December 30, 2004
Bad news for science fiction writers...
Radly Balko has an excellent column at FOXNews on the many ways that things are getting better in the world. (via InstaPundit) Fabulous tidbits. I've heard most of them, but it's cool to see them listed together. And bizarre, when you think also about the huge number of people who claim the world is in terrible shape, and sneer at anyone who is trying to make it better.
Here's one item I had not heard; the lowering of the "green ceiling."
—The world is getting cleaner. Most economists now endorse the concept of a “green ceiling,” which means that although the transition from a developing economy to a developed one requires some environmental exploitation, there is a point at which a country becomes wealthy enough that its citizens will begin to demand environmental protection.
The key is to get each country to that point as quickly as possible. And as noted earlier, that’s exactly what’s happening. The good news is, the “green ceiling” is getting lower every day. Right now, it stands at about $5,000 per capita GDP, but the World Bank reported in 1997 that poor countries begin turning the corner on water pollution, for example, at as low as $500 per capita...
My title comes from many depressing experiences while looking for SF books to read. I find myself examining one book after another, and they ALL depict some future earth where pollution and Global Warming are unchecked, 30 billion people are starving, corporations (evil of course) have replaced governments, industry is gray and grim and needs masses of uneducated poverty-wage workers... you get the picture. There's no hope. And it's all utterly stupid and wrong. Almost all the trends are just the opposite.
I know of course that writers need problems and catastrophes. It takes unusual skill to make a story out of a happy situation. But I suspect many SF writers learn about the "future" only by reading SF or talking to each other, and are quite out of touch with the real world. Also, they want to be out of touch with reality for another reason, because they are Liberals. That's another group that needs a world of misery that can only be helped (but never cured) by the actions of Big Government, and needs masses of wretched victims without hope. One tip-off in SF is the frequent "good guys" role given to the UN. Anyone connected to current reality knows that this is just goofy, that the UN is an utter catastrophe, corrupt and dedicated mostly to maintaining the world's miseries...(and fortunately too incompetent to have much success.)
I remember back in 2002 hearing that one of my favorite writers, Michael Swanwick, was taking a break from writing to do "anti-war activism." Which was to say pro-Saddam activism. And I speculate that what he was doing should really be described as a case of Baby-Boomer-preserving-smug-world-view-from-Vietnam-era activism. I think a similar case is Greg Bear, whose recent books have included shadowy right-wing conservatives tending towards fascism and restricting civil rights and imposing theocracy. The usual DU litany, John Ashcroft as Godzilla. To someone like me, who is IN that conservative milieu, these fantasies are pitiable.
But SF writers usually preen themselves on thinking out-of-the-box! And the conspicuous new (even science-fictiony) feature of our time is that it's conservatives and religious believers who are now the ones who are fighting for freedom and democracy and choice, who are now the Internationalists and the reformers. And it is now the liberals and secularists who are the crabbed and pevish reactionaries without hopes or dreams or optimism.
We are living in a time of astonishing change, with many reasons for hope. And SF writers should have been canaries in the coal mine, sniffing these changes ahead of the rest of us, instead of plugging their ears and singing La La La. I shouldn't have to pick up SF books and frequently say, "Oh Gawd, not another one."
I predict we will see the SF crowd now leap boldly into the future with tons of stories about hapless villages swept away by tsunamis. And ignoring the rapid deployment of warning systems that will save thousands of lives in the next disaster. And also ignoring the spread of prosperity and democracy in Third-World counties that will enable them to do much more to help themselves in the future.
Posted by John Weidner at December 30, 2004 10:49 AM | TrackBackTry some Connie Willis. She usually includes some protesters in her novels and her depictions are hilarious.
What's really fascinating, however, is to read the dystopian novels of a few decades ago. Harry Harrison's Make Room! Make Room! and John Brunner's The Sheep Look Up are prime examples that the nightmares of years gone seem overhyped today. (Brunner has a lot of interesting and even hopeful stuff; try The Crucible of Time for an interesting read.)
Actually, I've noticed that people who complain about the demise of SF (and the rise in fantasy) usually attribute it to an unwillingness to look to the future, a wish for "a simpler time." I wouldn't be surprised if, instead, it's merely a reaction to the constant doomsaying in mainstream (as much as it is) SF. There's very few authors I can think of in SF who are positive, and many of the few who are are also difficult reads. (Kim Stanley Robinson and Iain Banks, while stellar authors, are impossible to read in volume. They are not "popcorn"; they are the prime rib of writing, which means you can only take so much before you're FULL.)
I prefer fantasy, because it's about the people. I love SF that is about the people but, all too often, it's about the eking out of existence in a world of strained resources. Again.
Posted by: B. Durbin at December 30, 2004 02:31 PMI was ranting and overgeneralizing of course...tomorrow I may go to the bookstore and discover someone super. (Another Thomas Harlan or Phyllis Gotleib perhaps.) Connie is a delight, and often quite the anti-idiotarian—I adored Bellwhether.
And actually some of those constricted-future things are books I really really love, such as Ring of Swords, or Color of Distance. But they still are flawed by wrongheaded projections.
"Strained resources." You hit it, and you can add to the list of positive developments that RESOURCES are increasing. All of them are getting cheaper, measured in constant dollars. "Proven reserves" of oil continue to increase!
Posted by: John Weidner at December 30, 2004 06:27 PMYou can try Vernor Vinge if you want something that's not negative. His A Fire Upon the Deep and A Deepness in the Sky are good. Orson Scott Card isn't relentlessly negative either.
Asimov was always pro-technology. There have always been writers who have been pro-, anti-, and neutral towards technology. Of course, it's always the antis who get the Hollywood movies. That abomination they called I, Robot, don't get me started.
Posted by: John Thacker at December 30, 2004 07:27 PMDon't get me started about Starship Troopers either. The book's theme was "A country worth keeping should be able to get volunteers to do the job" (well, there's a lot of themes but that's one of the key ones), while the movie— whose director PROUDLY stated that he hadn't read the book so as "not to pollute his vision"— had a theme of "War makes fascists of us all."
My husband, who likes big dumb action movies, loves the movie. Me, I can't suspend my disbelief nearly enough. There's not a military out there that would manage to function with the philosophy they portray as natural. (There were also several points I was screaming "court-martial!" at the screen. Gah.)
Posted by: B. Durbin at December 31, 2004 11:48 AMThe old masters are worth looking at again.
Larry Niven's main future timeline includes some weird new problems, along with a whole ton of weird new solutions to long-standing problems. Pretty much the way technology works in the real world. While he did predict overcrowding, and fertility laws as a consequence, he also postulated lots of energy (from nuclear fission and fusion, naturally), extensive settlement of space, and a human population that was basically interested in solving problems (rather successfully, on the whole) rather than bitching about them. No constrained resources here, other than Earthside real estate, and there were other places to go anyway.
Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle also wrote a couple of books that take a close look at how the whole "back-to-nature", "human-activity-is-the-root-of-all-evil" mindset is so unspeakably evil and destructive if it's ever taken seriously by anyone in power. There's one (Fallen Angels) that explores a world where global warming hysteria leads to massive restrictions on energy use leading to a new ice age, and another one (Lucifer's Hammer) with incredibly prescient predictions of the effects of a comet strike on the Earth, where we get to see what happens when the human race really gets back to nature and eschews the evils of modern technology (in a nutshell: lots of bloody fighting and lots of corpses).
Heinlein's future history, and most of his other works, are also strongly recommended.
Posted by: Ken at December 31, 2004 09:59 PM
