The Future? Let’s Ask a Sci-Fi Writer
As we close in on the election — an election liable to be the defining moment for this nation for, oh, the next 100 years or so — I thought it might be instructive to get a perspective on where we might be headed.
About a year and a half ago, I interviewed a few science fiction writers to get their take on what I perceived as a rightward drift in the genre. The responses were interesting and instructive. It seemed to me then that if we’re trying to determine where the country is liable to be in 20 years, perhaps we should consult with people who are generally thinking about the future.
I conversed with four: Retired Army Lt. Col. Tom Kratman, who is a best-selling author of near-future military thrillers and a military SF series which is, by his own admission, a thinly disguised near-future thriller; Sarah A. Hoyt, respected author in more genres than I’m able to accurately count and winner of the prestigious Prometheus Award for Best Libertarian Fiction for her space opera Darkship Thieves (the sequel Darkship Renegades is due out Dec. 4); Larry “The Combat Accountant” Correia, the multiple New York Times bestselling author of the Monster Hunter International series and The Grimnoir Chronicles; and Kate Paulk, whose debut novel Impaler was well-received and whose urban fantasy ConVerse books (ConVent and ConSensual) are some of the genuinely geekiest — and funniest — books I’ve ever read.
I asked the panel one simple question: given conditions as they exist today, where do you think we are headed in 20 years, and what will the world look like? (Ok — two questions.) Kratman was less than optimistic:
I anticipate the European Monetary Union will break up. The German-controlled euro may become the new deutsche mark, or Germany may go back to the mark. The name really won’t matter. The European Union won’t go away — Europe is littered with transnational organizations that don’t ever go away — but will be irrelevant. Most countries will go back to their traditional monetary unit: franc, lire, drachma, punt, etc. A fair number will stick with the new mark so long as Germany remains in charge of it. I expect resurgent fascism in Italy, Spain, and France at a minimum, as socialism does what it does best — fail disastrously.
Paulk likewise sees trouble:
The U.S. is still the world leader, but what it leads is much reduced from even 20 years before. The implosion of the Chinese economy took a great deal of pressure off the U.S. economy, but the massive entitlements of the boomer generation leave almost nothing for anything else. The form of the U.S. government remains unchanged, but the real leaders are a handful of bureaucrats who administer a soft fascist regime. Those who espouse the correct opinions can still do well, but accidents and odd coincidences befall those who dare to express the wrong view. Since the wrong view can change overnight, studying political correctness is essential.
Hoyt sees things as bleak, but she is hopeful:
I think the next twenty years are an inflection point for human civilization.
By the history of our race, we should be heading into a time of more and more limited liberties, a time that looks like a cross between 1984 and Brave New World. Then that civilization would fall, and slowly the light of liberty would appear again. And there would be the bloody mess to reconstruct.
But I think technology changes things. The movement towards mass everything and the belittling of the individual moved fast in the 20th century because it was what the century’s technology encouraged. For the last 100 years we’ve been on this path where the schools create serfs and the state extends to points unheard of, and … well, it’s the whole miserable history of the 21st century.
So, are we still on that course?
Well, it’s still the safe way to bet, but I don’t think so.
Correia sees it both ways:
Where are we headed in twenty years? I see two distinct possibilities. If we continue down our current path of ever-growing government, increasing dependency, bloated bureaucracy, and never-ending spending, then within twenty years we will see an economic collapse like the world has never known. My background is as a finance guy, and I can’t even wrap my brain around what we’re doing right now. Our current policies are simply incoherent. There simply aren’t enough producers to pay for that many consumers’ good time, yet both parties (however, one far more than the other) keep on proposing new methods to set money on fire.
Neither side wants to cut their pet projects, but we are simply broke. Every time anyone talks about cutting anything, there is an institutional freak-out because that particular program is so vital and important and regardless of what it is, cutting it will be the end of the world. So nobody ever cuts anything. They are called budget cuts, not budget pillows or budget cuddles. Cuts are supposed to hurt.
The other possibility is that enough of the American people say to hell with this, and put their foot down. The Tea Party movement gives me hope in that respect. If enough of America’s producers stand up against the bloat, then we are overdue for an economic boom. Companies are sitting on their hands right now because they are scared of the future. Remove that fear, let them know that their government isn’t going to screw them for a while, and we are overdue for an economic boom.
