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Wednesday, August 12, 2009

Futurology Is Usually Worse Than Bad SF

Futurologists are indulging the demand of neoliberal-neoconservative policy-makers for imaginative rationalizations by contributing to the burgeoning cottage industry of speculative scenario-building. Speculative scenarisms (of which, as with most things, some versions are of course better than others, usually directly in proportion to their aliveness to the virtues of criticism and self-criticism) are essentially fictions in the science/speculative fiction mode, but we're talking sf too inept to exhibit even clumsy efforts at integrating characterization, plotting, contextualization via "setting," and so on that most fiction-writers (even "hard sf" writers) at least try to have a go at if they want to claim to be worthy of reading.

What is remarkable is that so many of these futurological scenarists seem to see in this very ineptitude the sign that their own fiction-writing is not only "scientific" (the inaugural misconstrual, possibly felicitous, that transformed the self-image of fantasy-romance writing into "science" fiction in the first place), but as actual quasi-scientists or at any rate science-minded technocrats engaging in actual scientific or objective policy-making practices themselves.

I mean, I'm as big an sf fanboy as the next queergeek, but, honestly, writing worse than the worst sf doesn't turn sf into lab-science. Talk about fantasy-romance!

11 comments:

RJ Eskow said...

Interesting, provocative comment ... but I don't really know what to make of it unless you provide some specific examples.

I THINK I know what you mean, but can't know that we are picturing the same things.

So I don't know whether I agree with you or not.

Dale Carrico said...

Well, the point was pitched at the level of genre -- are you asking me what sorts of texts are the ones that I would describe as futurological scenarios -- from Future Shock to Unbounding the Future? Or to delineate moments in journalistic pop-sci-tech pieces that I take to be characteristically futurologically, especially when, for example, they blue-sky a bit and then go on to "derive" from their sketch "principles" that presumably speak to current developmental policy-making when in the sketch itself arises out of these very assumptions (and usually aspirations) instead? eg, what if people now living didn't die for three centuries? what if nanofacturies created food and shelter cheaper than dirt? what if machines became people? How should we behave in the world now as if these imaginings were ahead of us in the same way that quite familiar and urgent legal, security, diplomatic, and welfare problems most certainly will be as they are now?

It's hard for me to picture what you find hard to picture which makes the exchange at once potentially more interesting but also more intractible, especially depending on whether or not you personally identify with the futurological sub(cult)ures I often critique here and which draw most attention here, for good or ill.

RJ Eskow said...

I don't really think my question hinges on the nature of my own specific self-identification. I'm assuming (perhaps wrongly) that you don't condemn every futurological scenario ever written as nothing more than crappy sci-fi.

Are you specifically addressing scenario-writing by either a) neocon/neolib fellow travelers, b) members of certain subcultures, c) both of the above - or is the entire genre corrupting and corrupted in your eyes?

Many of us tend to spin a little "what-if" scenario now and then to explore or illustrate a point. Do you feel that there is no way to write such a scenario without descending into the "too lame for Amazing Stories" category? Surely there's a lot of weak writing out there in this genre - but there's a lot of weak writing in EVERY genre.

No hidden agenda here - I'm just trying to make sure I'm tracking with you ...

Dale Carrico said...

I'll put my cards on the table: My answer is pretty close to "yes" to your question: [I]s the entire genre [futurology] corrupting and corrupted in your eyes? That said, as with nearly everything, there are better and worse, more enjoyable than not, more useful than not versions.

I think the underlying critique remains the substance, though. Futurology is a funhouse mirror reflecting a parochial present back at itself, it's futurism is always deeply vulnerable to retro-futurism, it tends to disavow the open futurity inhering in the plural present for a projection and amplification of parochial presence into presents-to-come (identified as "The Future"), and too often it tends to substitute for the interminable freedom of peers in their inter-dependency an instrumental amplification aspiring to fullsome autonomy that amounts to the loss of nearly everything worth having.

As I say, some is better than others -- I offered up what I take to be one of the decisive factors accounting for better writing that remains recognizably futurological, namely, self-criticism.

My favorite futurologist is Jamais Cascio (which is not to say I agree with him about everything, or that I think he would expect me to do), but I take him seriously despite the fact that his work is discernibly and self-described futurology. I will note that he is so self-critical in his futurological work that he has wondered if he should find a different term for what he is doing -- he has settled on saying it is futurology for now and I think he is right to do so but the whole quandary for him probably enables him to overcome the worst tendencies in futurology more generally.

(I still think his geo-engineering tip is futurology in the bad sense, but Jamais is someone who can be productively talked with -- he's no superlative or sub(cult)ural futurologist even at his most futurologistic!)

Anyway -- I do have an agenda, I'll admit, but I try to be as up front as possible about it! Thanks for the intervention.

RJ Eskow said...

Thanks for the clear reply, Dale. I'm not as negative about the genre as you are, although I know that most 'futurology' is a reflect of the present and not the future.

I like Jamais, too ... and agree with him a surprising percentage of the time.

As for your 'funhouse mirror' comment, my grandfather was very old to be a father when my mother was born. He grew up in the 19th century. He recalls reading in a schoolbook that astronomers had observed people on the moon -- they couldn't see the individual people, but they could see the crowds gathering on Sunday mornings to go to church.

(I'll have to use this in some piece of writing or another, if someone else hasn't already)

Best, Richard

Athena Andreadis said...

I wish I could show you some of the stuff I was privately asked to critique for people in the Lifeboat Foundation list. Awful science, awful writing. I was supposed to be the unpaid editor plus agent -- for people who had attacked me publicly on the list, yet. The syndrome is known as "asking the queen of England to wash your socks" but I overcame my reflex to repair everything in the universe long ago. Particulary for things that can't be fixed.

RadicalCoolDude said...

RJ Eskow is one of the "good guys". He is a health care public policy analyst who argues that "libertarian eugenics" is the term that would more accurately describe the form of eugenics promoted by some notable proponents of liberal eugenics, in light of their strong opposition to even minimal state intervention in eugenic family planning, which would be expected of a social liberal state that assumes some responsibility for the welfare of its future citizens.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/rj-eskow/homo-futurus-how-radica_b_39990.html

Athena Andreadis said...

I interacted with Richard at the Lifeboat Foundation list, mostly positively (from my end, anyway). My comment had to do with Dale's original post about bad science/bad SF. Sometimes you get one or the other. Sometimes you get both, even -- especially -- by established authors resting on their laurels, not aware that's the wrong place to put the wreaths.

In the rare instances that you get good science and SF in one package, you get a brain/body jolt whose power exceeds the more common sort of bliss. Just as you do when you're the first to discover something in research.

RadicalCoolDude said...

Athena Andreadis: My comment had to do with Dale's original post about bad science/bad SF.

My comment had to do with Dale trying to determine Richard's self-identificaion to know whether or not he should dismiss and ridicule him rather than limiting himself to responding to his comments at face value... :/

That being said, I was interested in reading your comments about Dale's post on your leaving IEET.

http://amormundi.blogspot.com/2009/08/boys-and-their-toys.html

RJ Eskow said...

Our interactions were positive from my end too, Athena. We disagreed at times, but even when the disagreements were rowdy we ourselves remained civil (I think!)

And thanks for the kind words, RCD.

I still choose not to self-identify ...

Athena Andreadis said...

Yes, Richard. We did that, unlike others.

RadicalCoolDude, I didn't make any commments on that post. Whatever I had to say, I said in my blog.