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)