Science Fiction is the New Realism

Earlier this summer, the New Yorker published its first-ever "Sci-Fi" special issue, with a cover image of a spaceman, a robot, and an alien crashing through the wall of a stodgy literary party.

Inside, there were non-fiction essays by people like Ray Bradbury and Ursula Le Guin. But my favorite parts were the sci-fi stories by putatively "non-genre" writers like Jonathan Lethem, Jennifer Egan, and Junot Diaz. Diaz's story, "Monstro," was my favorite — set in a near-future, globally-heated, income-stratified Dominican Republic, where a creepy zombie infection across the border in Haiti is just getting started (apparently Diaz is working on extending the story into a novel).

But the thing that struck me most about the "sci-fi" stories was how grounded and plausible they seemed — in spite of their use of sci-fi tropes like cyborgs and zombie infections. Another story by Jennifer Egan tells of a beautiful woman spy with cybernetic implants that relay her senses to the CIA (in a demonstration of "the medium is the message," the story was published in 144-character segments on Twitter). Though it was set in the near future, and in spite of the Twitter gimmick, the story seemed completely plausible — we already have robot agents fighting overseas, while Google is building cyborg prototypes for networked, computer-enhanced vision.

And my favorite thing about "Monstro" were the details — not quite apocalyptic, but getting there — that made it feel like our everyday discomfort amidst income stratification and constant disaster. The story's horror builds in the background noise of a world in crisis with heat waves and third-world epidemics. Problems whose distance and relentlessness just don't merit that much attention (at first) from the protagonist narrator — not while he's chasing girls in the air-conditioned neighborhoods where the upper class lives.

All of which — the background static of freakish disasters on the 24-hour news cycle, combined with first-world indifference — feels a bit too familiar to call it "sci-fi," doesn't it?

I've also recently started reading the novels and essays of William Gibson, who's also has an essay in this same issue of the New Yorker. His books get shelved in the sci-fi section, even though most of them are pretty solidly rooted in contemporary Internet culture. It's not that Gibson is writing in a fantasy genre; the problem is that most contemporary literature feels like a genre that's stuck in the past, in a world without internet forums or cellphones. As critic Choire Sicha bitingly observes in Slate:

"The literary novel is, make no mistake, as much a pileup of inherited conventions as the worst werewolf cash-in. There are now thousands of young, MFA-toting writers, so many of them aping the weak generation of literary male novelists now in their 50s: pallid and insufferable teachers and idols, in light of the strong and inventive generation before them."
– from Choire Sicha's review of The Unreal and the Real, a new two-volume collection of stories by Ursula Le Guin

Gibson's on Twitter as @greatdismal, which is where I first learned of him over a year ago. Appropriately enough, he's inspired at least one fake imitator account — a fictional cyberpunk  version of the cyberpunk fiction author. I mention it here because that fake account recently summed up (admittedly with some out-of-character exaggeration) how science-fictional the reality of the last few days have been:

Unclassifiable mega-storm decimates swaths of Boston-Atlanta Metro. Axis. NJ residents vote by fax. World transfixed by S. Korean pop video.
— Authentic Wm. Gibson (@AuthenticWmGibs) November 5, 2012

The world we live in — with rich-world obesity epidemics, prefabricated cities rising in Asia, global heating, social media and its attendant transformation of our identities, financial crises, and everything else — has turned out to be far stranger than the old sci-fi stories of white Texan mavericks who landed rockets on Mars.

The weirdness of the future isn't a genre anymore: it's real life.


Recommendations from authors mentioned in this post:
Distrust That Particular Flavor, essays by William Gibson (2012)

A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan (2010)

The Unreal and the Real: Selected Stories Volume One: Where on Earth by Ursula Le Guin (2012).

How the Baby Boom Became the Apocalypse Boom

I recently started following the amazing Twitter feed of William Gibson, author of Pattern Recognition, Neuromancer, and a new collection of essays called Distrust That Particular Flavor.

The title of the latter, it turns out, comes from an essay about his childhood reading of H.G. Wells's Time Machine, around the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis. Quoting at length from the end of this essay, titled "Time Machine Cuba":

The future, according to Hollywood, in 1968 (from 2001: A Space Odyssey) and in 2009.

