cyberpunk fiction of Bruce Sterling and William Gibson is up there. But when
I think about the future of the genre, I think of a whole starfield of space to survey.
I think of the opportunity to adventure into my imagination to make worlds, ex nihilo.
And, man, I’ve been doing a lot of that lately. Driving to Bowling Green, Kentucky to teach composition and literature at WKU has afforded me 14 voice-to-text dictation hours a week of pure creative exploration with a dash of flawed dictation. (Max Cold gets transposed to Mac’s Called, Mask Colt, and even weirder stuff).
But as I’ve been writing SF, I’ve had the good fortune to meet some stellar writers along the way. Knowing them and seeing the creative worlds that they pen has climbed to the top of my list of what I like about the genre. Because the genre is people, really freaking amazing people who have important things to say, beautiful things to say, or sometimes horrifying things, and genius thoughts, and images like crystalline winter webwork phasing in and out of dreams.
So, this post is both to and by my fellow SF writing friends who are exploring the genre, pushing its limits, filling empty space, and as Ryan Hyatt says, wonderizing us.
Rimi Chatterjee
I have always felt (from before it was fashionable) that literary fiction is a special case of genre fiction rather than the other way round. In my two specialties, SF and climate fiction, you are allowed to mess with the given rules of the observed universe in ways that get you kicked out of the select group of lit fic writers. But it has also become evident to me in the last ten years that this kind of messing with the 'rules' is essential for the healthy survival of our civilisation. I believe the 'realism' of literary fiction, and the questionable ascendancy it has enjoyed since the nineteenth century till now, has promoted a complacent and dangerous conservatism whereby we fail to imagine a world that is not run by the powers that are currently digging our collective graves. Since 1991 and the supposed collapse of communism, capitalism has been behaving as if this was somehow a metaphysical victory for its ideology, which it was not. If we accept that our current world dispensation is the only possible world, as lit fic would have us believe, then make no mistake, we are all going to hell if we're not there already. Now, more than ever, the world needs to explore the possibilities of the immaterial, which is very far from the unreal. All the as-yet-unbodied ideas need a way to reach us from unisense. What better way than stories about the futures we could (or need to) face?
@RimiBChatterjee
Remember that scene in E.T. when Elliot rode America’s favorite alien in a basket on his bicycle? Remember how E.T. used his telekinetic powers to lift the bike over a police barricade? Remember the bike hovering across a forest and landing in time for E.T. to “Go home” aboard his spaceship?
Of course, you do! You are a sci-fi fan, and great moments stick, even if you do have an aging, dilapidating cortex.
Be honest. As time passes, and apples wither, you still long for those moments that take you out of your comfort zone, don’t you? Provide you with a sense of awe, make you wonder? About life, possibilities, reality.
And if we’re really being honest, admit: What they say about aging is true, isn’t it? As we grow up and grow old, we look and feel more like that apple…
Guess what? Sci-fi does, too. At some point over the past several decades, our favorite genre aged, shriveled, rotted at its core, and that sense of wonder waned. Instead of odd, but friendly aliens trying to return home, now we’ve grown used to watching warriors blast evil alien hordes to hell.
So, sometimes you may wonder: When was the last time science fiction inspired me? Hell, made me feel like a kid again?
If you’re anything like this writer, that feeling has been few and far between in the years spent voyaging in a hovercraft over a sea of pop-culture viscera. The Matrix was an eye opener. There have been plenty of books and films, too. Annihilation and Arrival come to mind.
But the diamonds are increasingly difficult to find. Too often, we settle for corporate gimmickry and expected storylines over substance, and we call this mass-production of hot chicks in space pants with ray guns fantastic. Just look at all of the superhero movies, and remakes of all the superhero movies. All in our lifetime. I don’t know about you, but Spider-Man is dead to me, and I was once a youth who flipped off buildings, before they called it “parkour” and posted clips about it on YouTube.
So, all I ask, my dear science fiction, is this: bring me back my childhood. Not so I’m smitten by an E.T. with a glowing heart and magic index finger since I’m too old for that crap, but immerse me in a universe that disrupts my frontal lobe with a sense of wonder I can experience as an adult, with children of my own.
Anytime you pull that off, my beloved genre, you’ll always have a fan in me, and maybe my family.
Twitter: @ucalthisreality
Not Your Father's Bedtime Stories with Sage Hyatt
Science fiction (sci-fi) has the power to bridge the gap between the sciences and the humanities, showing how complex theorems and technology can be applied to jumpstart the imagination, which creates interest and improves learning (Menadue & Cheer, 2017). Sci-fi also influences public opinion to be more open to scientific advancements, directs the progress of real scientific research, and acts as a roadmap for cultural changes (Menadue & Jacups, 2018).
