Charles Stross: When thinking about the future, beware of regurgitating the present

We are constantly interested here in how thinking about the future liberates people to act enthusiastically and creatively in the present. And one of the tools for that is science-fiction, whereever you come upon it - on your games console, in the movies or classically in a paperback. 

However we came upon a blog recently that questions whether science-fiction is really keeping horizons open - and this written by one of its greatest contemporary exponents, Charles Stross (the favourite writer of economist Paul Krugman). Charlie doesn't read much SF anymore - and here he says why:

Similar to the sad baggage surrounding space battles and asteroid belts, we carry real world baggage with us into SF. It happens whenever we fail to question our assumptions. Next time you read a a work of SF ask yourself whether the protagonists have a healthy work/life balance. No, really: what is this thing called a job, and what is it doing in my post-scarcity interplanetary future? Why is this side-effect of carbon energy economics clogging up my post-climate-change world?  

Where does the concept of a paid occupation whereby individuals auction some portion of their lifespan to third parties as labour in return for money come from historically? What is the social structure of a posthuman lifespan? What are the medical and demographic constraints upon what we do at different ages if our average life expectancy is 200? 

Why is gender? Where is the world of childhood? 

Some of these things may feel like constants, but they're really not. Humans are social organisms, our technologies are part of our cultures, and the way we live is largely determined by this stuff. Alienated labour as we know it today, distinct from identity, didn't exist in its current form before the industrial revolution.

Look back two centuries, to before the germ theory of disease brought vaccination and medical hygeine: about 50% of children died before reaching maturity and up to 10% of pregnancies ended in maternal death—childbearing killed a significant minority of women and consumed huge amounts of labour, just to maintain a stable population, at gigantic and horrible social cost. Energy economics depended on static power sources (windmills and water wheels: sails on boats), or on muscle power.

To an English writer of the 18th century, these must have looked like inevitable constraints on the shape of any conceivable future—but they weren't. 

Similarly, if I was to choose a candidate for the great clomping foot of nerdism afflicting fiction today, I'd pick late-period capitalism, the piss-polluted sea we fish are doomed to swim in. It seems inevitable but it's a relatively recent development in historic terms, and it's clearly not sustainable in the long term. However, trying to visualize a world without it is surprisingly difficult.

Take a random grab-bag of concepts and try to imagine the following without capitalism: "advertising", "trophy wife", "health insurance", "jaywalking", "passport", "police", "teen-ager", "television". 

SF should—in my view—be draining the ocean and trying to see at a glance which of the gasping, flopping creatures on the sea bed might be lungfish. But too much SF shrugs at the state of our seas and settles for draining the local acquarium, or even just the bathtub, instead. In pathological cases it settles for gazing into the depths of a brightly coloured computer-generated fishtank screensaver.

If you're writing a story that posits giant all-embracing interstellar space corporations, or a space mafia, or space battleships, never mind universalizing contemporary norms of gender, race, and power hierarchies, let alone fashions in clothing as social class signifiers, or religions ... then you need to think long and hard about whether you've mistaken your screensaver for the ocean.

And I'm sick and tired of watching the goldfish.

All of which, needless to say, is an invitation to make better and more aware science-fiction - not to reject it as a genre altogether. We're looking forward to taking SF techniques and stories into our forthcoming labs.