It’s hard to talk about dreams, especially cherished ones. As the Shins taught us, “caring is creepy,” and as Obama (supposedly) demonstrates, idealism is for kids and the deluded. Everything is going wrong, and it’s much easier to bitch, whine, and moan. Besides, telling people your hopes and dreams means they can attack them.
Let me tell you my dream.
Carl Sagan described a glorious dawn, a galaxyrise of four hundred billion suns. I see the glorious dawn, where every sun is different, strange, and new. Every star has heard the word, that the Eagle has landed. Around each sun are humans, in groups, in families, alone, speaking a babel of tongues. From one end of the galaxy to the other, you can find a sky full of ideologies, values, customs, histories, practices. Zensunni philosophers rub shoulders with Weighty Friends and Orthodox rabbis. It is a galaxy full of mystics, of people who have felt a strange and inexplicable connection to the sublime and indescribable.
And not just people. Too many futures are sterile, by choice or by accident. Asimov nailed the first with Trantor of Foundation, an entire world occupied only by “man, his pests, and his pets.” I see, instead, a flourishing and blossoming of Earth life and that of other worlds (if any). Humanity “and friends,” if you will. Where humans land, they bring Earth (or Mars) grasses, trees, yeasts, yogurts, whole ecosystems, which then change and adapt (as humans do, as ecosystems do, as life does) to their new worlds. We seek out new life, but not alone, we start new civilizations, but within a living world.
It is a living, thriving, meditating future. It may, in places, have war (but I hope not), and oppression (but I hope not), and horror (but I hope not). It’s a future to fuel an anthropologist’s wildest dreams, a sky full of lost tribes and strange subcultures. You could go into the field and never come back for centuries. And among the scattered stars are my children, laughing, fighting, weeping, sleeping, and exploring. And yours, too.
I like to say I’m a speculative fiction writer. Speculative fiction and all its branches are distinct from literary fiction, there’s something there that holds my interest and that of many others, as evidenced by the fact that it’s the only kind of fiction the Internet seems to consider worth stealing. To me, speculative fiction is the literature, not of ideas, but of questions. Science fiction asks, “what could happen?” Alternate history asks, “what if it had happened differently?” Fantasy asks, “What if it was all simply different?” Horror demands to know “what are you afraid of?” And speculative fiction itself, both including the others and standing alone, asks “what if…?” in all its Goldberg variations.
So, in this model, science fiction is the literature of asking what could happen. There’s two strains of SF, that have danced and interwoven over the years but which remain nevertheless distinct. I call them the Welles and Verne strains. Jules Verne gave science fiction “gee whiz!” and Welles gave it “caveat chrononator”. Verne’s heroes are scientists and explorers, discovering and delighting in the laws of science and the grandeur of the natural world. He was less interested in the Nautilus than in what you could see out its porthole, and Around the World in Eighty Days revolves entirely around a little-known fact of the International Date Line. “What if!” Verne cries, giddy as a schoolboy, amazed at the possibilities that could unfold.
Welles, on the other hand, was of a soberer disposition. He envisioned London crushed beneath unknowable (almost Lovecraftian) alien technology, finally turned back not by a plucky group of misfits in a last-ditch effort, but by a natural pest, the common cold. He used his marvelous machine (time, in this case, not sea) not to show us the wonders outside the viewport, but to warn us of the future that could come into existence. His traveler is confronted with the end of humanity, and the end of Earth, and gives us no answers to the questions raised. “What if,” Welles asks, hushed, almost afraid of the answer.
From the Welles-spring came Brave New World, 1984, Threads, Blade Runner, The Stars My Destination, The Iron Heel, and all the other works of SF that extrapolate a trend and in grave tones warns us from supposed destruction. From Verne comes Asimov’s Robots, Diamond Age, Little Brother, 2001: A Space Odyssey, and Star Trek, and all science fiction that promises a brighter, better future (even if it still has a few warts, old or new).
I chose these examples because, at the time they were written, these futures were considered plausible, or at least plausible enough to be worth talking about. The Soviet Union politely imploded, and Threads is now a nearly-forgotten collective nightmare vision of 1980s nuclear paranoia. 1984 came and went without Big Brother, and 2001 without a Jupiter mission. But in 1982, Threads was a horrifically near possibility. In 1948, Orwell saw it as entirely possible that Western liberal-capitalism, Soviet socialism, and Asian authoritarianism would become indistinguishable. And in the heady Apollo days of the 1960s, a Hilton in orbit and a mission to Jupiter were all but assured.