"In his preface to the 1921 edition of The War in the Air, Wells wrote of World War I (still able to call it, then, the Great War): 'The great catastrophe marched upon us in daylight. But everybody thought that somebody else would stop it before it really arrived. Behind that great catastrophe march others today.' In his preface to the 1941 edition, he could only add: 'Again I ask the reader to note the warnings I gave in that year, twenty years ago. Is there anything to add to that preface now? Nothing except my epitaph. That, when the time comes, will manifestly have to be: "I told you so. You damned fools." (The italics are mine.)'

"The italics are indeed his: the terminally exasperated visionary, the technologically fluent Victorian who has watched the 20th Century arrive, with all of its astonishing baggage of change, and who has come to trust in the minds of the sort of men who ran British Rail. They are the italics of the perpetually impatient and somehow perpetually unworldly futurist, seeing his model going terminally wrong in the hands of the less clever, the less evolved. And they are with us today, those italics, though I've long since learned to run shy of science fiction that employs them.

"I suspect that I began to distrust that particular flavor of italics when the world didn't end in October of 1962. I can't recall the resolution of the Cuban missile crisis at all. My anxiety, and the world's, reached some absolute peak. And then declined, history moving on, so much of it, and sometimes today the world of my own childhood strikes me as scarcely less remote than the world of Wells's childhood, so much has changed in the meantime.

"I may actually have begun to distrust science fiction, then, or rather to trust it differently, as my initial passion for it began to decline, around that time. I found Henry Miller, then, and William Burroughs, Jack Kerouac and others, voices of another kind, and the science fiction I continued to read was that which somehow was resonant with those other voices, and where those voices seemed to be leading me.

"And it may also have begun to dawn on me, around that same time, that history, though initially discovered in whatever soggy trunk or in whatever caliber, is a species of speculative fiction itself, prone to changing interpretation and further discoveries."

I love that last sentence. There's a whole academic field of historiography: the study of how our historical narratives change and have changed over time. Historiography is essentially a literary exercise: understanding the stories we tell about ourselves. Is there really much difference between the stories we tell about our pasts and the so-called science fiction stories of our futures?

"That particular flavor" of dystopian science fiction is particularly strong right now, with heady notes of Mayan prophecies and mideast uprisings and financial collapses. In a recent interview with Wired magazine, Gibson elaborates on his skepticism:

"Futurists get to a certain age and, as one does, they suddenly recognize their own mortality, and they often decide that what’s going on is that everything is just totally screwed and shabby now, whereas when they were younger everything was better.

"It’s an ancient, somewhat universal human attitude, and often they give it full voice. But it’s been being given voice for thousands and thousands of years. You can go back and see the ancient Greeks doing it. You know, 'All that is good is gone. These young people are incapable of making art, or blue jeans, or whatever.' It’s just an ancient thing, and it’s so ancient that I’m inclined to think it’s never actually true. And I’ve always been deeply, deeply distrustful of anybody’s 'golden age' — that one in which we no longer live."

As concerned as I am about human civilization's capacity to commit suicide, I'm still with Gibson here. America's baby boomers have been a uniquely self-important generation — and uniquely destructive. But the idea that they're the apex of a million years of humanity, after which everything must decline, really takes the cake for arrogance.

Best Reads of 2011

I read some really excellent things in 2011. So as I did around this time last year, I thought I'd share some of them with the people who enjoy reading this blog. In my opinion, all of these books are worth owning and sharing (if you click the links to buy them from Powell's website, you'll help finance my own book habit with a small commission), but they should also be available from your local library.

And don't forget to support your hometown libraries as they sprint to the finish line with their annual fundraising drives. For my local readers, here's a link to donate to the Portland Public Library.

The Information: A History, A Theory, A Flood by James Gleick

2400 years ago in Greece, Plato made this commentary on the newly-invented technology of the written word (we know, because somebody wrote it down, and I know, because James Gleick included it in an early chapter of this book):

"The fact is that this invention [writing] will produce forgetfulness in the souls of those who have learned it. They will not need to exercise their memories, being able to rely on what is written, calling things to mind no longer from within themselves by their own unaided powers, but under the stimulus of external marks that are alien to themselves."

