Snippet from a work in progress.
It has been noted that we are already living in something like a cyberpunk dystopia (albeit one that is, of course, unevenly distributed). The 'soft' neoliberalism of the 1990s and 2000s has made way for a new wave, whose distinct features are still subject to debate. But it is certainly a neoliberalism shaped by its accommodation of far-right fascist agitation, and by a neofeudalist approach to the challenges of climate change. It is also the neoliberalism of platform capitalism and surveillance capitalism -- a neoliberalism profoundly shaped by big tech -- and it is credible that it has been ideologically influenced by science fiction. It is credible, that is, that key actors at key junctures have pursued science-fictional future for its own sake, letting the science fictional imagination fulfill the function of the moral imagination. So science fiction, we suggest, has a lot to answer for.
But which science fiction? Of course, there is a quantitative project there, the cultural consumption of Silicon Valley. But can we hazard a guess? It has not been the static, programmatic utopias or dystopias, thick with institutional detail, that have given big tech actors their lodestar. Nor has it been self-conscious design fiction or diegetic prototyping. It has been the critical utopia. Critical and the ambiguous utopias and dystopias, and the utopian impulse within the rich, intermingling subgenres of transhumanist, singularitarian, postcyberpunk, and new space opera science fiction. Exhilarating, freewheeling narratives that unfold unpredictably on a grand scale, that are often picaresque either spatially or temporally, that often gleefully trash the expectations of characters and readers about the limits of the possible, all the while fairly clear about one thing: 'science fiction is more about the present than it is about the future.'
Showing posts with label futurism. Show all posts
Showing posts with label futurism. Show all posts
Sunday, April 7, 2019
Tuesday, May 24, 2016
Popping My Cogs
A few links:
(1) I went to a really lovely one-day conference at Cardiff yesterday, Fantasies of Contemporary Culture. I've just uploaded the uncut version of my paper to Academia.edu, as y'edu. It's very much research-in-progress. It's called "There Is No Cognitive Estrangement," but really it's way more sympathetic to Darko Suvin's work than it is to, for instance, some of the uses to which it's been put, or to the criticisms and refinements offered by Simon Spiegel.
(2) My sort-of-paranormal-romance novel Invocation is free on Kindle today.
(3) I am loving see the Sputnik battleballots roll in like the Severn tide. Have you cast your vote yet? (See also: The Sputnik Award and the Hugo Awards at File 770).
(4) Many academics are on strike on Wednesdays and Thursday. Here's the official reason. And for a bit more context, here's a Guardian article by Nina Power and a blog post by Plashing Vole. Of course the strike is not just about pay. Almost every academic I know is concerned about this government's efforts to close down the spaces where free and critical thinking can take place, accompanied by a steady, glazed-eyed construction of the most babyish incentive structures, of a kind that would barely make sense in any market, let alone in the provision of education. Calling it neoliberalism is almost too kind. It's more like jocks v. nerds.
(4) Many academics are on strike on Wednesdays and Thursday. Here's the official reason. And for a bit more context, here's a Guardian article by Nina Power and a blog post by Plashing Vole. Of course the strike is not just about pay. Almost every academic I know is concerned about this government's efforts to close down the spaces where free and critical thinking can take place, accompanied by a steady, glazed-eyed construction of the most babyish incentive structures, of a kind that would barely make sense in any market, let alone in the provision of education. Calling it neoliberalism is almost too kind. It's more like jocks v. nerds.
Wednesday, October 21, 2015
Twelve Tomorrows 2016
MIT's Twelve Tomorrows anthology is now definitely out! "Inspired by the real-life breakthroughs covered in the pages of MIT Technology Review, writers Nick Harkaway, Bruce Sterling, and Paola Antonelli join emerging authors from around the world to envision the future of the Internet, biotechnology, computing, and more."
Earlier: my acknowledgements to go with my story.
See also: I've only read one story so far, Charles Stross's "Life's A Game," which makes an excellent addition to this gamification fiction listicle.
Elsewhere: review in Locus.
Idk why they didn't just call it Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow I would have called it that.
"Two thoosand an' fifteen?! Ye mean we're in the future?"
