We've been scripting and envisioning plausible futures through the 2010s. What can they tell us about the way ahead?
As the UK General Election grinds to a probably dispiriting solution, we fell upon this tweet by an assistant editor of Vice magazine, which asked a great question:
Brian’s tweet received many great answers, which we’ve sifted through and glossed below. We’re not just doing this because it’s Christmas, and you might be looking for present options… But also because it’s fascinating to see what the peers of one of the new journalistic outlets believe are influential works of science-fiction and fantasy. Particularly those works that place the reader, viewer or player at the heart of a plausible world, whether desirable or cautionary.
As the room for debate about the future of this nation, at least, narrows down to incendiary points, disinformation and personal abuse, it might be reassuring to gaze upon the SF mind at work over this last decade. Dig into some of these possibilities, and pathways for current action might well open up, beyond the impoverished terms of the debate we’re having.
Films
ExMachina, Blade Runner: 2049, Elysium, Arrival, Sorry To Bother You, Interstellar, Black Panther, Never Let Me Go, Looper, Mad Max: Fury Road, Snowpiercer, Her
A/UK note: Robots, androids or enhanced humans in most of these. And over half of them taking place post-apocalypse (from war or environmental disaster).
TV
Black Mirror, The Expanse, Years and Years, Mr. Robot, Westworld, Altered Carbon
A/UK note: again, the same mix - worsening or collapsed societies, with new kinds of machine-human agency challenging or expressing it.
Short-form video
Uncanny Valley - where the poor and battered are kept in control by a massively immersive and plausible virtual reality
After the Green New Deal - beautiful animation, starring Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez, showing what the long-term consequences of a Green New Deal would be
Books
Post-apocalypse
LX Bennett, Gamechanger
“Gamechanger is about the people of tomorrow (well, 2101) living in a world they’ve
worked incredibly hard to drag back from the brink of climate disaster,” Beckett explained. “It’s a post-capitalist world, remade by social media and the gig economy. A person might find themselves playing VR esports in the morning, working as a public defender a few hours later, then lobbying to crowdfund their favorite ecological rehab project after that.”
That certainly seems like the path we’re headed down, with many modern-day workers attempting to take advantage of the gig economy and holding multiple jobs at once. We aren’t as far along technology-wise, though, and that’s one of the things that presented a challenge to Beckett when crafting this story.
“The biggest part of the creation process was researching technologies we’re working on
today,” they explained, “then imagining them deployed, on a global scale, in the future: nuclear diamonds, drones that can plant millions of trees in a day, infusions that turn desert sand into arable land, economic ideas like minimum standard of living societies. (You can find stories about all these things online!) Then I threw these innovations forward a hundred years and started imagining knock-on effects.”
Ada Palmer’s Terra Ignota: war after 300 years of post-nation-state peace. A blurb from her first novel in this world, Too Like the Lightning:
Mycroft Canner is a convict. For his crimes he is required, as is the custom of the 25th century, to wander the world being as useful as he can to all he meets. Carlyle Foster is a sensayer–a spiritual counselor in a world that has outlawed the public practice of religion, but which also knows that the inner lives of humans cannot be wished away.
The world into which Mycroft and Carlyle have been born is as strange to our 21st-century eyes as ours would be to a native of the 1500s. It is a hard-won utopia built on technologically-generated abundance, and also on complex and mandatory systems of labelling all public writing and speech. What seem to us normal gender distinctions are now distinctly taboo in most social situations.
And most of the world’s population is affiliated with globe-girdling clans of the like-minded, whose endless economic and cultural competition is carefully managed by central planners of inestimable subtlety. To us it seems like a mad combination of heaven and hell. To them, it seems like normal life.