They were focused on what could be. Steampunk, to take one example, has incredible artistic merit. The original literary impetus was to put technology’s effects on society (such as the widespread use of information technology) in sharp relief by putting it in a radically different society (such as Victorian Britain). But it’s not science fiction. It’s not ‘what could be.’ It’s more akin to fantasy, as it’s about what never was. All cyberpunk’s daughters seem to be tending in the same direction, showing us futures we’ve left behind.
Over the past few years, I’ve seen a spike in this kind of retrofuturism. Not just steampunk, deiselpunk, et al., but the success of SpaceWesterns.com and its Bat Durstons, the future noirs (especially in film for some reason), and the increased interest in rocket-laden, sliderule-using, chainsmoking “raygun gothic.” Great stuff, all of it (Sturgeon’s Law aside), but not science fiction.
Where has all the science fiction gone? Of science fantasy, we’ve got plenty, and in so many flavors…from Star Wars to steampunk, visions of times which never were and could not be. But of science fiction, the literature and mythology of what could be, it all seems increasingly to tend toward two extremes: the horrific (embodied by Cormac McCarthy’s The Road) and the unthinkable (anything Vernor Vinge has ever written). Either the Apocalypse comes, or the Singularity does. There seems to be less and less out there, and less and less interest every year, in the strain of science fiction that takes an idea (usually out of the headlines) and runs with it, thinks it out, sees where it goes. To me, that is science fiction, whether the question is robots, augmented reality, ecology, or, ahem, meditation. There are, of course, exceptions (movies like Gattaca and Inception, novels like Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, Gilded Age: China 2013 and Anathem, stories like the intensely creepy “Baby Doll”) but this seems to be the way the pattern is tending.
Anyone care to prove me wrong? I could be easily suffering from selection bias, though, as always.
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Postscript: I say this, of course, as a futurist chronically stuck in the past. I’ve been told that all my speculative fiction has an old-fashioned tang to it, even when I specifically try to avoid it. This could be because I tend to stick pretty strongly to the three-act structure when most of what I read is more experimental. It could be because I grew up reading Foundation, Dune, Fahrenheit 451, Dangerous Visions, and “Why I Left Harry’s All Night Hamburgers,” not “Baby Doll,” Snow Crash, A Fire Upon the Deep, and Accelerando. Or it could be because I still tend to write stories from the question of what could happen. My upcoming Kickstarter-distributed story “Sweat and White Cotton” is about “I know kung fu” mind-machine interfaces and how they change the martial arts. I have one I’m working on right now, “Simplified,” about a future China so zealously dedicated to doing business and being modern that they’ve dispensed with tea, Chinese food, and the Chinese written language. I find it horribly plausible.
C’mon, eighties kids, you know this one: snakes, temples, death-traps, idols, desert chases, melting Nazis, human hearts, a map with a red line on it.
Lucas’ marketing men did their homework: “If adventure has a name, it must be Indiana Jones.”
My boy, Henry
But the eighties were a long time ago, and the thirties that Indy lived in never existed. You had to grow up, go to school, get a proper degree (not something useless like English, or history, or archaeology), rack up student debt, find your first real job, and, generally, keep up with the Joneses. It’s the right way to do things, and it might be a little harder now, but I’m sure you’ll get through it.
Let’s look at the numbers. I’m not studying social sciences for nothing. The economic unemployment rate is based on the labor market, which is the civilian noninstitutional population 16 years or older (1). That is, everyone over 16 who’s not in the military, in prison, or in a home. The jobless rate for Americans between 16-24 is a whopping 16.4%, damn near double the national average at 8.6% (2). Oddly enough, college kids in that cohort also have 8.6% joblessness, again double the unemployment rate of their elders.
Or, to put it another way: Look at your freshman English class. If it was anything like mine, there were forty people there, some of you standing in the hall. By the time you graduate, four of you will be unable to find a job. If you can only spot three people who will never work, guess what.
And you can back this one up with anecdotal evidence. All of you know someone who sent out a few hundred resumes, collected a few dozen rejections, and have moved back in with their parents “temporarily” to save money. They’re sending out a few hundred more. It’s been six months, or twelve months, or two years, and their grace period for their school loans ran out a long time ago.
