The Last Word On Nothing

Yesterday I was at a science fiction symposium on London City Island, a strange, clean little post-industrial peninsula in the Docklands. A small group of academics had gathered – the sorts of people who get PhDs in science fiction studies – to consider the question: If science fiction is about the future, what is the future of science fiction itself?

This is not just a professional development concern for a niche group of fiction writers. It’s pretty well understood that science fiction shapes society’s ideas of what’s possible. This has been true since before the space age, but the relationship between science fiction and reality has only gotten more circular as technology increasingly saturates our lives (see Elon Musk and “neural lace” for just one example among scores). And as a consequence, the science fiction genre has increasingly inflected every corner of media.

The British science fiction writer Adam Roberts (whose book The This has my most slavering recommendation) recalled that when he was growing up, sci fi was for niche nerds – until, that is, Star Wars blew the doors off pop culture. Star Wars‘ galactic success ushered in the increasing market share of sci fi narratives that seem to dominate the world around us today, from the full blanket Star Wars Cinematic Universe expansion to the Marvel universe to The Hunger Games.

Why is there suddenly so much of it? Roberts and his co-panelist, the philosopher Beth Singler, pointed out that these stories may be serving the same purpose as the Greek or Norse myths served people who lived long before us. They are reifying the stories that we are telling ourselves about the deepest realities of how the world is, and what we can expect from the future.

The word “myth” is an example of a “contronym“: it means two opposite things at the same time. These delightful creatures are everywhere: custom means common practice and also tailored or bespoke; to clip something means to fasten it and also to cut it off; to bolt means to secure and to GTFO; screen is a name for a way to keep something from view, and a way to inspect it closely. (And of course there’s my perennial British favourite, “quite”, which means both “yeah not so much” and “very much!”)

The word myth is probably the ultimate contronym – in the sense of Norse and Greek myths, it is considered to communicate the deep, foundational truths of a civilisation. But at the same time the word literally means falsehood. Health myths, misleading misinformation, unfounded notions that stubbornly persist.

Science fiction, Roberts and Singler said, has saturated popular culture because it is a way of articulating our existence in a hypertechnologised world, surrounded by machines, in which religion is no longer considered a relevant way of dealing with existential helplessness. In other words, science fiction stories now have pride of place as the way to reflect our deepest fears and beliefs about the world. One of the reasons we have all become so hungry for myths is that we find ourselves overwhelmed with constantly accelerating technology. Our response has been to treat the technology the same way we once treated the mercurial gods.

And you can see why. How else are we supposed to cope with the ubiquitous inscrutable technology that sees everything, wields power over us, and not in a benevolent way? This is an old script. What is the difference, in your fishbrain, between opaque technology that controls your life, and the mercurial Gods whose inscrutable motives were as likely to start a war as turn men into flowers? AI predictive policing algorithms target people according to opaque whims, surveillance algorithms invade your privacy like Zeus turning himself into animals to spy on his human conquests. These algorithms might help us sometimes (Singler pointed out that a common refrain on social media is that “I have been blessed by the algorithm”, a tongue-in-cheek but still telling response to a good day as a Lyft driver for example, or a serendipitous recommendation from Deliveroo). But what the algorithm giveth, it taketh away. Maybe you get the tasty new restaurant; maybe you get the Basilisk luring your children into suicide with a single glance from the abyssal timeline. Which will it be today? We don’t know! Such are the mysteries of faith.

It’s worth taking a moment to consider is how much of this narrative is dystopian. I write a science fiction column for New Scientist, and looking at the advance catalogs of the different publishers every month, I can confirm dystopian narratives outnumber other types easily 2:1 and probably more so. But too much dystopia has given our reality a particular tilt, and it is becoming harder to think ourselves out of it.

Even our utopias are starting to take a distinctly dystopian turn. Consider Neom, the futuristic desert megacity now under construction in northwestern Saudi Arabia. In 2017 crown prince Mohammed bin Salman unveiled his vision for the city, hermetically sealed inside 500-meter walls, independent of “existing governmental framework”, blessed with its own tax and labour laws and an “autonomous judicial system,” reliant on robots for security, logistics, home delivery, and caregiving. Props to this guy for coming up with such a careful recipe for the perfect dystopia. He has created the worst possible case outcome for the initially-utopian idea of the “smart city”.

But we are not trapped in the worst timeline! Another myth – the false kind – is that technology only reflects our human nature back at us. This is patently and demonstrably untrue – technology shapes the aspects of human nature that our society prioritises. We can control that, and one way to do it is by deeply considering which myths we choose to tell again and again to ossify our reality. Glyn Morgan, the exhibitions curator at the Science Museum in London, pointed to some authors who are breaking out of dystopian containment to tell stories that don’t reify that narrative: Becky Chambers’ Wayfarers series focuses on the kinds of human bonds that can make us antifragile to dystopic nihilism.

The problem with mythologising technology the way we are now doing – imbuing it with all the characteristics of the Greek and Norse gods – is that we then outsource our responsibility over it. It becomes an external reality over which we wield no control. But tech isn’t god. We can exert control. It doesn’t feel like that right now, but that’s because we’re too busy being overwhelmed by it. And we have options! Becky Chambers and her focus on the warmest, most pro-social elements of human nature is one approach. Yen Ooi, who explores East and Southeast Asian culture in her SF as well as from an academic perch, also pointed out that Western foundation myths are not the only game in town. Our relationship with the future might benefit enormously from looking at the deep truths of other cultures.

There are ways to rescue ourselves from dystopia if we can tear ourselves away from obsessively reading and writing the same stories about it over and over again. If we can make different stories. Take Neom. The highly decorated SF author Lavie Tidhar has written a book about its future that comes out in November. (I’ve never regretted reading anything by Lavie Tidhar.) Stories can be alchemy. They can transform dystopia from received wisdom, back into into myth.