The Future Revisited
In the ‘summations’ at the start of his annual ‘best of’ SF anthologies, the editor Gardner Dozois repeatedly comments that many critics, readers and even writers lament the ‘death of SF’ (he then goes on to show them how wrong they are with his intriguing choice of stories published in the previous year). The truth is that we now live in the ‘future’ that authors of classical SF wrote about in the 40s-60s and it is all rather a bit of an anti-climax.
Our dreams of exploring the stars (or even the solar system) and encountering alien civilisations have faded. I am losing patience with current writers of space-opera that set their narratives in the far future without admitting that the hopes and expectations we had of space travel have died out and are unlikely to be revived in our lifetimes.
But I don’t think that SF is ‘dead’—far from it. After all, it is not just about spaceships and aliens. Sure, we don’t have humanoid robots doing our household chores and virtual reality has become rather jaded. It is perhaps not the best time to go on writing dreamy stories about a utopian future, but SF has always pointed a finger at necessary changes and messy outcomes (Phillip K Dick springs to mind; the post-apocalyptic wasteland described in the stories I read in my youth still haunts me). There is no need to colonise other worlds, encounter space monsters or invoke a VR heaven (although a lot of fun can be had with this); it is perhaps far more important to look at our own possible future—the stuff that could happen in our lifetimes. The problem with this is, of course, that fact sometimes overtakes fiction. I’ve iced my first story because it is not science-fictional enough and moved on to another based on Usenet discussions from several years ago—only to find that several things have already happened that lessen its impact considerably, although not its message. I’m sticking with it for now and was tweaking around with genetic modifications (a favourite topic with current SF writers), when I came across a recent revolution in molecular biology which is redefining how we think about the genome. Fascinating though this is (check out ‘The RNAissance’ which touches on a bit of what the new methodology can do or play around with PhenoBlast—yes, mess around with the phenome!), it appears that everything I’m turning my thoughts to is already happening. Aaarrgh!
—So what do you want next? Faster than light travel? Sentient computers? First contact? Just say and I’ll think about it and it will probably happen in a year or two ;}
Tags: Neither here nor there, Tag Index
Denni