This essay is my first and so far sole venture into sf criticism, so the attention it has received, the conversations (and arguments!) it has started, were unexpected but particularly gratifying. The essay originated as online ranting, and I would like to acknowledge the intellectual give-and-take with my co-ranters on the Clarion '94 listserv that helped shape my ideas and challenged me to think more carefully and systematically about the issues. I'd also like to thank John Kessel, who suggested I write up the rants in publishable form, David Hartwell and the staff of The New York Review of Science Fiction for publishing the essay, and everyone else who has given me feedback, stimulation and encouragement.

#

As an academic in another field, sf was formerly a respite from intellectual production rather than the subject of it. Writing this essay, however, began a process of re-defining my relationship to sf, both intellectual and artistic. This process is still very much underway, but I do have a few more thoughts on the subject of science fiction futures--or lack thereof.

In the last year, several quite disparate sources have directed my attention to the issue of models of time and history in sf. Last May, I finished a paper on traditional Native oral histories from the north Pacific coast. Among other things, the paper examined a subgenre of oral history that describes first contact with Europeans. The subject of these contact narratives was the transformation of the traditional nature of time and history.

Shortly thereafter, Bruce Sterling wrote to me, commenting on "Science Fiction Without The Future," that: "Most cultures don't have 'futures.' They've got destinies and karma and eternal recurrences and Gotterdammerungs and such... One has to wonder if [the fictional future] isn't some kind of aberration." While I found myself in agreement with this statement in general terms, the body of oral history I had been working with had just demonstrated to me that, even within nonliterate, myth-based societies, there can be competing models of time and history, and that such models can grow and change.

Then came the September 11 attacks. Like many acts of political violence, the attacks were aimed, we read, at the ultimate establishment of a utopian state--except in this case, the utopia was not an imagined perfect future but a return to an imagined perfect past, the Golden Age of the Islamic Caliphate. It is certainly possible to interpret the attacks as targeting not just American political hegemony, but also Western notions of social progress, and--historically connected but essentially distinct--that body of economic, demographic and cultural dislocations we call "modernity." It occurred to me that each of these three targets carries with it a particular concept of the future, and the attacks could be understood as an attempt not just to reverse the flow of history, but to eradicate those particular futures.

Two of these concepts of the future--the futures of social progress and of modernity--seem essential to science fiction. Western notions of social progress, of course, embody a set of cultural ideals that arose from the Enlightenment and its subsequent developments. These ideals include such concepts as human rights, equality, self-determination, religious freedom, universal suffrage, and freedom of expression and inquiry. The concept of the future that developed along with these ideals, what I'll call the Enlightenment future, is dependent upon other Enlightenment ideals and vice versa. In principle, realization of the Western agenda regarding human progress depends upon a future that is open and undetermined, that can be created, molded, directed or redirected, critiqued, feared or anticipated--in other words, imagined and acted upon. The imaginability but indeterminacy of the future is what makes freedom of thought and action possible. In this model, human progress depends upon the degree to which citizens don't live with karma, armageddon, or a return to the past staring them in the face.

Modernity carries with it a somewhat different concept of the future. Modernity is not a single thing but a complex of changes, and the term is usually applied in reference to transformations in the developing world like urbanization, industrialization, and the rise of mass communications. Modernity comes into focus in contrast with that other ill-defined term, tradition. Modernity brings about disruption and alienation from traditional forms of life and thought. Its worldview is ironic in the sense that tradition is contained within it as memory or history, but the now-encapsulated tradition is steadily bleached of traditional virtue and ever more disconnected from sources of real power. In this sense, those traditional north Pacific contact narratives I had been studying were manifestations of modernity despite the fact that they did not come with the usual economic changes: in these stories, the traditional world, with its closed past and determined future, was violently opened up into a new universe shaped by a different form of history.

Modernity takes different forms in different cultures, and it by no means comes packaged with an Enlightenment future (although Americans often seem to believe so). It seems to me, however, that modernity often does have an uncontrollable future, the one into which the traditional past is being dragged and dismembered. In that sense the future in modernity is also open and undetermined.

We in the developed West are supposed to be fully modern (post-post-modern, in fact). We are supposed to have gone through and overcome the dislocations of modernity that still trouble the developing world. It seems to me, however, that modernity is not an end state, but an ongoing process of technological, economic and social transformation whose end we don't know, and that we are still very much enmeshed in that process. The dislocations will continue as long as the process continues. Younger generations may be temporarily immune to the sense of dislocation, but only until they are old enough to see their own traditions torn apart. The Enlightenment future may in some sense be our official version of time, but the ravening monster-future of modernity always lurks nearby, ready to suck the virtue and truth out of every naive belief and cherished preconception.

Along with these two views of an undetermined future, our culture contains all those models of determined futures that have accumulated over time, from Armageddon to the communist dialectic of history to America as the eternal New Jerusalem on earth. Denizens of the science fiction subculture are as free to choose among all these models of time as any other members of the culture, and, oddly, they've been choosing determined futures. For pessimists, the field is entering a Gotterdammerung--it's declining into an eternal night. Those overcome by modernity and afflicted with nostalgia for the Golden Age of sf are turning back toward the past. In both these models of sf time, the future closes up and history ends.

Another form of determined future that has been gaining prevalence in the field is the model in which the present leads inevitably to the Vingean singularity. (I'm still referring to the context of sf production, not its content). One discussion arising out of my essay has been whether the imminent arrival of the singularity has caused a crisis of imagination. Advances are so fast and furious these days, it is argued, that technological and scientific extrapolation into the future becomes difficult, if not impossible.

Charlie Stross has at least half-jokingly described the singularity as "rapture of the nerds." His choice of the term "rapture" for the ascent of the posthuman is an interesting one. To the degree that it is the end of (human) time, the singularity has the power to erase the future just like an armageddon. The singularity closes off and determines the future by forces that are not just beyond our control, but almost beyond our imagination.

Models of time do not just frame perception and experience, they guide actions. While the choice among competing models may not be entirely arbitrary, we do choose, and the choices we apply to the science fiction field affect not just the future of the field, but, I would argue, the culture at large. Models of time with closed futures will bring an end to science fiction for the very reason that a steady production of imagined futures requires an open and undetermined model of time. But there are also differences among open futures. In an Enlightenment world, imagining the future empowers us to act in relation to it. If, on the other hand, we're trapped in modernity, the future cannot be guided, and science fiction is at best a form of ritual enactment that we use to manage our anxiety about it.

My personal model of time veers between these two types of open future, and this is the source of my conviction that sf is a canary in the cultural coal mine, and that continuing to imagine and fictionalize diverse futures is important to all of us. Managing anxiety is by no means a trivial cultural function, since, in the modernity model of time, our anxiety will be with us forever. But it's also conceivable that imagining the future doesn't just make us feel we're more in control, it does actually give us more control. So I'm going to end with an Enlightenment-type exhortation.

Along with everything else that can be said about the imagined future, it's about the possibilities of Now. Restrict our exploration of those possibilities, good and bad--diminish our capacity or freedom or will to think about them--and you've diminished freedom of thought and action in a fundamental way, along with whatever chance there is to affect the direction of the future purposively. Or to phrase this another way: to the degree that the future fades from the world of ideas and imagination, our sense of possibility about the present vanishes.

If the future is nearly beyond imagination, all the more reason to work hard at imagining it. As with freedom of expression generally, it's important not just to have the right to imagine the future, but to use that right, to challenge threats to it, to stretch the limits of imagination, to grow and change as the present and its futures change. Use it or lose it.

Thank you again, very much.

FICTION & CRITICISM