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So, on LJ this post went under the SFRA Paper filter. However, because I am having a moment of supreme vanity and really like this post that much, I'm going to post it to DW unfiltered, though cut so as not traumatize f-lists (or people who don't particularly like theorizing). As I said there, there will be two posts based on thoughts which resulted from reading my reading Samuel "Chip" Delany's essay "Politics of Paraliterary Criticism" for my SFRA paper: one dealing with Engineering the Future and the current politics of Science Fiction and its production (i.e. Libertarianism), and another looking at the comics industry, its ongoing struggle with fitting and creating for itself a definition, and how all of this ties into the dislike, in some fannish corners, of the existing editorial teams.
In his essay “[The] Influence of Science Fiction,” science fiction Grand Master Isaac Asimov says that, “without the initial assumption that there will be change, there is no such thing as science fiction, for nothing is science fiction unless it includes events played out against a social or physical background significantly different from our own.” He continues that this fiction does not in itself have to be predictive, but “the existence of change, the acceptance of change, is enough.” Asimov goes on to argue that if “enough people read science fiction, or are, at least, sufficiently influenced by people who read science fiction,” then enough people will come to accept, however reluctantly, that change and allow government leaders the freedom they need to plan for said change. (This part of Asimov’s argument is particularly pointed toward social issues, and will be tackled in a second.)
However, this description is itself rather flawed. As an example, recently in anime club we watched the first episode of Super Dimensional Fortress Macross (what became Robotech in the US). Created in 1982, Macross’s story was set in the near-but-still-far future of…2009. And for that time, the “existence” and “acceptance” of the change which caused humanity to build transforming robot planes and space-mounted defense platforms was enough to set it apart as different.
But on the flipside, the change in 2040, roughly when the canonical sequel Macross Plus is set, is not enough. For in 1994 when Macross Plus was made, the great expensive, exclusive technology of the future was the car phone, and in among all the holographic screens and super-sentient AI pop stars of Macross Plus lies, like a great big turd from our (current) past, a car phone.
In 1994, it seems none of Plus’s creators would have imagined that one day people would not use not their vehicle but a single portable device for communication and many other basic information-gathering tasks. And our current portable devices have even moved beyond the aforementioned creators’ modest visions: not only does the iPhone perform many of the same functions as the car phone of the future, but also allows users to snort virtual crack cocaine using a real nose and dollar bill (see the iSnort app).
I bring this up to point to rather bluntly illustrate the limits of Asimov’s description—just changing the environment is not enough. Another example is the world of Star Trek. Though Gene Roddenberry’s multiracial vision of the stars was changed enough in 1966, it becomes less so as the future advances. And the official Trek production company’s current reluctance to move the Trek universe into a future with open same-gender relationships can be seen as, assuming based on current-day standards a constant trajectory of social change, practically philistine post-2063.
Which moves one into politics. One of my early arguments for my SFRA paper was the idea that the uniformly Libertarian science fiction view of the future (or a future saved by Libertarians) was a great hamper to engineering the future because it left the future in the hands of a current political ideology which likes to assume current sociopolitical problems will go away somehow, often without making any effort to illustrate how this change happens.
As science fiction author Samuel “Chip” Delany takes pains to point out in his essay Politics of Paraliterary Criticism, “the ‘origin’ is never an objective reality; it is always a political construct.” (246) As such, the origin for science fiction’s “Future” according to Asimov and many others in the science fiction establishment is itself just a political construct meant to move forward their own libertarian political views. It’s not science fiction writers who truly moved society toward a future of LGBT or racial equality because their view was that, in the future, such things would be so unnoticeable so as to not come up. However, with enough real-world ‘un-change’ one can see that these differences still would be of notice, even in a our current steadily “post-racial” world (those are, I point out, very strong sarcastiquotes). Asimov and his ilk wrote an impossible ideal (both bad and good) instead of a possible, if idealistic, reality.
Though it is not longer the central thesis, it still plays a part because the libertarian “Future” is part of what hampers science fiction from seeing the future. For this Future (I think I can stop with the quotes now) has become so established as to be unquestionable. As Tor editor Patrick Nielsen Hayden told Reason, “Libertarianism is very much part of the intellectual argument of science fiction. It’s impossible to be a part of the argument of science fiction without engaging both broad libertarian ideas and also specifically the whole American free market intellectual tradition.”
To this Nishitani would say, quoted inexactly, that ‘the laws of nature as man has decided them have taken over the process of nature, nature’s “is”.’ Science Fiction needs Libertarianism to supposedly justify itself, but Libertarianism as a political philosophy could exist existent of Science Fiction. Thus, any future which acknowledges the incrimentalist politics of current (and past) equality movements is one which in its realism stands in direct opposition to the Libertarian Imperative and is not to be even conceived of. Asimov’s change, based on the minimum requirement that the “existence of change, the acceptance of change, is enough,” turns out to now be not enough at all.
All this is, I think, one of the reasons Ted Chiang’s work is so refreshing, for it does not (in fact, it refuses to) tie itself down to the Great Sci-Fi Future in the Sky, but to the imperfect now. It deals with choices through people and environments which are made up of many political philosophies or none at all. Diversity and pluralism is the basis for Chiang’s future, the future which can be practically engineered.
