imagining a better future and exploring the dystopian present with sf are complementary, not opposed

[cimorene]

Something Is Broken in Our Science Fiction: Why can’t we move past cyberpunk? By LEE KONSTANTINOU Jan 15, 2019 at Slate:

But none seems capable of generating the sort of excitement cyberpunk once did, and none has done much better than cyberpunk at the job of imagining genuinely different human futures. We are still, in many ways, living in the world Reagan and Thatcher built—a neoliberal world of growing precarity, corporate dominance, divestment from the welfare state, and social atomization. In this sort of world, the reliance on narratives that feature hacker protagonists charged with solving insurmountable problems individually can seem all too familiar. In the absence of any sense of collective action, absent the understanding that history isn’t made by individuals but by social movements and groups working in tandem, it’s easy to see why some writers, editors, and critics have failed to think very far beyond the horizon cyberpunk helped define.

This essay is quite odd to me, in that it does a good job of exploring what it is that makes *-punk genres "punk", and (IMO) had a really compelling summary of why those appeal and apply equally today as in the 1980s - it's there in that quote: We are still, in many ways, living in the world Reagan and Thatcher built—a neoliberal world of growing precarity, corporate dominance, divestment from the welfare state, and social atomization.

But then it wants to also diagnose the subgenre (or its market share) as a 'problem' in the science fiction genre. (?) And the problem is seemingly both a failure of imagination - because it fails to be set in a universe which shares fewer of our real lives' features of structural inequality (hence showing that its author was incapable of imagining a better society apparently?) -

- and a failure of ideology, since the essay's author seems to think that the only reason to write about people living in dystopias which share the above punky features with our own society is if you don't "understand[...] that history isn't made by individuals but by social movements and groups¹", which sounds suspiciously prescriptive about what function exactly fiction does and should serve. In other words, it seems to imply:

• A work of fiction inspired and focused on a specific societal problem must be intended ultimately to bring about social change and fix said problem.


• Works concerned with a societal ill (or to be fair, given the talk of distribution/% of sff which is *punk, I'll say a large portion of those works) will be primarily directed towards proposing or imagining how that societal change would best be achieved.

A simple counterexample: there have been notable instances where works of fiction have influenced public opinion for social change, and where they have been written with the intent to do so, e.g. Upton Sinclair's The Jungle and Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin (though in Sinclair's case, not at all the social change he intended to create). They didn't have to imagine how a better future might look in detail in order to help bring it about.

The essay continues,

If the best you can do is worm your way through gleaming arcologies you played little part in building—if your answer to dystopia is to develop some new anti-authoritarian style, attitude, or ethos—you might as well give up the game, don your mirrorshades, and admit you’re still doing cyberpunk (close to four decades later).

Counterpoints not necessarily in a particular order:

• anti-authoritarian style and ethos is a legit response to authoritarianism


• some people under authoritarianism don't manage very much resistance - maybe just survival and that's okay


• just the 'style' of anti-authoritarianism is valuable because it communicates hope to those people and serves as a tool to help other forms of resistance and dissent organize


• some books are about people doing things that aren't okay, so you could conceivably have books about the tragedy of teenagers crushed by authoritarianism and tragically doomed to live there forever because they were fooled into thinking individual choice was a viable method of resistance when in fact if they had just got Organized they could have helped. And that book need not be the result of an inability to imagine a better future.


• if the best you as a writer can do is write in genres and tropes and even universes you played little part in building, then congrats, that is not worse than the alternative. Ideas can be recombined infinitely. OTOH, if you don't have anything original to say, that's down to you, not dependent on your subgenre and trope of choice.

You’ve substituted the hunt for a cool new market niche for the work of telling compelling stories that help us think rigorously about how we might make a better world, or at the very least better understand where our world might be heading.

• Those are great things to think about! Honestly! And I enjoy being made to think about them!


• But all fiction doesn't have to be helping us think about and understand THOSE SPECIFIC THINGS. It can be helping us think about and understand the past, or the present, or the nature of love, or the incredible complexity of even very small social systems, or why people do and don't join in collective actions. Those things aren't less worthy, and they all have a place in science fiction.

1. And way to beg the question. (back)

Comments

[cathexys]

I actually lost the author long before your points. I think they mostly lack a wide enough definition of SFF and are themselves a bit too obsessed with *punk as a genre. (In fact, the comment section lists many more SFF authors that I read and showcases the wide variety of the genre once you leave the narrow subgenre of *punk behind).