For Hoyt, it’s the economic and freeing possibilities of new technology which she believes will bring us out of the current malaise:
There are breaches in the wall. We’re not there yet, but we’re starting to see an age where information is power and information is cheap, a time when individuals can live anywhere and work anywhere, which means territorial governments better play nice or else, a time when skilled labor is everything and education is at everyone’s fingertips, if they want it.
It’s a stance with which Kratman disagrees. He sees civilization dissolving and a new dark age on the way:
A new civil war (will break out) in China with a probable break-up of the PRC into perhaps five groupings. Australia will continue its progress in enviro-fascistic seppuku. For a while. Then all the lampposts in Sidney, Perth, Canberra, Melbourne, etc. will acquire new decorations. As will those in Sacramento, L.A., San Francisco, D.C., Boston, New York, Chicago, Atlanta.…
I don’t know if the United States will finally break up. I do expect us to descend into a civil war in the manner of Beirut in the 1980s — on steroids. I further expect a nasty war with racial overtones in Cali … excuse me, Mexifornia and the southwest, as we have to fight to retain our righteously stolen gains of 1846 to 1848.
Latin America? Hopeless.
In short, it’s all going to crap and there’s little or nothing we can do about it to stop it.
Correia thinks it’s fixable:
In twenty years, either we are living in a nation slowly going broke and dwindling in importance on its road to decline, or we are living in the America that we want to live in.
I suppose there could be a middle path, where we keep on doing what we’re doing and things somehow stay about the same for our society, but I doubt it. It is make-or-break time.
I grew up on a dairy farm. Every now and then you would have a cow become terminally bloated. It is actually a medical condition in a ruminant animal where gas has built up in its stomach and has become trapped. This can be, and often is, extremely fatal. When you have a cow that is terminally bloated, and you haven’t been able to release the gas through other less invasive means (like a hose jammed down its throat), you’ve either got to stab the cow in the stomach (with a device called a bloat knife) to let out all the pent up gas, or you let it die. Stabbing the cow is always dangerous, always painful, and sometimes still deadly anyway. America is our cow, and it is about to pop, yet many of our politicians want to stick that cow to an air compressor and try to blow her up like a balloon. It is time to cut or die.
So that’s the take from the SF futurists: without a major change of course, America as we know it is doomed.
Also read:
Not knocking the article, but as a lifelong SF fan, silver / golden age in particular, SF writers are lousy at predicting the future.
Yup… Clarke’s 2001 is a good example. SF is great to read, I’m a fan but I would not there for prophecies. They suck big time at that.
2001 was set 20 years too early.
What it doesn’t have is important: NASA, spacecraft modeled on jet fighters, artificial gravity, humanoid aliens, Greenies.
50 years, at least.
Funny that Clarke succumbed to one of the failures of prognostication that Clarke pointed out–people tend to overestimate the short term future and underestimate the long term future. It’s been too long since I read Clarke’s writings about the film 2001–maybe he wanted the film to take place further in the future and Kubrick overruled him.
2001 was a novel, meant to be a novel turned into a film and meant to have an odd ending.
Clark would not have said 2001 was a prediction of the future. When asked about the future he would predict things like geostationary communication satellites as early as 1945. What a dumb idea eh?
Don’t confuse stories which are meant to be ripping good yarns with eassys about possible future events. If anything SF writers are no worse than most think tanks and government agencies on this.
Well, if fictional ‘what if’s', written by well educated people who’ve done their research, aren’t your cup of tea, read, “Winter is Coming” by Jim Goulding, or “The Fourth Turning” by Strauss and Howe. See also: “The Predictioneer’s Game” by Bruce Bueno de Mesquita. …which are written by other well educated people…who’ve done their research.
For comparison, google: “The Rise an Fall of Civilizations,” by Miller, Joubert and Butler, who are also well educated…and who have done their research.
Unless everyone who disagrees with you – or questions your assumptions – is an idiot, of course, you’ll find that these works, and others like them, are enlightening, if often uncomfortable reading.
The notion that “well-educated people who have done their research” can predict the future is not credible. It’s advocated mainly by people who believe they are “well-educated and have done their research.” A great deal of self-flattery is involved. However, one of the reasons we’re in the fix we’re in is that we rely too much on “well-educated people who have done their research” and not enough on experience and common sense.
So…don’t trust anyone who’s well-educated, or who has done their research?
Can’t read this site, anymore, can we…
Sure, listen to them. Just don’t believe them or follow them blindly because they’re “well educated and have done their research.” You know as well as I do that some of the most impractical, harmful, and just plain WRONG ideas have come from people who are “well educated and have done their research.” Experience is a more reliable guide than education and research.