2312 and New York 2140 by Kim Stanley Robinson - two book on the same timeline, the latter a submerged but still viable New York, the former showing the power battles of a humanity extending itself into the solar system, and dealing with longevity into the late 100s
New Normal
Ted Chiang, ”Lifecycle of Software Objects” (link to novella)
Cory Doctorow, Walkaway - anticipates the current wave of youth militancy, but tied to new ways of producing, co-habiting, eating
Ken Liu
The Perfect Match (link to story, 2012) - predictst the Alexa monitoring and responding to our every need
Simulacrum (link to story, 2011) - predicts the idea of a virtual personality
Malka Olders, Infomocracy, from an interview with the author:
Infomocracy came very directly out of two experiences. The first was that of living and working in many countries with secessionist movements — Sri Lanka, Sudan, Spain, Indonesia, for example — mostly violent, and thinking about the impulses that lead people to fight for their own country or, conversely to fight to keep people within a country when they don’t want to be there.
The second was the 2012 U.S. presidential election, and in particular conversations I had with friends and acquaintances in which I found it harder and harder to discuss legitimate policy disagreements because of a lack of common basis in fact. We talk a lot about the post-factual world now, but in fact these techniques have been around for a while — remember the swiftboating in 2004? — and of course misinformation more generally has been a part of politics since, well, politics.
But it did feel like it was getting more pervasive and at the same time more pernicious, more difficult to name, describe, and clarify. The mire was getting deeper, and it was harder to find the bedrock of common fact at the bottom, and even when you did some people refused to believe it.
The big idea, then, was really a combination of two big ideas, two out-there what-if solutions to these two frustrations. First, instead of nation-states we would have much smaller units, determined by population, not geographical size (which in the modern world is much more accurate in terms of economic and political power), and each of these units could vote for whatever government it chose, leading to governments with constituents scattered all over the world.
To manage this system, and take care of my other peeve, I invented Information, a giant bureaucracy descended from the United Nations by way of Google and charged with information management and dissemination, including fact-checking and data-sourcing. I called the system formed by these two components micro-democracy.
Super Sad True Love Story by Gary Shteyngart (2010 - predicted Occupy Wall St & social media-based social credit scores)
Cli-Fi (climate fiction)
Eliot Peper, Bandwidth. From his author site:
Bandwidth is a science fiction thriller featuring hackers and spies grappling over the geopolitics of climate change, with a group of techno-utopian activists hijacking the global feed to manipulate world leaders… [Eliot wrote this during] a turbulent time in the United States, and it was impossible to escape the chaos and outrage of the presidential election. Technology played a disturbing and divisive role in that election, defying the starry-eyed pronouncements all too common in Silicon Valley. Judging by the current news cycle, there is still ample material for investigative journalists to dig their teeth into.
But great novels offer something different from great reporting. Fiction shines when it entertains and challenges us at the same time. It transports us. It offers an opportunity to move beyond intellectual debate and play out ideas in the gritty, intimate, messy context of people’s actual lives. It forces us to put things in perspective and to ask hard questions even if we don’t have ready answers.
If we are the stories we tell ourselves, what happens when someone else controls the narrative? If every detail of your life was algorithmically engineered, would you even be able to trust yourself? What does it take for a cynic to rediscover authenticity? How is technology changing the structure and exercise of power? When absolute data corrupts absolutely, what price would you pay to change the world?
Margaret Atwood, Maddadam Trilogy - a world in collapse, and thoroughly defined by genetic engineering
Omar El Akkad’s American War: “set in a near-future United States of America, ravaged by climate change, in which a second Civil War has broken out over the use of fossil fuels.”
Snowpiercer (film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snowpiercer
Claire Vaye Watkina, Gold Fame Citrus. From the review:
In the near future setting of Watkins’s book, California has become a second Dust Bowl, with the trajectory of two centuries of immigration abruptly reversed. The state that was known for its gold rushes, film industry and fruit orchards (the gold, fame and citrus of the title) now breeds a population of impecunious “Mojavs”, whose insulting nickname seems intended to echo the “Okies” of a bygone era. Militias defend the Oregon border; Washington has stopped accepting relocation applications; signs from Houston to Indianapolis proclaim: “MOJAVS NOT WELCOME. NO WORK FOR MOJAVS. MOJAVS OUT.”
