that many. But multitudes go to the movies to see science fiction. What if HBO offered a mini-series based on The Windup Girl by Paolo Bacigalupi? Would it influence politics and lifestyle? The Windup Girl illustrates the results of climate change, monoculture farming, and using up all the oil. Even though it’s a very colorful future, it’s not one that most people would visit if they had a time machine.

All the governments around the world are working on reducing C02 in the atmosphere. Ninety-eight percent of the scientists and a large percentage of the general population know about the dangers of increased C02. The problem is many people refuse to believe there is a problem, including the Republican Party. Would more science fiction illustrating what life might be like after “visiting the iniquity of the fathers on the children and the children’s children, to the third and the fourth generation” make a difference? If all of us believed the science of climate change absolutely, would we change the way we live? Or are too many Homo sapiens fatalists?

1998 brought two films, Deep Impact and Armageddon about big rocks crashing into our planet. Since then, governments around the world have been spending money to develop early warning systems. And can’t we claim all the SF stories about malevolent emerging AI made the current client of skepticism of artificial intelligence what it is today? Hasn’t the phrase “living off the grid” come from SF-awareness? Haven’t all the Preppers gotten their philosophy from science fiction? Didn’t we go to the Moon because of science fiction? Cold war politics paid for the Apollo program, but wasn’t science fiction the original inspiration?

Science fiction can give us thousands of scenarios about ecological catastrophes, mass extinction events, and AIs transforming society, but are they useful? Do we all just read the stories to be thrilled, and then continue on with our excessive lifestyles, ignoring daily species extinctions, and even wanting our computers to get smarter and take over more jobs?

I have to be cynical here. Could science fiction be like religion, in that we’re willing to talk the talk, but not walk the walk? How many of the faithful swear absolute belief, yet make no attempt to live divinely? How many eco-evangelists live green lives? For the prophets of science fiction to succeed they must first imagine livable lifestyles, and then convince readers to live them. And isn’t the record for famous Biblical prophets something like Prophets 0, People 17? I don’t think we escape our fate by self-flagellation and choosing to live like ascetics. We need visionaries who can imagine new kinds of urban lifestyles that protect the environment yet offer self-sustaining forms of abundances to seek, rather than our rampant destructive consumerism we chase now.

Science fiction has always excelled at imagining Hells, but it’s awful at inventing Heavens. In fact, dystopias are what kids love today. Why? Isn’t it kind of sick that the chosen setting for escapist literature is a dystopia? Why have utopias gone out of fashion? Sure utopias are impossible almost by definition, but getting close might be possible. Utopias were popular hundreds of years ago, but I guess most of humanity gave up on Heaven on Earth back in the 19th century.

Donald Trump campaigns with the slogan “Make America Great Again” so we know a better future is a popular want because of his success. Yet, Republicans are so adamant about no new taxes that they are causing the country to slide into ruin and disrepair. You can’t make a great nation by penny pinching. All the anti-tax revolutionaries have done is ruined K-12 and higher education, neglected the infrastructure, deflated the middle class, fired first responders, teachers and other valuable governmental employees, gutted libraries, let parks run down, defund science and research, and the list goes on and on. America was great when we had the Apollo Moon program, or when we were fighting WWII—and we all paid a lot more in taxes. We weren’t cheap, and knew building a great nation costs money and requires sacrifice.

We have the scientific knowledge and technology to solve all our problems, but we don’t. Why? Because we’re not unified. All across the globe populations are divided between conservatives and liberals. Most of the Muslim world, and half the Christian, want to return to the past, to embrace an Old Testament view of reality. We all live in the same reality, but we each perceive it differently. Until we reach some kind of consensus about the nature of reality, we’re not going to solve our problems. This is where pop culture comes into play, it’s a kind of peer pressure of ideas.

At some point we have to do what the prophets ask, or face extinction. Did all the prophets of the past fail because they imagined unappealing lifestyles? Evidently convincing people to do what’s hard never succeeds over people choosing to do what they feel like. Can science fiction ever make us disciplined?

I didn’t write the above to make a political point, but to show that we lack vision for making life better. Most conservatives are arming themselves for the Armageddon, while liberals focus on their own brand of gloom and doom. Science fiction needs to stop thinking about the end of the world and focus on the goal of surviving a million years on this planet. If we don’t think about the future, then the future becomes whatever we’re doing without thinking.

JWH

6 Comments

bleebs   |   23 May 2016 @ 12:04

Interesting article, thanks. I think the most important SF writer that has written and thought about these matters himself is Kim Stanley Robinson. He sees a moral imperative too, for all writers. I’ve quoted the following in my extensive review of ‘Green Earth’ too, and it’s from the introduction to that book…

“Also, my original idea had been to write a realist novel as if it were science fiction. This approach struck me as funny, and also appropriate, because these days we live in a big science fiction novel we are all writing together. If you want to write a novel about our world now, you’d better write science fiction, or you will be doing some kind of inadvertent nostalgia piece; you will lack depth, miss the point, and remain confused.”

SF can save us, in the sense that it advocates the scientific method – the only method available to humanity to safeguard and improve our shared biosphere.

Rising anti-intellectualism might be countered by inspiring stories, like ‘Seveneves’ – they’d better be entertaining too, if they want to be effective, and reach a significant audience.

