A discussion of how SF "reflects the period", with some interesting notes about how it seems more to contrast the popular or highbrow  literature of the period.

Reflecting the Times? : Uncertain Principles

The problem for the reflecting-the-times thesis is that the really optimistic tales of yesteryear were being written in the 1930's. And if you think the world looks depressing now, think about what it looked like in 1930.

The piece goes on to note:

SF has been struggling to become a Serious Genre, one that respectable literary types can engage with. And if you're going to be respectably literary, you need to put a greater emphasis on darker topics than on technological cheerleading. Which is why modern SF is so depressing, relatively speaking.

I think that also says more about the way literature is approved of or rejected by the reigning tastemakers and cultural guardians of the day.

One of the common elements of the future we're seeing now (as opposed to the future we saw fifty years ago) is a world where most everything in it has a digital representation, us included. Sometimes this is used for satire — viz., Gary Shteyngart's Super Sad True Love Story, where the horrid implications of always "being in touch" are carried to their logical extreme.

Twenty years ago, nobody imagined that something like Twitter would even emerge, let alone have the kind of pervasiveness that it does. Actually, I should stop right there: it's not that technologies like Twitter and (ugh) Facebook are indeed wholly pervasive, but that they seem that way right now.¹ Give it five years, and I'd bet you my next box of Cuban cigars (if I smoked) that they'll have melted away and been replaced with something else. Maybe not something better, but certainly something different.

While writing Vajra I became convinced that it would not be possible to know the precise shape that such technology would take in our lives. In other words, for us to speculate about what far-future variant of Twitter they would be using would be like someone in the 1910s wondering how many Model Ts there would be on the road and if they were finally in some color other than black.

I'm also reminded of the moment, easy enough to miss, in the terrible movie Lost in Space, where the daughter character breaks out her video diary device with its conspicuous Silicon Graphics Inc. logo. Or the in-dash Nokia-branded phone in the car in the even more terrible 2009 Star Trek remake. These things say less about the power of corporate money for sponsoring and branding than they do about how easy it is to not really think about the future, and just populate it with bits of the present.

So: communications technology. The way I saw it, once you gave people the possibility to become part of the very digital fabric they used, a lot of things become unneeded. No one carries a phone, because you are the phone: everything that phone used to do has in some way become a part of your very being, or been diffused throughout the environment you now move through every day. So there are no phones in this story, not even any computing devices as we know them now — but rather a pervasive atmosphere of computation and connectedness. That's about as forward-thinking as I could get without making a total fool of myself.

I'm looking back over what I wrote just a second ago — specifically, the words "populate [the story] with bits of the present". I don't meant to say that in itself is a bad thing, only when it's a substitute for genuine reflection on the future. The story I'm writing is indeed populated with plenty of bits of the present. That future is filled with people having meals together, arguing good-naturedly (or not so good-naturedly), creating art, going places, seeing each other, etc.

Yes, how they do all those things is drastically unlike what we have now. But I decided early on that a future where people did things that we of 2012 have no way to refer to or connect with culturally would make for a story that almost no one would want to read in the first place.

¹ The more you live or work with something, the easier it is to believe the rest of the world lives or works with it as well. This rule goes double, possibly triple, for anything in the tech industry. I'm growing a little tired of neophyte colleagues of mine — or even folks I know who really should know better — professing completely unfeigned astonishment when they tell me someone they know doesn't have a Facebook page, doesn't bother with Twitter, and for the most part is indifferent to the Web. How can they possibly live without acknowledging the impact of these things on their lives!? My answer was "A lot more easily than you think." I dread the idea that five years from now I turn out to be the naïve one.

Hay Festival: Jonathan Franzen: 'Art is a religion' - Telegraph

I’m amused by how intent people are on making human beings immortal or at least extremely long-lived. One of the consolations of dying is that [you think], ‘Well, that won’t have to be my problem’. Seriously, the world is changing so quickly that if you had any more than 80 years of change I don’t see how you could stand it psychologically.”

Most of Franzen's comments on e-books and technology are pretty shallow — he's an admitted atavist, as per his essays in How to Be Alone  — but he does touch on something worth expanding on here, even if he doesn't seem to realize it.

An incredibly well-timed post from io9: Great Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers Who Never Wrote Sequels or Trilogies.