Asimov ends his essay with the typically Asimovian, “but I was writing science fiction—so now I’m changing the world.” If I were to go back in time 28 years, I would make one small change to “making the world.”
A world from which we now endeavor to escape.
In his essay “[The] Influence of Science Fiction,” science fiction Grand Master Isaac Asimov says that, “without the initial assumption that there will be change, there is no such thing as science fiction, for nothing is science fiction unless it includes events played out against a social or physical background significantly different from our own.” He continues that this fiction does not in itself have to be predictive, but “the existence of change, the acceptance of change, is enough.” Asimov goes on to argue that if “enough people read science fiction, or are, at least, sufficiently influenced by people who read science fiction,” then enough people will come to accept, however reluctantly, that change and allow government leaders the freedom they need to plan for said change. (This part of Asimov’s argument is particularly pointed toward social issues, and will be tackled in a second.)
However, this description is itself rather flawed. As an example, recently in anime club we watched the first episode of Super Dimensional Fortress Macross (what became Robotech in the US). Created in 1982, Macross’s story was set in the near-but-still-far future of…2009. And for that time, the “existence” and “acceptance” of the change which caused humanity to build transforming robot planes and space-mounted defense platforms was enough to set it apart as different.
But on the flipside, the change in 2040, roughly when the canonical sequel Macross Plus is set, is not enough. For in 1994 when Macross Plus was made, the great expensive, exclusive technology of the future was the car phone, and in among all the holographic screens and super-sentient AI pop stars of Macross Plus lies, like a great big turd from our (current) past, a car phone.
In 1994, it seems none of Plus’s creators would have imagined that one day people would not use not their vehicle but a single portable device for communication and many other basic information-gathering tasks. And our current portable devices have even moved beyond the aforementioned creators’ modest visions: not only does the iPhone perform many of the same functions as the car phone of the future, but also allows users to snort virtual crack cocaine using a real nose and dollar bill (see the iSnort app).
I bring this up to point to rather bluntly illustrate the limits of Asimov’s description—just changing the environment is not enough. Another example is the world of Star Trek. Though Gene Roddenberry’s multiracial vision of the stars was changed enough in 1966, it becomes less so as the future advances. And the official Trek production company’s current reluctance to move the Trek universe into a future with open same-gender relationships can be seen as, assuming based on current-day standards a constant trajectory of social change, practically philistine post-2063.
Which moves one into politics. One of my early arguments for my SFRA paper was the idea that the uniformly Libertarian science fiction view of the future (or a future saved by Libertarians) was a great hamper to engineering the future because it left the future in the hands of a current political ideology which likes to assume current sociopolitical problems will go away somehow, often without making any effort to illustrate how this change happens.
As science fiction author Samuel “Chip” Delany takes pains to point out in his essay Politics of Paraliterary Criticism, “the ‘origin’ is never an objective reality; it is always a political construct.” (246) As such, the origin for science fiction’s “Future” according to Asimov and many others in the science fiction establishment is itself just a political construct meant to move forward their own libertarian political views. It’s not science fiction writers who truly moved society toward a future of LGBT or racial equality because their view was that, in the future, such things would be so unnoticeable so as to not come up. However, with enough real-world ‘un-change’ one can see that these differences still would be of notice, even in a our current steadily “post-racial” world (those are, I point out, very strong sarcastiquotes). Asimov and his ilk wrote an impossible ideal (both bad and good) instead of a possible, if idealistic, reality.
Though it is not longer the central thesis, it still plays a part because the libertarian “Future” is part of what hampers science fiction from seeing the future. For this Future (I think I can stop with the quotes now) has become so established as to be unquestionable. As Tor editor Patrick Nielsen Hayden told Reason, “Libertarianism is very much part of the intellectual argument of science fiction. It’s impossible to be a part of the argument of science fiction without engaging both broad libertarian ideas and also specifically the whole American free market intellectual tradition.”
To this Nishitani would say, quoted inexactly, that ‘the laws of nature as man has decided them have taken over the process of nature, nature’s “is”.’ Science Fiction needs Libertarianism to supposedly justify itself, but Libertarianism as a political philosophy could exist existent of Science Fiction. Thus, any future which acknowledges the incrimentalist politics of current (and past) equality movements is one which in its realism stands in direct opposition to the Libertarian Imperative and is not to be even conceived of. Asimov’s change, based on the minimum requirement that the “existence of change, the acceptance of change, is enough,” turns out to now be not enough at all.
All this is, I think, one of the reasons Ted Chiang’s work is so refreshing, for it does not (in fact, it refuses to) tie itself down to the Great Sci-Fi Future in the Sky, but to the imperfect now. It deals with choices through people and environments which are made up of many political philosophies or none at all. Diversity and pluralism is the basis for Chiang’s future, the future which can be practically engineered.
Asimov ends his essay with the typically Asimovian, “but I was writing science fiction—so now I’m changing the world.” If I were to go back in time 28 years, I would make one small change to “making the world.”
A world from which we now endeavor to escape.