Where is the Science Fiction?
The illuminating light of science fiction’s ‘Golden Age’ is
finally dimming to leave the stage to the ambiguous darkness of ‘exhausted’
genre crossing. Most of the science fictional and the futuristic visions of the
future nowadays have an inclination towards ambiguity, negativism,
hopelessness, unsightliness and uncertainty – and it is for a good reason to
some extent. We, as humans, have a melancholic tendency for destroying
ourselves, the environment that we were supposed to co-exist with is dying at
our hands, nearly eighty percent of the world’s population is ‘believing in –
living according to the doctrines of’ one of the numerous dogmatic religions,
and our mistrust and misuse of new technologies makes it hard to give up the
past. In times like these, science fiction has always had concrete insights
into the future that would shape the roadmaps for many technological
improvements, sociological theories and economical behaviors. However, as
science fiction writers failed to identify this culture-wide conceptual
blockage of futuristic visions, we started to experience inevitable dystopic
outcomes, insurmountable sense of detachment from the world, and a desperate clinging
to ambiguous ‘fantastic’ as a last resort for backgrounds in today’s ‘science fiction’
(novels, short stories, movies, TV shows, etc.).
Currently, most writers of the genre no longer attempt to
depict the future since the future is now considered to be out of limits. The
world that we’re living in is perceived as ever-changing and any attempt to
predict the future would eventually be deemed as a futile effort. However,
without confronting this particular difficulty, as expected from the genre,
science fiction propounds this intellectual inaccessibility of the future as a
cultural event known as ‘the singularity’. The term was popularized by science
fiction writer Vernor Vinge and futurist Ray Kurzweil, and it is, generally
speaking, the point at which human and machine intelligences concurrently start
to increase in both size and speed, resulting in a cultural change with an
inclination towards the infinite. I won’t go into detail and try to explain
singularity in scientific terms, since that might be a topic for another
write-up and I’m just scrutinizing the fact that the genre writers are using
the term as a professional dodge. As the British critic Paul Kincaid reveals, “Somewhere amidst the ruins of cyberpunk in
the 1980s, we began to feel that the present was changing too rapidly for us to
keep up with. And if we didn’t understand the present, what hope did we have
for the future? The accelerating rate of change has inevitably affected the
futures that appear in our fictions. Things happen as if by magic […] or else
things are so different that there is no connection with the experiences and
perceptions of our present.”
After failing to generate an encouraging insight into
humanity’s future, science fiction writers responded to this issue by promoting
‘inwardness’ and turned their back on the world since they concluded it would
be more fun and less risky to write about less challenging topics instead. As
many critics have pointed out, science fiction’s failure to engage with the future
is a direct reflection of our culture’s dilemma as a whole. We are now so
utterly and indistinguishably wedded to the ideals of neoliberalism and the
doctrines of capitalist democracies, it is merely impossible to imagine a
future without a capitalist system. This issue was prominently evident in the
aftermath of the financial mortgage crisis recently when the banks across the
world began to collapse. However, lacking their own plans to replace these
neoliberal democracies, political warheads just stood back and pumped millions
of dollars into the global economy in hopes that the capitalist system would
find its right course again.
However, the writers of the genre never bothered to inquire
about the facts that led to this socio-economic and cultural exhaustion.
Instead, as I’ve stated before, they turned inwards and started producing
materials depicting an ironic detachment from the world. The ‘fantastical’ and
‘metaphysical’ backgrounds were deemed necessary as the genre writers were
intentionally blurring the boundaries of science-fiction and fantasy-fiction. As
Kincaid writes, “This is a notion that
has clearly taken root with today’s writers since they consistently appropriate
the attire of fantasy for what is ostensibly far-future science fiction, even
to the extent of referring ‘un-ironically’ to wizards and spells and the like.”
This intentional melting of different genres in a pot, this
criss-crossing of different genres with different origins, this ambiguity, this
fogginess is called the “New Weird”, which began in the 1990’s and developed as
a subgenre or continuation of the speculative ‘weird fiction’. After giving a
break to science fiction for more than ten years, I
decided to return to the genre with contemporary writers and award winners and
started reading China Miéville, Peter F. Hamilton, N. K. Jemisin and Nnedi
Okorafor. And what struck me most was the ambiguity of socio-economic
structures of the fictional worlds created in most of the novels of these
writers, the feeling of detachment from the world, the inescapable inclination
towards dystopic futures and the moral fogginess materializing on the face of
total post-apocalyptic scenarios. At first I thought that might just be a
coincidence on my part for choosing those writers and after a brief search I
found some articles tackling with the blurring of the traditional boundaries of
the genres. In one of these essays, author Michael Cisco writes, "The
“New Weird,” as I’ve said, is a topic for critics and not so much for writers.
Nothing could be more unenlightening or useless than a New Weird manifesto.
What strikes the observer is precisely the spontenaiety with which so many
different writers, pursuing such obviously disparate literary styles, should
vaguely intersect in this way. Instead of a set of general aims, we have a
great proliferation of correspondences on a more intimate level, like a
sprawling coincidence of idiosyncratic choices.”
When asked, author Cisco explains that the New Weird does
not promote ideology and purpose but is actually about relationships and
influences. Which writer read what before they started writing and who
influenced whom? Which writer used that really cool twist in my story before?