- "Aye! ...A 'hink." pic.twitter.com/JeY3G3AC0u
— Back Tae The Future (@BackTaeTheToon) June 17, 2015
OK but, gentlemen: I think three out of eleven contributors are women. The one before I think was two out of nine. The one before was a bit better. I recognize that sometimes, as an editor or organizer, you make a decision to seek some certain kind of variety or dialogism -- perhaps a kind that doesn't register very visibly in the quasi-canonical set of authorial identity characteristics around which the contemporary new left is organized -- and that variety or dialogism offsets and explains, even if it doesn't excuse, the plethora of white men. And I'm not somebody who thinks gender parity necessarily needs to exist within every year of a multi-year literary project. That said, I have no doubt that such a smart project as Twelve Tomorrows, so invested with the idea of being cutting-edge, already realizes it is veering toward unacceptable, and is going to spend some energies next time round to correct its course. Right guys? Yeah! I guess I should be grateful that Bruce Sterling was so dauntlessly perigrinatory and so devil-may-care supportive of work by relatively unknown or not-known-for-sf writers, which is why my story's in it. But personally, if I'd been editing this year, why not just completely cut the stories by Ned, Nick, John, Pepe, Charlie, Daniel, Virgil and DEFINITELY Bruce, and actually possibly Annalee, Paolo and Ilona tbh. Sometimes less is more, you get me.
Monday, September 14, 2015
Today, Tomorrow
The short talk I gave for the Northumbria Summer Speakers Series is now up on Academia.edu (with the bits I cut out put back in) mostly about science fiction and its relationship with the future. I'm hoping to revisit some of the theoretical material here on the blog, at greater length, if not much greater rigor, before too long.
Elsewhere: MIT Twelve Tommorows 2016 / "We've been trying to elude GHOST HARDWARE, but as Tim Maughan discovers, that's easier said than done" / Dada Data and the Internet of Paternalistic Things.
One of the other speakers at the event was the author Jane Alexander whom you'd better check out right now.
And Rasheedah Phillips, talking at Ferguson is the Future, probably sums up the whole science-fiction-as-acts-provoking-the-future thing way better than where I left it, with design fiction. "The teen mother surviving and not becoming another statistic, and not dropping out of high school, that science fictional story needs to be heard." (Panel 1, beginning at around 30:00).
Earlier: Metafuturism.
Elsewhere: MIT Twelve Tommorows 2016 / "We've been trying to elude GHOST HARDWARE, but as Tim Maughan discovers, that's easier said than done" / Dada Data and the Internet of Paternalistic Things.
One of the other speakers at the event was the author Jane Alexander whom you'd better check out right now.
And Rasheedah Phillips, talking at Ferguson is the Future, probably sums up the whole science-fiction-as-acts-provoking-the-future thing way better than where I left it, with design fiction. "The teen mother surviving and not becoming another statistic, and not dropping out of high school, that science fictional story needs to be heard." (Panel 1, beginning at around 30:00).
Earlier: Metafuturism.
Monday, June 22, 2015
Marxist Science Fiction Studies
According to Mark Bould, because science fiction rarely addresses “the economic dimensions of social totality” it leaves a negative space which “is often primarily, if unwittingly, bound by the structures, potentials and limits of capital” (Bould in Marxism and Science Fiction (2009), p.4).
According to this approach, fantastic literature, and science fiction especially, has a particular mode of telling us about the historical moments which produce it. For the most part – and despite the importance to science fiction of pedagogic essayistic or dialogic inserts (info-dumps) – this mode isn't overt or deliberate. Teasing out science fiction's knowledge requires interpretation that can see the text’s “negative space”: that is, which is alert to a variety of allegorical figurations, psychic transferences and disguises, symptoms, inversions and negations, and lacunae and aporia.
Behind such thinking, there is also the excellent intuition that it is difficult to directly acquire and sustain knowledge of the economic dimensions of social totality. It is not just for the extra challenge that we try to discover such knowledge in certain kinds of cultural production: it is because we think we have good reason to believe that it will be more discernible there than elsewhere.
For Bould, the reason that science fiction reliably produces these rich negative spaces is that it does not “take place in a world which pretends to straightforward mimesis” and it therefore cannot help but foreground its own internal consistency. Reading science fiction implies a continuous process of identifying fantastic elements and trying to relate them to each other and to its less fantastic elements. The systems which are thereby produced tend to “impact against material reality,” sort of in the sense that material reality leaves scuff-marks and indentations.
In short, material totality falsifies itself through ideology, and one of the best ways of exposing it is by studying the false totalities of fantastic literature.
There are some elegant ideas there, and they aren't just Bould's. I think that theoretical approaches of this kind underpin a great deal of science fiction scholarship (especially Marxist of course), and a great deal of that scholarship is very useful. It's roughly the sort of thing I did in my sprawling review of Cory Doctorow's Pirate Cinema and Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom. I think we should keep doing it, too!
But the paradigm has been creaky for a while. Here are some of the main issues.