There’s lots of interviews and talk on YouTube wherein KSR explores all this, like the following talk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Csvroehk7Ww

Also, as I’ve written in the review for ‘What Kind of Creatures Are We?’ on my blog, Chomsky’s distinction between ‘mysteries’ and ‘problems’ is maybe interesting to readers of this piece. The quote him: there is “a distinction between problems, which fall within our cognitive capacities, and mysteries, which do not.” I’ve used this distinction and proposed to use it as a distinctive factor between fantasy and SF: fantasy mainly deals with mysteries, and SF mainly deals with problems… It’s obvious our planet and species face a lot of problems, so in that respect SF (in the Robinsonian tradition) is a more productive genre.

bleebs   |   23 May 2016 @ 12:13

Of course, SF alone won’t save us. Civil activism is needed, amongst other things to counter orchestrated climate change denial.

If not you, who? If not now, when?

Scott Laz   |   23 May 2016 @ 12:46

Another recent book that could be mentioned in this context is Kim Stanley Robinson’s Aurora, which indirectly makes the point that we’d better take care of home, since leaving it and colonizing other worlds is probably not as feasible as Golden Age SF led us to believe.

Possibly the oldest conundrum in human history and development is the conflicting incentives inherent in our social species between the individual and the community, or between smaller and larger social groups. We seem to be “programmed” (by way of evolution) for individual survival, which means we will always fight for more resources for ourselves (and our families or communities), but the resulting actions are often at odds with the long-run well-being of those same individuals, especially as populations grow and resource constraints become binding. This is what leads to the paradox of knowing (or at least having a very good idea) of what needs to be done to solve collective problems like global warming, but being unable to accomplish these actions. Given our economic incentives for individual survival, both in general and in context of our particular economic system, it is extremely difficult for any individual to take the actions necessary to make an impact on the situation, even though many would like to. I don’t think the vision is lacking to solve collective problems, but the collective will/ability certainly seems to be. (Another example of this kind of dynamic, and much simpler to solve than global warming, is the problem of declining fisheries. Collectively, regulating global fisheries by creating more marine reserves and reducing catches to sustainable levels, would increase fish populations and benefit people who make a living from catching fish. But at the level of individual incentives, each fisher wants to catch as many fish as possible in order to make a living today, resulting in collective overfishing. Even if the individual fishers recognize the problem and want to solve it, each has no incentive to do so, since an individual fisher reducing her catch will have no impact on the overall problem. The reduction in fishing has to be collective, and so must be enforced by regulation, which is currently insufficient in international waters.) Vision isn’t enough; a political organization within society capable of implementing it, and getting individual buy-in, is required.

The anti-tax sentiments mentioned are another excellent example of this. Individually, I’d be better off paying less tax, but if we all pay less tax, we end up with degrading infrastructure, worsening education, and less scientific research. There are only three things that definitely lead to long-run economic growth: infrastructure investment, increased educational attainment, and science/technology! These things increase economic productivity, and the only way to increase average income is through higher productivity. But how many individuals (outside the wealthy elite that shapes the debate, and are the only real beneficiaries of low taxes) understand the connection between higher taxes/government investment and their own long-term economic prospects?

The question of whether the cautionary tales of science fiction, or the promise of science fictional utopias, can actually lead to change is one of the oldest ones among fans. Of course, there’s no way to really measure cause and effect in relation to this. We have lots of anecdotes about people who got interested in technological promise as young SF fans, and then went on to career in these fields (especially the space program and computer science), but maybe these technologies would have developed in any case. For me, reading things like Asimov’s Foundation and Le Guin’s The Dispossessed at an “impressionable” age led to an interest in the workings of societies that resulted in studying social science (economics), which allows me to teach students about the sort of issues discussed in this essay. We can only hope that SF (and our own additional efforts) can make some contribution to influencing enough people that a critical mass needed for change. Cynicism is understandable right now, but one of the reasons I love SF is that it constantly reminds us that, for better or worse, things will change in ways that we cannot now foresee.

Jim Harris   |   23 May 2016 @ 14:10

@bleebs – I like that image we’re all living in a science fiction novel we’re collectively writing. But it’s sort of like what Scott is saying, are we writing by ourselves, or we writing together.

But aren’t we all sitting on the deck chairs of the Titanic reading SF novels?

I read a lot of news stories each day via News360 & FlipBoard. Some give me hope, and others despair. The hopeful ones show we have the knowledge to solve our problems, the depressing ones are those that show we ignore what we know.

bleebs   |   23 May 2016 @ 15:00

If I’m in a pessimistic mood I think we’re on the deck of the Titanic too, but I try to do my part by teaching. Most of the time I’m an optimist for the human race in the long rung (a few centuries), but the coming 100 years will be hard indeed.

Humans aren’t only selfish individuals. We are a collective species, and most of the time we are pretty empathic and cooperative: when it comes to family and friends, but even neighbors or even the country most people can be very altruistic, so it’s all about expanding the golden circle, to borrow Peter Singer’s terminology.

I think part of the problem is that lots of people don’t ignore what we know, but simply do not know: they are not convinced of the scientific method, but remain stuck in just following their gut feelings. E.g. climate change deniers don’t ignore, they don’t believe (the method).

The way forward is to try to empower scientists and let them way more on policy. If the sciences had as many lobbyist behind them as industry has, things would become a lot more optimistic.

Glenn   |   29 May 2016 @ 17:29

SF can’t do it alone.

I usually see it in terms of SF and sister disciplines which need to work in cooperation with each other.

Future Studies adds intellectual rigor and methodology to grapple with “the Future”.
SF as an idea generator and presentation medium.
Utopia Studies as the idealist wing, where the great “Goals” are generated.
Peace Studies as the plain hard nuts and bolts of on the ground movements.

And then leadership. We are taking about movements here.

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