At a time when people are wringing their hands over whether the Internet might be making us stupid, it's nice to have this ancient reminder from Plato that humans have always fretted about these things. From writing, to the printing press, to wikipedia, new information technologies have changed the way humanity thinks as much as they've changed how we communicate.

Reading this book literally made me feel high: every chapter gave the distinct impression that my mind was being expanded with new insights into how humanity's information technologies have made mutable our fundamental concepts of what humanity itself is all about. Each chapter I read required several days for me to absorb and marvel at its ideas - it was a book to savor, and I found it highly accessible (although readers without much mathematics background might disagree about the book's more technical later chapters).

Reading this book also made me a more creative, curious person, and helped kick off an effort to teach myself computer programming this year.

Various short novels by Philip K. Dick, including Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said, and A Maze of Death.

I started reading more Philip K. Dick after finishing The Information, since a number of themes from his novels reflect some of the more metaphysical ideas from information theory (particularly the idea that different perceptions in a human mind can have tangible effects on reality itself).

Dick's novels have a weird mood to them. They tend to have clunky dialogue and retro-futurism that betray their pulp-novel roots. But his stories are also full of ambiguity and uncertainty, with unreliable narrators, delusions, and shifts between realities and simulations. All this makes his work disorienting and a bit challenging to read through - I often feel a bit hungover after reading his work - but if you can bear that, these novels manage to blend swashbuckling sci-fi with deeper metaphysical questions of reality and sanity.

About A Mountain, by John D'Agata

An amazing long-form essay about Las Vegas, suicide, and the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste repository. I wrote a blog post about this book last January, but wanted to mention it again here as one of my favorite reads of the past year.

Infinite Jest, by David Foster Wallace

I spent the last four months of the year reading two big novels - this one and 1Q84 (below). It was great, and I admit I feel a bit lost, reading-wise, now that I'm done with them.

I'd long thought about reading Infinite Jest but had been intimidated by its length and a perception that it would be too intellectually complex and experimental, like Ulysses or Gravity's Rainbow.

But it's actually very engaging and fairly easy to read, and very, very funny. There are aspects of the plot that I probably lost amidst the dozens of characters and storylines, but I didn't worry too much about it and it didn't affect my enjoyment of the book.

(If you need encouragement and guidance, I was also helped along by the Infinite Summer reading guide, and particularly by the "How to Read Infinite Jest" post.)

In fact, I found this book so engaging that I began to wonder if it might be a bit unhealthy, just as drugs, alcohol, tennis, film, and other entertainments become unhealthy obsessions for the novel's various characters. Wallace draws a number of stories and plots from his own participation in and experiences from AA meetings, and I feel that reading this book made me more aware of and compassionate for the forgotten members of our society who struggle with addiction.

My wife Jess got a little jealous of Infinite Jest at times, but I hope she'll read it soon so I can enjoy it vicariously one more time.

1Q84, by Haruki Murakami

Murakami is one of my favorite authors. His new book doesn't rise to the level of Kafka on the Shore and the Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, in my opinion, but it is still an amazing and extremely imaginative piece of literature.

Like Philip K. Dick, Murakami writes about strange parallel worlds where strange things happen without any explanation. Unlike Dick, though, Murakami has a style that makes these fantastic events feel a lot more natural and real. It's like the logic of a dream: it may be bizarre, but it's easy for you to take it for granted while you're inside of it.

Unfortunately, having read this novel, I find myself with no new Murakami fiction to read - at least until his next novel gets published and translated. That makes me a bit sad, like there's no new territory in his fictional worlds for me to discover, and it's made it harder for me to get into a new novel for the new year.

If you have any recommendations for me, I'd love to hear them in the comments.

"The Basement Stacks"

What former library in the land of Stephen King wouldn't be complete without a tentacle of old books creeping out from the basement walls?

Portland's old Romanesque library has recently been rehabbed and reoccupied as the headquarters office for an advertising firm, which commissioned this project from Portland artists/interior designers Wary Meyers. It's called "The Basement Stacks," and you'll find a few more photos on the Wary Meyers blog.

I hope that at least a few of those volumes bursting out of the walls have H. P. Lovecraft's name on their spines.