"Well-timed" in big part because I was just debating this very issue with others earlier today, and because it's something I've taken a stance on re: my own work. No sequels, no multiple works in the same universe.

That said, I am fully prepared to admit I might reconsider once I have to deal with the way publishing works apart from hustling individual copies across a table at a convention.

A common trope of far-future technology is matter synthesis — essentially Star Trek's transporter, wired up in such a way that you just spit out copies of things via energy-to-matter conversion.

We're not going to have anything remotely like that for a long time, but right now we have a fabrication technology which has been turning a few heads: 3D printing. The technology has advanced quite a bit in a very short amount of time, so much so that it's a little intimidating. Check out the Shapeways site, and the range of materials available for use in a given project: it's not just ABS plastic. Naturally the implications vis-à-vis patent and copyright are pretty hair-raising.

What got me thinking, though, is a slightly oddball, sidelong aspect of the whole thing. At what point does the term "handmade" become pointless, especially if you could program a 3D printer to emulate the very imperfections and quirks that make a handmade item so endearing? Or is it even any of those things? Is it just the cachet that goes with knowing you have something an actual human being created with their own hands? How valuable is that feeling going to be in the future?

10 Writing "Rules" We Wish More Science Fiction and Fantasy Authors Would Break

... "sympathetic" isn't the same thing as "compelling" — a character can be unsympathetic but utterly fascinating and spellbinding. Like a lot of the things on this list, this is all in the execution — if you're going to go with a protagonist who's fundamentally unsympathetic or unrelatable, you're going to have to do an amazing job of making the reader care about him or her in spite of everything.

The Stars My Destination comes to mind as a great example of this. Gully Foyle, the hero — er, protagonist  — is one of the less likable characters of any SF story I've read. What makes him the center of such a compulsively readable story is a) we know exactly what he wants, but we never know how he's going to go about trying to get it next, and b) he does humanize as the story goes on. He begins as a brute, mutates into a creature of revenge, evolves into a spy / supersoldier, and ends as a repentant and a transcender of human limitations.

Theological Science Fiction - Reason Magazine (Gregory Benford)

The point of speculative ideas and science fictional treatments is not to foster propaganda (though many do so, usually obviously and unsuccessfully), but to make us think. As a literature of change driven by technology, science fiction presents religion to a part of the reading public that probably seldom goes to church.

The piece as a whole is only okay — it was written in 2003, and it doesn't trot out a lot of stuff that we haven't heard before and since — but the above comment deserves some expansion.

(Note: My boilerplate Point-In-Time Disclaimer applies for this post.)

Not long ago, in another part of the web, I watched a discussion wherein someone attempted, very unconvincingly, to defend the position that money should be abolished. He had no coherent idea about what to replace it with; in fact, he didn't seem to be of the opinion we should replace it with anything.

From what I could tell, he had far bigger problems than the fact he was stumping for a not-very-defensible idea in the first place. He could barely hold a train of thought long enough to complete a sentence, let alone complete it coherently.

But out of that grew some thought on my end: would there come a time, far enough in the future, where money might well be abandoned as no longer serving any useful purpose? Note that I'm not talking about a "cashless society", but a society where the very concept of money has been ditched.

I didn't think this would happen, and here was my reasoning for same.

I've been hinting on and off about a new novel-length project, Flight of the Vajra, but I haven't actually talked about it in detail for a couple of reasons.

One, I'm always a little reluctant to reveal a lot of details about a project in progress, because things could change quite radically between now and the final draft, and I hate the idea of looking like I'm pulling a bait-and-switch. Earlier this week I read about how Dostoyevsky fed his original draft of Crime and Punishment to the flames after realizing his story deserved to be told anew in a better way. I was appalled at first, but then I realized a) it was his damn story, and b) look what we got because of his willingness to break from his own continuity.

Two, I don't want to get into the habit of substituting talking about my work with actually producing it. I have a deep-seated aversion to such things — I think it comes from having spent time with too many people who were themselves more talkers than doers, and I don't want to imitate their habits if I can help it.

So here's what I'm gedankening: Rather than blog about the book, I'll be talking on and off about themes related to the book, posted under a general topical heading (Flight of the Vajra). Some of the stuff I talk about there may make it into the final draft; some might not. At the very least you'll be guaranteed an interesting time.

As they say in advertising: Watch this space.

(Smartass voice from off-stage: "Why, what's it doing?")