A Thing of the past

[supergee]

I am more and more concurring with Barry Malzberg’s idea that science fiction was a 20th-century phenomenon. Back then the first approximation of the fantasy/science fiction difference was that fantasy was about exciting but impossible things like dragons and magick swords but science fiction was about our real future: space flight, robot maids, and artificial intelligence. Now we know better.

OK, so I’m cherry picking. Fifty years ago I was on the side of the Buck Rodgers dreamers who wanted to dodge the drafts, not necessarily the military one but the tedious business of generating from scratch a first draft, second draft,…perhaps ad infinitum. We dreamed that the gods or the scientists would give us a Magickal Screen, a device that would create a First Draft in the Sky that we could revise, correct, rearrange and then have reproduced materially without further effort on our part….As you may have guessed, I am writing these words on such a contrivance.

It’s the missing parts of the dreams that hurt. One needs little more organic intelligence than Elon Musk* to see that we are trapped at the bottom of a gravity well, with no hope of getting any further that invading one or two neighboring wells.

More than twenty years ago someone said, “Artificial intelligence is twenty years away…and always will be.” That prophecy has been fulfilled. What humanity gets better and better at is creating ways for superhumanly fast computing to look like the product of actual human thought. As Charles Stross noted from looking up “Charles Stross,” the more enhanced the interrogation becomes, the greater the distance from mere consensus reality. As he put it, “They deliver a lump of text in the shape of an answer.”

*Intelligence, not feral, zero-sum business skills

Comments

[radiantfracture]

Barry Malzberg’s idea that science fiction was a 20th-century phenomenon

I hadn't read this! But I wondered about that, too.

These excellent thoughts feel like they might have a second half? Anyway I'd like them to go on.

[supergee]

Thank you. I shall give it a try.

[weofodthignen]

As a rather old-fashioned SF reader, I suspect the problem is more with the writers' lacking either imagination or familiarity with the latest science. Golden Age SF (and its precursors) was written by grade A sci-tech nerds. The experimentalism of the '60s sought to remedy the famously perfunctory characterization and pay attention to the then hot social sciences, and of course new SF has built on that by explicitly focusing on minority experiences, as well as by integrating the strong worldbuilding that fantasy readers expected. But these changes opened the door to the focus on characters and their experiences/growth that in mainstream fiction, by tacit agreement, is the "point" of any story. The speculative "what if", even the '60s "how strange can I make this story without it descending completely into incoherence", were shoved toward the margins. Instead of Gernsbackian rose-tinted imagination of (the West's) future, with stick figures in the foreground for human scale, or even Van Vogtian psychedelic fantasies about hacking the laws of physics with blobs of humanity serving as an ingredient in the engineering stew, we've shifted via the likes of Anne McCaffrey to tales of personal development with handwaves to science and technology. The science is window-dressing, so the stuff dates as fast as original-series Star Trek (where the problem was the tiny prop budget). Another reason for this has to be that hard science has subdivided itself while becoming far more secretive. I can appreciate the inevitability of this; the fewer people messing with nuclear physics, the better, and medical research is big business. Also I do appreciate that there's a lot of science to know; my own science education was almost unimaginably bad because of the Nuffield Project—which before it was taken over by Nuffield, was a reform project by science teachers to try to get post-19th-century physics into school curricula. So I appreciate the problems as well as the good intentions. But SF as a genre has drifted into the shallows. It needs a good shove off into new waters. Some author with a new story to tell, with new speculations.

Musk ... I like the concept of feral business skills, but in his case, what business skills? I hope those overpaid b-school faculty are making hay with his bad decisions as case studies.

[supergee]

Musk made his money the old-fashioned way: started out with a lot of it and then was the meanest sumbitch in the valley. Some people mistake that for intelligence.

[sleigh]

As a writer (and reader) of both SF and fantasy, I’ve never much cared for ‘hard’ sf — and thus have never really written it at all. My sf has been largely ‘soft’ sf, dealing with characters and the social sciences. I don’t believe those are areas that are limited to the 20th century. However, I will agree that, like most fads and fashion, the genre is suffering from over-exposure.

[dalmeny]

But there's so much good sf being written right now! I'm more enthused about the genre than I have been in decades.