What’s worse, they’re telling us that we’ll be feeling it in forty years. According to Business Week, those of us with the temerity to graduate into a bad job market (England in the early 1980s, Japan in the 1990s, America in the late 2000s) will be making 93% of what we could have if only they’d been born about five years earlier (3). This will stick with us, in the form of reduced pay over a lifetime, chronic holes in our resumes, and increased rates of depression and mental illness. Income in the form of purchasing power has been dropping steadily since we were born, since the first Indiana Jones film came out.
Still, there’s nothing you can do. If you want to live a comfortable lifestyle, you’re going to have to move out, get straight to work, and pay off your debt. Except, you can’t find work, you can’t afford it, and, well, frankly, that makes you a bad person. A failure. And it’s because you spend too much time online, and you have the attention span of a goldfish, and you have no idea how the real world works.
I’d like everyone under thirty to join in here: Fuck that!
This is a wonderful time to do something insane and awesome, because you have nothing to lose. No, really. If you could spend the next year living in your parents’ basement, collecting rejections, or teaching English in the heart of Asia, making ramen money and getting life (and work!) experience, which one would you choose? Willingly?
This is the kind of time, and the kind of place, where the insane becomes practical, and the accepted becomes insane. Expecting to find any kind of work after graduation is pretty much batshit insane by now, given that you’re competing against Baby Boomers with forty years of experience, sullen Gen-Xers trying to make mortgage payments, teenagers, and that one guy in your year who was class president, captain of the swim club, valedictorian and held down three jobs while working his five internships.
Since that’s looking more insane, the previously insane options look pretty tame by comparison.
Besides, starting on “the old straight track” keeps you on the old straight track. You know, the one where you listen when your friends explain why it’s a good idea to flip the “starter castle” you bought after working a few years out of college? Where your neighbors snicker when you show up in your old reliable beater? The one where you start seriously paying attention to those “debt consolidator” commercials on the big-screen TV you bought with a credit card?
That’s life keeping up with the Joneses. Fuck that.
If you want to try again when the American job market doesn’t suck as badly, you’ll have something worth talking about on that resume. You may even have acquired valuable skills, like these transferable skills, or learning to speak Chinese (or Spanish). If, as Colleen Kinder points out in her book Delaying the Real World, people who start out adventurous stay that way, I’ll see you on the road and buy you a drink. And if it doesn’t work out, at least it beats mailing resumes every goddamn day.
How are you going to raise money for it all, you ask? Well, a lot of these ideas pay money. Almost none of them pay great money, but teaching English in Korea or Russia should make enough to keep your student loan payments going. I couldn’t have spent a year over here in China if I was paying for it out of pocket. Starting your own business, according to Scott Gerber, may be the sanest option of all (4). A lot of them defer those payments, like KNOM or the Peace Corps. The price tag on most of these is $5000 or below, total. That’s cheaper than one semester of college. A lot of them are just the price of a plane ticket. If you’ve got a car, sell it. Sell your old crap on eBay. Work a McJob if you can find one, and apply for a few-hundred-dollar loan at the Bank of Mom and Dad (5). McJobs become a lot more bearable when you’re saving up for something and you can see the light at the end of the tunnel.
Live your crazy. Live the life of adventure. Nobody died regretting the summer they spent in Paris or that time they taught skiing in Aspen. And, frankly, it’s not nearly as crazy, by comparison, as expecting to find a job with a medical plan or that your 401k will be worth shit in forty years. Your 401k will be raided, but they can’t raid your experience, your skillset, your friendships, or your memories.
Would you rather keep up with the Joneses? Or would you rather become Indiana Jones?
Once, in 1955 San Francisco… the west coast weirdos and the east coast beat-down desolation angels met together in the six gallery to listen to a new poetry. it is a poetry of genitals and poverty and tatters, a jazz poetry, eastern mysticism and american hustling. the crowd was electric, shouting and stomping, the compression of elements like atoms smashed together forming a new write, a new literature, a new and self-aware rebellion against the old and established ways, the grey and consumptive of doing things. it would go by many names and many faces, and come by many more.
In 2010 in China… an American made his own rebellion against all that was grey and consumptive. he wants to channel the lightning and charge people to see the show. fusing elements in the reactor of his mind, blowing up the petty things, sparking off a chain reaction of questions. the experiment spans the big bang to stray thoughts, a science fiction of outer space and
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