Hard sci-fi should be particularly effective at this, versus, say, a fantasy-sci-fi blend. Scholars speak of hard sci-fi, but never of hard cyberpunk. Cyberpunk’s science is computer science, from A.I. development to software engineering, but the subgenre seldom goes into the detail of the science behind the actions. At best, they are highly metaphorized, as in Melissa Scott’s Trouble and her Friends, though that is admittedly a tremendous work. The typical cyberpunk scene reads, He hacked the computer, but the process used is just attributed to an implant running an automated routine, rather than a sophisticated portrayal of the dance on the datastreams that hackers jive to as they overcome cybersecurity measures. Compare this to the discussion of resurrecting animals in Michael Crichton’s Jurassic Park, or the application of the Gupta-Wing Threshold in Alastair Reynolds Poseidon Wakes. Cyberpunk lacks science.
Based on this, I would like to see realistic hacking portrayed in cyberpunk by those with an understanding of networks and the various ways hackers use to circumvent their security protocols. I would like to see implants written by people who understand organic neural networks. And I’d like to see it all wrapped up inside solid political statements that bring readers to action. If the words truly jump off the page, then they should move people to jump off their couches.
Twitter: @MarkEverglade
References:
Menadue, Christopher Benjamin, and Jacups, Susan. (2018). Who Reads Science Fiction and Fantasy and How Do They Feel About Science? Preliminary Findings From an Online Survey. Sage Journals. Available at URL: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/2158244018780946
I would like to see Science Fiction driven by characters we can relate to, ones which make the reader and the watcher invested in the story. I'd like to see the genre tackle both the hopes and fears which advances in technology bring, especially with regards to Artificial Intelligence and genetic engineering.
I would also like to see Science Fiction give greater representation to marginalised groups, in particular, trans people and disabled people.
Twitter: @Tanweer_Dar
Dawn Ross
What do I want in Science fiction? Give me an imaginative glimpse into a futuristic or fantastic world. Give me exotic tools. Give me devices that alter how people live (or die). Send me to a new world with new challenges. Show me a universe where all is possible. Good science fiction exists in a unique world, with relatable beings struggling against nature, their own natures and the weirder natures beyond.
Reality can be stressful, depressing, frightening, an awful and terrifying zone. Yet science fiction provides hope. Even science fiction stories taking place in worlds harsher than our own help us believe humanity can endure—and that we can endure.
Science fiction defines humanity. It shows us how our human natures might mesh with the worlds of the future. When we attain superhuman bodies, what ghosts will still lurk in the machine? What wars will we fight to avoid extinction? Yes, we may endure physical conflicts, bloody wars, but like in Andy Weir’s The Martian, many of our battles will be against the hostile and alien environments into which we are thrust.
Twitter @DawnRossAuthor
Science fiction is universal, unlimited, boundless. It transcends culture. Writers of science fiction are the architects of dreams and gatekeepers to the future. Also, how cool are spaceships?
I fell in love with science fiction when I was a tyke. I drew spaceships and aliens, robots and superheroes, taking joy in the unearthliness of those otherworldly images. I could see myself better through their eyes than my own. I felt I belonged with the aliens I drew. That sense of belonging and inclusivity is one of the biggest strengths of science fiction. SF represents everyone. Everyone belongs.
Good science fiction helps us imagine other worlds. Great science fiction helps us understand ourselves through those worlds. Science fiction allows us to interpret who we are, and where we fit in the big picture.
Time travel is my favourite subgenre of SF. I’m obsessed with time. The implications of manipulating time blows my mind. And it’s a universal concept that every single human shares in common — the march of time, and our place within it. There’s still so much to play with when it comes to stories involving oddities of time. For instance, In H. G. Wells’ novel dealing with time, The Time Machine, he writes not only about time travel but explores issues of class and race in 19th century England. I try to add something new with the time traveling stories that I tell.
One problem is that the more science reveals about the universe, the more limiting our options for fiction become. I don’t want to see science fiction become like any other genre — with its own set of rules and limits. Science fiction writers need to live outside the box, or else the box will stifle creativity.
I’ll always love science fiction. It gives me space for my imagination to roam, and the freedom to be who I am. If science fiction can’t change the world, it can at least help us to perceive it in new ways. And no matter what the future holds, it gives us a canvas on which to meet it.
Twitter: @FrasierArmitage
To write great science fiction, the key is not to set out to write science fiction at all. Starting out with a clear genre in mind can lead writers to find themselves ticking off its common tropes: laser guns, cyberpunk dystopias, dogfights in space. Setting out to simply write a compelling story, which happens to be set in the future because, perhaps, currently unavailable technology is pivotal to the plot, is the right approach for writers. This is surely how we were blessed with the reality-morphing, breathtakingly original worlds of Philip K Dick, or the flawed far-future utopia depicted in Iain M Banks’ Culture novels.
And if this approach results in a work that is difficult to categorise, so be it – perhaps a whole new genre is yet to be unearthed!