The genre is under constant danger with the sterile notions and writing
techniques stripped out of context. And according to Mark Fisher, this purging
of the genre, and therefore the culture, of both history and politics is a
by-product of capitalism. He then goes on to explain that, “The power of capitalist realism derives in
part from the way that capitalism subsumes and consumes all of previous
history: one effect of its ‘system of equivalence; which can assign all
cultural objects, whether they are religious iconography, pornography, or Das
Kapital, a monetary value. Walk around the British Museum where you see objects
torn from their lifeworlds and assembled as if on the deck of some Predator
spacecraft and you have a powerful image of this process at work. In the
conversion of practices and rituals into merely aesthetic objects, the beliefs
of previous cultures are objectively ironized, transformed into artifacts.”
(Mark Fisher on our current cultural malaise, recorded at
the DIY Conference, 2012)
As it’s not that hard to guess, literature isn't the only
medium that is plagued with this ambiguity. This exhausted charade can be
experienced through most of the TV shows and movies that are deemed as
science-fiction. I won’t go into too much detail explaining why these
productions lack the sincerity to claim a ‘sci-fi’ tag attached to their
titles, however I’ll just notify the most obtrusive aspects of them. In the critically
acclaimed and criticized Alien prequel ‘Prometheus’, a subversive creation myth
is introduced in the subtext of the movie, however most of the provoking
questions were left unanswered since the writers could not bring the themes
together in a comprehensible way. In the TV series ‘Fringe’, our agents are working
for a special unit called the ‘fringe department’ and that term couldn’t be
used more fittingly since particularly after the second season of the TV show,
the audience is bombarded with ambiguous notions about parallel worlds and paranormal
speculations about alien technologies. ‘Dramatization’ is a huge part of these
shows, however getting the aid of fantastical to account for the phenomena
presented there just adds salt to the wound that is blurring of the genres –
especially when the show claims to be a serious speculative fiction about
science. To exemplify, TV shows like ‘Lost’, ‘Alcatraz’ and ‘Terra Nova’ and
movies like ‘Signs’, ‘The Fountain’ and ‘Knowing’ (and I’m deliberately omitting
Marvel and DC Universe adaptations) are all either creating distinctive detachment
from the world or choosing the fantastical or mystical over scientific facts to
explain phenomena or both. In most of these productions, the science fiction
theme could safely be removed from the background and they could be replaced
within a fantastical or historical setting.
One other deficiency of the contemporary science fiction I
witnessed, though this is experienced largely on novels and short stories, is
that the genre writers are lacking the urge to generate reasonable productivity
and insight for solving real life problems. Instead, some of the writers of the
genre create alternative timelines and history for the Western societies to get
a chance to adopt a fictional past without the white liberal guilt. We actually
had a glimpse of this sub-genre with the Steampunk tradition prominently in the
1980’s. Let’s have another look at the definition of this sub-genre for
argument’s sake and move on from there: Steampunk is a sub-genre of science
fiction that typically features steam-powered machinery, especially in a
setting inspired by industrialized Western civilization during the 19th
century, or a post-apocalyptic environment. Therefore, steampunk works are
often set in an alternate history of the 19th century's British Victorian era
or American "Wild West", in a post-apocalyptic future during which
steam power has regained mainstream usage, or in a fantasy world that similarly
employs steam power. Steampunk perhaps most recognizably features anachronistic
technologies or retro-futuristic inventions as people in the 19th century might
have envisioned them, and is likewise rooted in the era's perspective on
fashion, culture, architectural style, and art. Such technology may include
fictional machines like those found in the works of H. G. Wells and Jules
Verne, or the modern authors Philip Pullman, Scott Westerfeld, and China
Mieville. Other examples of steampunk contain alternate history-style
presentations of such technology as lighter-than-air airships, analog
computers, or such digital mechanical computers as Charles Babbage and Ada
Lovelace's Analytical Engine.
This lack of historical truth and foundation of the
Steampunk is what makes it alluring in the first place, since it offers the
Western societies a way out of their guilt trip. These fictional pasts offered
by the sub-genre give the readers a chance to distance themselves from their
real colonial past, and thus the racism, sexism, homophobia and social
prejudice and inequality. And according to me, while these writers are
re-writing the past and replacing the irritating truths with fictional myths of
the new age, they’re just imposing a postmodern and ironic detachment from both
the historical record and political realities of our era.
Some might ponder whether I’m against the escapism
generated by this sub-genre and I wouldn't hesitate to imply that I’m a daunt
supporter of fantasy-fiction and furthermore, am still working on another
write-up about that specific genre. However, as I've stated before, this article
is mainly about blurring of the genres to create an ambiguous movement that is
detached from the world, unable to create meaningful insight into the future.
And contemporary science fiction writers are facing a challenge to widen the
cracks of the fractured polish of capitalism, peer into the future and write
insightful fiction that would excite the reader. And these futures, although fictional,
should get their feedback from our age, since creating a future is not
necessarily enough – science fiction writers ‘must’ envision futures that is
currently thought of as unimaginable.
As governments, economies and financial enterprises are
stumbling on the brink of devastation and the elite are acquiring riches beyond
measure, the Western dream is shattering. Deprived of new ideas and concepts
and horrified by the responsibility of having to keep the decaying system
alive, the Western political elite are bringing back the feudal hierarchy by
creating artificial enemies and forcing armies to fight outsiders. Having been
stripped of their identity, culture, solidarity, unity and dignity, the
Westerners have dutifully ignored the warning signs and carried on with buying
more useless stuff. What we need right now is interpretations of the future
rooted from our present, since the future is not what just lies ahead; it is
what we’re making with every thought and action of our living each day. The
science fiction genre should definitely think in new terms, interpret the
future by looking from different angles and try innovative ways to project insightful
scenarios.
Reference:
5. http://www.sfsignal.com/archives/2012/10/the-future-is-not-a-land-of-enchantment-on-sfs-exhaustion/
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