Never cede your liberty to those with credentials. If that worked we wouldn’t be in the near fatal position we find ourselves now. After all, Harvard, Yale and the like have produced very few graduates with a sane view of the world in the last 40 years.
In an additional thought, never blindly believe anyone who seeks power by becoming part of the government has the people’s best interest at heart.
Liberty requires eternal vigilances. Too many American’s have been asleep at the wheel since the 60s.
…or as I read recently:
Remember, the ark was built by amateurs; it took professionals to build the Titanic.
Those who do not learn their history are doomed to repeat it. There are astonishing parallels in many ways between the collapse of the Roman Republic in to the Roman Empire and the collapse of the Roman Empire and what we’re experiencing today. When people allude to “bread and circuses,” they aren’t just making a joke. It’s completely relevant and absolutely has meaning and parallel to our empty hand-out and entertainment deadened culture for just one. You can start talking about a Senate that allowed itself to cede it’s powers and responsibilities to a temporary dictator who styled himself “first among equals” being very similar to a president who is becoming increasingly imperial and dictatorial and grabbing more and more of the legislature’s powers to himself and his bureaucracy and czars for another. I could go one, but there you are.
It doesn’t always take a good imagination to predict the future, just a good understanding of human nature and history to see where the trends lead.
And to expoound upon your analagy between Rome and America, as the empire was compelled to expand to fund the corrupt decadence of Rome, more reliance on mecenaries rather than patriots, breaking down of trade routes, gold went into an inflationary spiral, barbarians knocking on the gates and finally prolonged collapse and the ensuing vacum devolved into a tribalistic dark age that began to re-evolve back to nation states in order to defend agains the threats of the beserkers from the north, asiatic expansion from the east and Islamic expansion thru Iberia and southern Europe. In this time many legends were born, perhaps we might face a similar future dark age and people will ponder the legend of George Washington and debate whether or not he really existed.
Uncomfortable…now THERE is a good word. I’m a fan of all the writers in question. Scarily enough the one that comes closest to my own world view is Tom Kratman. Though I’ve always tended to take the dark view and like all of them…have studied massive amounts of history.
Check out the short story, a Logic Named Joe, you can read it free here it is the sample chapter. The story was originally published in 1946 and seems a good prediction of personal computers and the internet http://www.baenebooks.com/p-253-a-logic-named-joe.aspx
Also I believe in starship troopers the protagonist got his military id from a machine that, from its description, sounds just like what the DMV uses for Drivers Licenses. So not sure how good SF authors are at predicting social change but there are just a couple of many technology predictions that were spot on.
HISTORY OF THE COLLAPSE by Warner Walden.
Despite the advances of humankind in recent centuries, entire continents remained essentially medieval cultures with a thin smear of technology spread over them like delicious jam spread over bread gone hard and moldy. The ability to hold a piece of clever, miniature tech with an opposable thumb carries with it no more guarantee of an ascent of human dignity or wisdom that placing a hard copy of Aristotle in the paws of a Zonian tribesman. In the civilized North, many, too many as it turned out, fervently believed otherwise, and so a tipping point was reached, and like a sundew, reality asserted itself. And so those hoardes once tamed by the North headed North and enforced their own organic form of philosophy: the insistence and blind resolve of sheer numbers and sheer desire, and so the North was thrown down.
I must agree with Colonel Kratman (with whom I’ve conversed before). I don’t see the troubles of the world being resolved, without some truly bad things occurring first.
I’ve been “predicting” this sort of thing to my friends for a couple of decades now, and they thought I was plain nuts. Well, until 9/11 and subsequent events – now a lot of them are beginning to see I may have been correct all along.
With respect to China in particular: we have this blind spot in the West that considers China to be just soooo monolithic, as if it will forever be a unitary whole and always be on the rise. I believe that’s crazy – that at some definable point in time, the average Chinese citizen will grow fed up with the “we’re kinda capitalist, but always Communist” nonsense, and finally rise up and do something about it.
And here? One wonders just how long you can have forces operating that have been working to Balkanize North America, before WE act out against it as well.
I think your comment about N. America being Balkanized is right to the point. By this I mean politically/ethnically. The Dem Left has seen fit to radicalize ethnic groups and this will serve the purpose of such groups continuing to increasingly organize politically against the supposed monster and the one group that does NOT organize politically: whites.
