I've been reading Karl Schroeder since his first novel, Ventus, was published in 2001. He's one of the most original and thought provoking writers working today. He's also a certified futurist (yes, there is such a thing), who has been hired by governments and corporations to help them plan for change.
He's now publishing a newsletter, Unapocalyptic, in which he says: "We talk about how a new science fiction can help us design a 21st century in which we can all thrive. News, facts, & worldbuilding for SciFi & personal futures." I have posted about it before, but I thought that his most recent post, The Science Fiction of the 1900s, deserves special mention.
In it he looks at how 20th century science fiction has shaped our visions of the future.
If the terror of my youth is different from the terrors of today, maybe I can also reframe the science fiction of the 1900s as carrying a different set of promises than we need in the 2020s. Maybe its main tropes are no longer relevant to the current moment.
This matters because in our modern technological society, science fiction tells us what to spend our time and money on. Do I really need to argue for this?—after all, the world’s richest man, Elon Musk, has made it his mission to implement the 1900s vision of what the 21st century was supposed to look like. Look at the things he’s working on: Space flight. Settling Mars. Cyberpunk-style brain-computer interfaces. Artificial Intelligence. Self-driving electric cars. Humanoid robots. These are the 1900s’ vision of the 2020s; he’s trying to catch up to where 1980s SF thought we’d ‘advance to’ by now. The cliche complaint of “where’s my flying car?” is literally his complaint about the world, and he aims to do something about it.
He goes on to say it's time to think about different visions of the future that are based on what is happening now as we transition into a new era, the anthropocene using Neal Stephenson's concept of the hieroglyph, introduced in an anthology of the same name.
His hieroglyph is a science fiction meme that detonates in the public consciousness, sparking society-wide bursts of creativity. Examples of hieroglyphs are easy to find: the classic finned rocket-ship, the time machine, the blocky toy robot, the Star Trek communicator, VR goggles. The 1900s were packed with hieroglyphs, each one inspiring whole generations to enter engineering and science careers and make some hieroglyph real. The anthology posed a simple question: where are the hieroglyphs of the 21st century?
It's a powerful idea and one of that he plans to explore in more detail in future posts on his newsletter. I recommend it, and his novels, highly.
1 comment:
I've been participating since the start with (too) long comments - including disagreements. It's a great topic, and Karl runs a smart, polite salon.
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