First, why should tacit knowledge of social totality be so reliably present in cultural production at all, let alone at such a convenient grain and scale, and in association with so many striking shibboleths? Is it not just as likely that at, any one moment, the most significant features of social totality may have left no traces, or a pattern of partial and misleading traces, in whatever work of fantastic literature happens to be under inspection?
Well, good progress can be made on those questions just by setting aside the habit of scholarly squeeing -- where valorizing the text and valorizing the institution of text-valorizing comes first -- and thinking carefully and realistically about ideology (and by looking at what theorists of ideology, especially Althusser, have actually said, not what we tell undergraduate students they said in the hope of being proved delightfully and invigoratingly wrong). One rule of thumb is: the author (and perhaps some editors) made this text, so let's think about how the supposed tacit knowledge was preserved intact through that particular bottleneck.
Second, how should we approach science fiction which does attempt, in one way or another, to address the economic dimensions of social totality? When it comes to economics, it is difficult to sustain a firm distinction between science fiction (where material reality leaves its imprints) and science fiction studies (which exposes them, as if by taking rubbings). Why shouldn’t science fiction writers undertake, within their narratives, to also interpret and explicate the negative spaces created by their imaginative world-building? As a reader, I know that they do do this. They go ahead and weave the sorts of statements you could imagine literary critics making into the texts. Why wouldn't you? And so when economic terminology and concepts appear explicitly in science fiction narratives do they require some different interpretative approach? And/or the same approach, with particular alertness to the confusion which will be caused by interpreting economic language as a symptom of something which is, once hermeneutically excavated, necessarily construed in the same economic language?
Third, what word can I use instead of "totality" to avoid a really boring conversation?
Fourth, there is a tradition of more-or-less informal literary criticism which places science fiction in some privileged relationship to the future. It is easy to take the mick out of futurism, and although science fiction studies rightly rejects naive accounts of science fiction as a predictive art based on rigorous extrapolation of present circumstances, the notion that science fiction has a distinctive temporal orientation is intuitively pretty persuasive -- and it's an influential part of how writers and readers of science fiction talk about science fiction. Science fiction is about the future (including Gibson's famous future that is "already here"). Science fiction tells us what's going to happen, what might happen, what won't happen but at one point could have.
Approaching the same issue from the other side, the economic humanities unpick the ways in which the models, thought experiments and other cognitive-rhetorical constructs of our best predictive sciences -- economics, say -- work as fictions, albeit also as sporadically performative, self-fulfilling (or other-fulfilling) prophecies. In short, while science fiction studies has got comfortable with the idea that science fiction doesn't predict the future, the study of future-predicting practices has started investigating the ways in which they are science fiction.
Design fiction in particular seems to be challenging the scholarly orthodoxy that science fiction tells us more about its contemporary moment than any future moment, by orienting itself at materialisation, mediated by readers. Fabian Muniesa (2014), drawing on Jean-François Lyotard, remarks that “[k]nowledge about things no longer occupies an overarching, critical, general and properly modern position but is now, in a sense, part of the industrial functioning of things” (p.8). We might not want to accept design fiction as SF or SF-related in any way; it could be understood as a kind of unsubstantiated grab for some cultural capital clustered around the idea of the future. But assuming we did accept it on more-or-less its own terms: design fiction doesn't fall into the trap of trying to work with complex and chaotic social trends. Instead, it usually concentrates narrowly a single imaginary product or service in the hope of performatively influencing its likelihood of emerging. A video clip on Kickstarter, which portrays a mock-up or prototype of a product in an effort to fund its development, may be considered a design fiction. Design fiction does not attempt to predict the future: it attempts to pitch it.
Authors and fans have a particular way of evaluating science fiction: according to what it knows about the future. Literary critics don't have to get on board with every bit of that, but they can't afford to ignore it either.
According to this approach, fantastic literature, and science fiction especially, has a particular mode of telling us about the historical moments which produce it. For the most part – and despite the importance to science fiction of pedagogic essayistic or dialogic inserts (info-dumps) – this mode isn't overt or deliberate. Teasing out science fiction's knowledge requires interpretation that can see the text’s “negative space”: that is, which is alert to a variety of allegorical figurations, psychic transferences and disguises, symptoms, inversions and negations, and lacunae and aporia.
Behind such thinking, there is also the excellent intuition that it is difficult to directly acquire and sustain knowledge of the economic dimensions of social totality. It is not just for the extra challenge that we try to discover such knowledge in certain kinds of cultural production: it is because we think we have good reason to believe that it will be more discernible there than elsewhere.
