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| The robot, Maria, from the 1927 silent film "Metropolis". Credit: Pixabay.com |
I apologise for
missing a month’s worth of posts. Some unexpected events occurred
within the last several weeks. One of these was a cold that put me
out for a week. All of this put a hiatus on my writing projects and
even on my creative energy. With the exception of journal writing and
typing up some manuscripts, I wasn’t writing a lot and just didn’t
feel up to it. In fact, there were a couple points where I thought,
what use is it? But writing, especially science fiction and horror,
is basically an inborn inclination for me and so sooner or later it
sparks up again.
One of the other
things, however, that has made me question my writing is the
outdating of science fiction. I’m not just talking about the
outdatedness of sci fi from 30 to 70 years ago; I’m not simply
talking about stories from the 1930s through ‘50s of tin can robots
or rockets traveling to nearby planets. I’m talking about science
fiction that has been written less than 20 years ago and is already,
seemingly at least, outdated.
The outdating of sci fi is happening with cyberpunk that
became popular in the ‘90s through early 2001s. Even though
cyberpunk started with mostly William Gibson’s stories in the ‘80s which was more than 20 years ago,
much of the sci fi literature would be directly influenced by his
work for the next couple decades. In less than two weeks (March
29th), a cyberpunk movie about virtual reality (VR) will be releasing
in theatres, Ready Player One, based on Earnest Cline’s ‘80s
novel of the same name, at the same time VR continues to go
mainstream! So what was unimaginable in our reality several years ago
no longer is. As a relatively new cliché goes, the future is now,
and, as I interpret it, the “future” is no longer that—the
future. Interestingly, even dystopian science fiction has become
outdated. We’re already in a Big Brother world at a level of
technology that goes beyond Orwell’s 1984, even though it’s
not absolutely fascist quite yet (God, forbid it ever be!).
Science fiction and
science fact are running neck and neck in the race for science
itself. Lately, writers have been struggling with this.
They’re asking each other how they can continue writing in the
genre when science fiction is becoming reality especially when it
comes to dystopian society. I mean, the rise of the internet and the
smart device has threatened us with the disappearance of privacy and
the twisting of perceived reality. Photoshop is allowing for this
twisting of facts and the creation of “evidence” to support fake
news. Our nation’s president is denying scientific facts! These are
elements of a dystopian society. The future is no longer the future,
it’s the present.
So what do we do to
continue creating sci fi in a world that’s more than ever rapidly
advancing in science and technology? We keep writing stories. That’s
what several speculative fiction authors at a writers conference sea
cruise earlier in the year basically conveyed, according to an
article at SyFy.com entitled “’The World’s On Fire’ . . .” Although the author’s article doesn’t quite specify
what “on fire is”, overall she talks about how she and other sci
fi authors deal with staying creative and continuing to write in a
world that has already gone dystopic. One good thing about arriving
at dystopia, is, as an author that
the article refers
to says, it forces optimism in science fiction writing.
Optimism is something we can definitely use in today’s screwed up
world.
Also, when you think
about it, we’ll never really run out of ideas for stories. The
universe is much more infinite than a lot of people think and there
will always be new scientific phenomena to discover and new
speculations of our universe and ever advancing technology. There’s
always room for advancement, and advancement in science and
technology is often speculated before it occurs. Even when it does
occur, it takes a while before the world sees its impact on society
and that gives us plenty to speculate on. For example, about a week
ago I was watching an episode of the Netflix anthology series, Black
Mirror. It was about an online service that reconstructs dead
people’s personas to make it seem like they’re communicating with
their survived loved ones over the internet. The service does this by
assembling online conversations of the deceased person from when they
were living. With people now able to have conversations with AI
online (as rusty and limited as the AI’s responses may be), we are
really not that far from that sort of thing. It can probably already
be done even if it hasn’t been yet.
Still, what was so speculative
about that episode wasn’t so much the technology itself as people’s
reactions to the technology. So even if the technology or science has
been discovered, the question still waits to be answered, that
question being, how will society react to the science or technology
once it is put to use and goes mainstream? Therefore part of the
science fiction is not just the physical scientific or technological
aspect but also the social scientific one.
As long as there’s
creativity and science, there will always be science fiction. In
order to continue making stories in the genre, we authors must
continue to write and read as well. We must read not just other
speculative fiction authors’ work but information about the latest
scientific advances in the world. We can always take the advancement
one step further, if not in actuality then at least in words. In
fact, as writers, our job is words and not so much the things they
represent, isn’t it?
Until next time. . .
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