Charlie Stross: September 2018 Archives

The folks at Tor.com have kindly posted the first chapter of The Labyrinth Index for your reading edification.

Enjoy! (I hope.)

So, anent nothing in particular, I was contemplating another of James Nicoll's essays on Tor.com the other day—this one concerning utopias in SF—and found myself trying to stare into my own cognitive blind spot.

Like all fiction genres, SF is prone to fashion trends. For example, since the late 1970s, psi powers as a trope have gone into steep decline (I'd attribute this to the death and subsequent waning influence of editor John W. Campbell, who in addition to being a bigoted right-winger was into any number of bizarre fringe beliefs). "Population time bomb"/overpopulation stories have also gone into decline, perhaps due to the gradual realization that thanks to the green revolution and demographic transition we aren't doomed as a direct consequence of overpopulation—climate change and collapsing agriculture are another matter, but we're already far past the point at which a collapse into cannibalism and barbarism was so gloatingly depicted in much 1960s and 1970s SF. And so are stories about our totalitarian Stalinist/Soviet overlords and their final triumph over the decadent free western world. These are all, if you like, examples of formerly-popular tropes which succumbed to, respectively, critiques of their scientific plausibility (psi powers), the intersection of unforeseen scientific breakthroughs with the reversal of an existing trend to mitigate a damaging outcome (food production revolution/population growth tapering off), and the inexorable historical dialectic (snark intentional).

Oddly enough, tales of what the world will be like in the tantalizingly close future year 2000 AD are also thin on the ground these days. As are tales of the first man on the moon (it's always a man in those stories, although nobody in the 1950s thought to call the hero of a two-fisted space engineering story "Armstrong"), the big East/West Third World War (but hold the front page!), and a bunch of other obsolescent futures that were contingent on milestones we've already driven past.

Some other technological marvels predicted in earlier SF have dropped out of fiction except as background scenery, for they're now the stuff of corporate press releases and funding rounds. Reusable space launchers? Check. (Elon Musk really, really wants to be the Man who Sold the Moon.) Space elevators/tether systems? Nobody would bother writing a novel like "The Fountains of Paradise" these days, they're too plonkingly obvious. It'd be like writing a novel about ITER, as opposed to a novel where ITER is the setting. Pocket supercomputer/videophone gadgets in every teenager's pocket? No, that's just too whacky: nobody would believe it! And so on. (Add sarcasm tags to taste.)

We are living through the golden age of grimdark dystopian futures, especially in Young Adult literature (and lest we forget, there's much truth to the old saying that "the golden age of SF is 12", even for those of us who write and read more adult themes). There's also a burgeoning wave of CliFi, fiction set in the aftermath of global climate change. We're now seeing Afrofuturism and other cultures taken into the mainstream of commercial SF, rather than being marginalized and systematically excluded: diversity is on the rise (and the grumpy white men don't like it).

Which leads me to my question: what are the blind spots in current SF? The topics that nobody is writing about but that folks should be writing about? (Keep reading below the cut before you think about replying!)

Charlie here (back again, briefly), with news on two upcoming appearances.

Firstly, I'm in Berlin next Monday (September 10th) (that's the capital of Germany, not the small town in New Hampshire—or the one in Maryland): I'm doing a reading and Q&A (and signing, of course) at Otherlands Bookshop Berlin, Bergmannstraße 25 (U7-Bahnhof Gneisenaustraße), 10965 Berlin, from 8-10pm. And afterwards I'm moving on for drinks at the Dolden Mädel Braugasthaus, Mehringdamm 80, 10965. (I am informed there's a Facebook event for this: if you plan to turn up, please sign in so we can give the bar some idea of how many people to expect.)

Secondly: this October, I'll be in Vancouver as one of the author guests of honour atthe VCON 42 SF convention, from the 5th to the 7th; memberships are still available if you go to SF conventions and are in the Pacific north-west. (Unfortunately I can't make it to CanCon in Ottawa the following weekend—the time line doesn't link up—but hopefully I'll be able to fit in a bookstore event or pub meet-up in Toronto or Ottawa before I go home, later in the month. Watch this blog entry for updates.

Specials

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About this Archive

This page is an archive of recent entries written by Charlie Stross in September 2018.

Charlie Stross: August 2018 is the previous archive.

Charlie Stross: October 2018 is the next archive.

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