Twitter: @RichterWrites
What I love most is the feeling of being immersed in something that purports (aggressively) to be both real and not-real. While that feeling isn’t limited to Science Fiction in particular, or even genre in general, and may be typical of the experience of reading altogether, there is something about the nakedness of the SFnal “What if?” that is attractive to me, the obstinate and unapologetic perversity of taking some aspects of reality for granted while obsessively pushing other aspects of it to all sorts of often barely comprehensible extremes.
One of my favorite bits in Futurama is when Fry marries a mermaid and in the disappointment of finding out how they are supposed to mate says “Why couldn’t she be the other kind of mermaid? With the fish part on the top, and the lady part on the bottom?” To me that punchline is some top-shelf SciFi, turning just one thing unexpectedly upside down. Or right side up. Playing with the moving parts until something hilarious or sublime or hilariously sublime happens. If you ask me what I wish there was more of in science fiction, I’d say I wish more writers were willing to take the risk to push things right out to their conceptual limits. Like when Peter Watts sticks vampires into a first contact story. More of that please. More what-the-fuckness.
Twitter: @billsquirrell
What I look for in a science fiction story are two things that won’t come as a surprise at all: characters and ideas. Characters are an obvious staple of every type of fiction, but ideas, at least some of the types of ideas I really enjoy, are at the foundation of science fiction.
I’ve always wondered why fiction is so important to us. Why do we spend so much time reading fiction? Why do we spend billions of dollars on movies? Why is television dominated by fiction? The best reason I’ve seen for this is—and I’m ashamed I can’t recall who first said it—is that fiction is a way for us to test our values.
Fiction exists when a character struggles to achieve a goal, and works toward that goal, even if they do so poorly or the goal is never achieved. One of the key questions an author is supposed to ask themselves of a character is: what does the character want? If you can’t answer what your character wants, then the story rarely works, and that’s because, for whatever reason, we want to see a character attempt to overcome an obstacle to get what they want. Along the way, the character will likely learn new things about themselves, and what they want may change, but they’ll still want something that they can’t just reach out and have.
I believe fiction tests our values because as we struggle along with this character, we’re constantly asking ourselves what lengths we’d go to in order to achieve the same goal. As a character gets developed more fully, we can (hopefully) empathize with them more, and our own moral meter constantly recalibrates until we’re brought to the same crux point as the character. If the author has done their job well, we now have new insights into our own values because we’re seeing a conflict with a new perspective. At the start of a story we might say to ourselves, “I’d never kill a man in cold blood,” but then we travel the story with a character and new layers are added to the circumstances until we arrive at the moment where the character may or may not kill in cold blood, and as a reader we’ve either come to change our mind about that dearly held value, or we’ve reinforced it.
Why is this testing of values inherently so pleasurable that we keep reading fiction over and over again? I have no idea, but I do know that those deep, flawed, realistic characters in complex, gray areas of struggle are absolutely key to my enjoyment of fiction.
The second aspect, ideas, is what I think sets science fiction apart from all other fiction.
Yes, all fiction contains ideas. Fantasy, for one, contains magical realms that can require tremendous imagination to construct. But I can explain my attraction to the ideas that science fiction trades in with a single, perfect example.
In the epilogue of Carl Sagan’s Contact—the book, not the movie—Ellie Arroway is printing out π to a zillion digits, and suddenly there is a moment where the digits become just ones and zeros forming a picture of a circle with a line through it, the very definition of π.
The implications are Earth shattering. Math, which is so immutable that it’s a concept that is true regardless of what else might be true or false in the universe, was created by an intelligence. And deeper yet, this image only exists in base ten, which means the universe and the inherent logic of math itself was created with a ten-fingered species like little old humans in mind.
That is a mind-blowing idea! That’s the kind of idea that makes me sit and think of its implications for years afterward, and only science fiction delivers those kinds of ideas. As wonderful as fantasy is, saying someone created the universe in such a way that a certain spell would only be discovered by a species with ten fingers doesn’t have the same impact because the underlying idea of magic is wholly fabricated to begin with. In the kind of science fiction I most enjoy, on the other hand, we’re looking at the implications of possibilities that may actually exist.
My favorite science fiction is the kind I write. What if we discovered an incoming asteroid was slowing down? What if some aspect of the weirdness of the quantum world could have real-world effects? What if some of the strangest mental disorders were actually just different methods of perceiving a reality that is just as real, but completely foreign to us?
Merging these two aspects—character and idea—creates my favorite science fiction. How do our values and humanity hold up in the face of mind-bending ideas? Where are the edges of our values? In what circumstances do our values break down? And if some of the dearest concepts we have of reality no longer hold true and our understanding of reality is redefined, then who are we? What does it mean to be who we are? And what happens to our values?
If fiction is the testing of values, and we’re strangely drawn to test our values over and over again, then science fiction, by incorporating ideas from the edge of possibility, might present us with our ultimate tests.
Twitter: @jonathsherwood