Watkins’s novel picks up the thread as Luz Dunn, a former model and poster child for water conservation, departs the abandoned city of Los Angeles with her boyfriend, Ray, and a child they have stolen from a rabble of “burners and gutterpunks”. Heading for Utah, they run out of petrol amid the Amargosa Dune Sea, an area of “monstrous, infinite sand” that has surged across the west of the country, and are taken in by a semi-mythical group of desert-dwellers whose leader claims to be able to dowse for water.
Lesley Nneka Arimah, What It Means When A Man Falls From The Sky (PDF of story). From feature in The Atlantic:
It takes place in a world ravaged by climate change and geopolitical conflict. As its inhabitants lament the plight (or the intrusion) of the refugees who’ve been displaced in the turmoil, many also take solace in a discovery that purports to ease all human woes.
The “Formula,” as it is called, is an infinite string of numbers that appears to explain everything in the universe. Mathematicians like the story’s protagonist, Nneoma, specialize in manipulating it to “fix the equation of a person”—they can “calculate” things like pain and “negative emotions” and then, through an obscure mental process, undo them.
A few attempt to use it to achieve the ultimate release from the bonds of the earth: “The bravest” mathematicians, Nneoma says, “have tried their head at using the Formula to make the human body defy gravity, for physical endeavors like flight.”
That’s how the eponymous man wound up in the sky, and his fall gives rise to fears that the Formula contains fundamental flaws—perhaps, rather than giving order to life, it leads to death. As Nneoma reckons with her own misplaced faith in the Formula and its awesome powers, Arimah explores the dystopian consequences of the human yearning for the illusory quick-fix. (The story is explicit about the parallels to religion: “For many the Formula was God, misunderstood for so long.”)
Paulo Bacigalupi
The Windup Girl (Night Shade Books, 2009)
The Water Knife (Alfred A. Knopf, 2015)[14]
The Tangled Lands, with Tobias S. Buckell (Saga Press, 2018)
Space opera
Ann Leckie, Imperial Radch trilogy, interview here
Iain M. Banks, Surface Detail (2010), The Hydrogen Sonata (2012). From Wikipedia, on “The Culture” universe these novels are part of:
The Culture is a society formed by various humanoid races and artificial intelligences about 9,000 years before the events of novels in the series. Since the majority of its biological population can have virtually anything they want without the need to work, there is little need for laws or enforcement, and the culture is described by Banks as space socialism.[1][2] It features a post-scarcity economy[3] where technology is advanced to such a degree that all production is automated.[1]
Its members live mainly in spaceships and other off-planet constructs, because its founders wished to avoid the centralised political and corporate power-structures that planet-based economies foster.[1] Most of the planning and administration is done by Minds, very advanced AIs.[4]
Although the Culture has more advanced technology and a more powerful economy than the vast majority of known civilizations, it is just one of the "Involved" civilizations that take an active part in galactic affairs. The much older Homomda are slightly more advanced at the time of Consider Phlebas (this is, however, set several centuries before the other books, and Culture technology and martial power continues to advance in the interim);[5] the Morthanveld have a much larger population and economy, but are hampered by a more restrictive attitude to the role of AI in their society.[6]
The capabilities of all such societies are vastly exceeded by those of the Elder civilisations (semi-retired from Galactic politics but who remain supremely potent) and the Sublimed, entities which have abandoned their material form for a non-corporeal, multi-dimensional existence, but these generally refrain from intervention in the material world.[7]
Some other civilizations hold less favourable views of the Culture.[8] At the time of their war with the Culture, the Idirans and some of their allies regarded the control that the Minds exercised over the Culture as a form of idolatry.[2][9]
The Homomda regard the Culture as idealistic and hyper-active.[10] Some members of the Culture have seceded to form related civilizations, known collectively as the Ulterior. These include the Peace Faction, the AhForgetIt Tendency and the Zetetic Elench. Others simply drop out temporarily or permanently.[11]
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