For Bould, the reason that science fiction reliably produces these rich negative spaces is that it does not “take place in a world which pretends to straightforward mimesis” and it therefore cannot help but foreground its own internal consistency. Reading science fiction implies a continuous process of identifying fantastic elements and trying to relate them to each other and to its less fantastic elements. The systems which are thereby produced tend to “impact against material reality,” sort of in the sense that material reality leaves scuff-marks and indentations.
In short, material totality falsifies itself through ideology, and one of the best ways of exposing it is by studying the false totalities of fantastic literature.
There are some elegant ideas there, and they aren't just Bould's. I think that theoretical approaches of this kind underpin a great deal of science fiction scholarship (especially Marxist of course), and a great deal of that scholarship is very useful. It's roughly the sort of thing I did in my sprawling review of Cory Doctorow's Pirate Cinema and Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom. I think we should keep doing it, too!
But the paradigm has been creaky for a while. Here are some of the main issues.
First, why should tacit knowledge of social totality be so reliably present in cultural production at all, let alone at such a convenient grain and scale, and in association with so many striking shibboleths? Is it not just as likely that at, any one moment, the most significant features of social totality may have left no traces, or a pattern of partial and misleading traces, in whatever work of fantastic literature happens to be under inspection?
Well, good progress can be made on those questions just by setting aside the habit of scholarly squeeing -- where valorizing the text and valorizing the institution of text-valorizing comes first -- and thinking carefully and realistically about ideology (and by looking at what theorists of ideology, especially Althusser, have actually said, not what we tell undergraduate students they said in the hope of being proved delightfully and invigoratingly wrong). One rule of thumb is: the author (and perhaps some editors) made this text, so let's think about how the supposed tacit knowledge was preserved intact through that particular bottleneck.
Second, how should we approach science fiction which does attempt, in one way or another, to address the economic dimensions of social totality? When it comes to economics, it is difficult to sustain a firm distinction between science fiction (where material reality leaves its imprints) and science fiction studies (which exposes them, as if by taking rubbings). Why shouldn’t science fiction writers undertake, within their narratives, to also interpret and explicate the negative spaces created by their imaginative world-building? As a reader, I know that they do do this. They go ahead and weave the sorts of statements you could imagine literary critics making into the texts. Why wouldn't you? And so when economic terminology and concepts appear explicitly in science fiction narratives do they require some different interpretative approach? And/or the same approach, with particular alertness to the confusion which will be caused by interpreting economic language as a symptom of something which is, once hermeneutically excavated, necessarily construed in the same economic language?
Third, what word can I use instead of "totality" to avoid a really boring conversation?
Fourth, there is a tradition of more-or-less informal literary criticism which places science fiction in some privileged relationship to the future. It is easy to take the mick out of futurism, and although science fiction studies rightly rejects naive accounts of science fiction as a predictive art based on rigorous extrapolation of present circumstances, the notion that science fiction has a distinctive temporal orientation is intuitively pretty persuasive -- and it's an influential part of how writers and readers of science fiction talk about science fiction. Science fiction is about the future (including Gibson's famous future that is "already here"). Science fiction tells us what's going to happen, what might happen, what won't happen but at one point could have.
Approaching the same issue from the other side, the economic humanities unpick the ways in which the models, thought experiments and other cognitive-rhetorical constructs of our best predictive sciences -- economics, say -- work as fictions, albeit also as sporadically performative, self-fulfilling (or other-fulfilling) prophecies. In short, while science fiction studies has got comfortable with the idea that science fiction doesn't predict the future, the study of future-predicting practices has started investigating the ways in which they are science fiction.
Design fiction in particular seems to be challenging the scholarly orthodoxy that science fiction tells us more about its contemporary moment than any future moment, by orienting itself at materialisation, mediated by readers. Fabian Muniesa (2014), drawing on Jean-François Lyotard, remarks that “[k]nowledge about things no longer occupies an overarching, critical, general and properly modern position but is now, in a sense, part of the industrial functioning of things” (p.8). We might not want to accept design fiction as SF or SF-related in any way; it could be understood as a kind of unsubstantiated grab for some cultural capital clustered around the idea of the future. But assuming we did accept it on more-or-less its own terms: design fiction doesn't fall into the trap of trying to work with complex and chaotic social trends. Instead, it usually concentrates narrowly a single imaginary product or service in the hope of performatively influencing its likelihood of emerging. A video clip on Kickstarter, which portrays a mock-up or prototype of a product in an effort to fund its development, may be considered a design fiction. Design fiction does not attempt to predict the future: it attempts to pitch it.
Authors and fans have a particular way of evaluating science fiction: according to what it knows about the future. Literary critics don't have to get on board with every bit of that, but they can't afford to ignore it either.
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