I think you're perfectly correct in pointing out that the idea that fiction must be edifying went out the window with the late 1800s at the latest, and we despair of antis in fandom when they conflate fiction and PSAs. My favorite moment of the essay was actually the LeGuin quote (because everything's better with a LeGuin quote :) and personally I think that we are seeing a changed awareness of what the problems re. I've noticed for several years now an increase in environmental disaster SFF, sometimes as a backdrop in a waterworld kind of way, but definitely noticeable. Even when the rarely habitable planet is still ruled by corporations :)

[cimorene]

Yeah, the essay was off from the beginning, that's true. I kinda lost focus on the beginning of the article after how outrageous the end of it was, I guess.

But you're right that it's a very odd article all the way through... it reminds me of those fanfic tourist pieces you get from time to time, but this is clearly a person who has at least done *punk-subgenre reading if nothing else... but then why is his objection that everything else is inherently superior? Like why didn't he just read the other kinds of sf all along?

I wonder if what's happening is some convoluted mental gymnastics in order to justify a kneejerk hate for new *punk words in particular? Like, "Well, classic cyberpunk was good, but these kids nowadays should stop trying to reinvent the wheel and just admit they're just copying cyberpunk's greatness".

[cathexys]

Yes, I think it has that I've been there first feel to it (esp since he's clearly ewritten in the genre himself). I think the article would be actually really insightful and smart if it wasn't so...judgy...

[justbolts]

There's some literary analysis that acts like the author's job is to create an instruction manual for readers to follow and this reads like one of those.

[cimorene]

I know it's a thing that individual people - like antis - actually think, but it's still weird to see it in apparently serious criticism from an apparently widely-read person. I mean, as cathexys pointed out above, that view hasn't been popular since the 1800s.

[justbolts]

The thing about antis is that, as much as I hate to say it, I do think they're a specific fragment of a broader cultural movement. It sucks, but having been deep-deep in Tumblr social circles while this all first start to emerge, it doesn't surprise me.

[elf]

Indeed, even when they reject it, these new subgenres often repeat the same gestures as cyberpunk, discover the same facts about the world, and tell the same story. Our hacker hero (or his magic-wielding counterpart) faces a huge system of power, overcomes long odds, and finally makes the world marginally better

Err.... that's not a rare trope. It's not limited to *punk stories. It's kinda the basis of, oh, all military sci-fi, along with a whole bunch of mainstream literature. "What you are fighting is huge and powerful and hostile, but if you are talented and lucky, you can defeat it and improve the world" is also the core of Harry Potter, which is not normally considered even an offshoot of the cyberpunk genre.

It's possible that what makes cyberpunk, cyberpunk, is that the "huge and hostile evil" involves tech-heavy corporations. And yeah, we're still flooded with stories about evil technocrats, because hey, we're still flooded with reality about evil technocrats and fiction has always held up a mirror to life.

And then he rambles on about how all these *punk variations are not imagining anything new (while he admits he published a story involving "dronepunks" in a recent anthology) and authors should do something "different." Of course, he utterly fails to describe the something-different, other than being certain it shouldn't end with the "-punk" suffix. 30 years, he apparently thinks, is more than long enough to mine the possibilities of a subgenre.

Has he also written articles about how derivative and formulaic space exploration SF is, and how it's time to set that genre aside and find something truly innovative?

[cimorene]

"What you are fighting is huge and powerful and hostile, but if you are talented and lucky, you can defeat it and improve the world" is also the core of Harry Potter, which is not normally considered even an offshoot of the cyberpunk genre.

Hahaha, that's a really good point! I actually had a couple of points in mind about how incredibly generic that particular description was and how it could apply to a million adventure stories, but I forgot it when I got caught up in the other stuff.

Looking at it now, though, I think he actually understands *punk as involving that 'huge and powerful' hostile force being the structure of society itself, or at least embedded in or inherent to the social order, analogous to the way the corporation is in cyberpunk... I mean, sort of by squinting at the rest of his article I think that. He's just kind of failed to articulate it in this paragraph and accidentally invoked half of all adventure fantasies instead.

And you know, I wonder if he has also complained about space opera, or utopian far-future sf, for example? He doesn't really touch on them in this article, even though he seems to be aware that *punk isn't ALL of sff. On the surface, though, I'd think they seem to be doing what he claims in this article is the correct moral thing by envisioning a better future... which then makes me wonder why he wasn't just reading them instead.

[thawrecka]

The other thing that confuses me about the article is that for the last few years I've felt the dominant trend in SF was space opera, not any of the -punks, anyway.

[cimorene]

I did wonder about that, but I haven't been paying attention to the demographics of the new stuff that was being published myself. I did have an impression, though, that dystopias were in vogue for a while, because of how often I was hearing things about them, and then more recently that eased off a bit.