The Left does everything in its power to prove whites do in fact organize racially by casting the Tea Party as a de facto racist organization, the GOP as well, and by invoking code and dog-whistles and myths that are straight up lies. The Left has been very successful in this with their base. The Left has simply ignored the gains since the Civil Rights era in order to justify its continued existence; the must create monsters.
The politically correct 800 hundred pound gorilla in the room is the inconvenient fact that whites have created everything everyone loves in America. The Left despises this narrative and pays attention only to the negative side of it and thereby extorts money by shame.
Today, the source of America’s exceptionalism cannot be stated or one is a racist, despite history books and current maps of nations that are loudspeakers. However, who doesn’t leave this country and who risks much to enter it speaks louder than fake cries of racism – people are complaining and breaking down the doors to get up as close to racist whites as possible.
These fake cries are only meant to advance political agendas and blame lack of success on others. Even the fools who cry the loudest know it’s BS. 90% of immigration in the last 10 years has been from Third World countries and that does NOT include illegals. Plane rides do not enable success, nor does some magical osmosis ala school busing.
Already we have black, Hispanic, and Asian caucuses in Congress. Whites do not. The Left says whites don’t need a caucus because they control everything. The Right says whites have no interest in defining themselves as a racial grouping, but rather think of the greater good. That latter argument is losing in popular culture and the coming demo shift will exacerbate this.
The result will be increasingly fractured ethnic groupings, plus Muslims, who will become a Tower of Babel, each voting according to naked ethnic self-interest. Where these groups are pushed up one against the other in urban areas, friction will result.
Where they are not, perhaps enclaves of peace will emerge in America which will then be emigrated into the same way the nation itself was overrun from without. Other enclaves like Dearborn, Michigan and Miami will emerge; their success will be determined by how close they stayed tied to those they complain about the most, and how many Fed dollars they can extort.
The Feds already have plans to have suburbs pay for the inner city by sharing the tax burden, read failure, and generally speaking, billions of Fed dollars are being spent to make equal that which cannot be made equal, barring a wholesale shift in cultural values. But, for example, I don’t see Muslims swearing off Islam any time soon, or black Americans spitting on the values of rap.
Despite the hollow claims of the groups which agitate and cry the most, they know where their bread is buttered and where peace and productivity reign. If they didn’t, they’d stay in their own countries in the first place.
Look at Greece, they are being suborned by illegal immigration. The only solution for America is to cut off all immigration, or at least have a quid pro quo where one comes in from a country, one must go out from that country. In addition, we must crack down hard on illegal immigration – zero tolerance.
Otherwise, stick a fork in it. In short, the political Left will destroy America.
I am very pessimistic concerning the future of this country because I agree exactly with everything you said here. I am a retired technologist with advanced degrees in chemistry and physics, plus a now-resigned commission as a US Army Ordnance officer (during Vietnam).
I have always tried to live my life according to the “scientific method” and any reader who doesn’t know what means can look it up in Wikipedia. Before I retired I was asked to give some inspirational speeches to college students of science and engineering, and of course I told them to also live their lives as I had done. But no more.
Now I see this country slowly falling apart due to having been taken over by the “give-me everything that I am entitled to” generation, so if I were ever asked to give another speech to students, I would tell them to drop out of school (even high school) at their earliest legal age and go on welfare and permanent unemployment.
I would tell them to live on 1/2 of their “entitlement benefits” and spend the other half each month on lottery tickets because the possible payoff is so great, even if the probability of winning a large sum is very remote. Who cares how much you have to spend on lottery tickets when it is free government money anyway. Meanwhile, our communist government will provide them with total free health care and virtually everything else they might want.
Whites will finally have full financial equality with Blacks and other minorities when all are equally destitute.
I agree with everything you say here, sadly. I come from a similar background, except just physics (chemistry is hard, and besides, physics includes it
There is a huge, huge chasm between those who enjoy learning, and those who couldn’t be bothered. Unfortunately, the singular difference between today’s “3rd world” and those who built the technological civilization that supports them indirectly is this simple variation. It flowered in Europe during the Renaissance, and was nurtured and carried forth by that culture.
If we could just get the rest of the world to realize how much fun it is to know truth on a fundamental level, this onrushing disaster might be averted. There are buds beginning to bloom in China and the surrounding area, so there is some hope.
But mostly, I’m very pessimistic these days. Vast ignorant hordes can overcome insouciant educated peoples. In most of history, that is the dominant theme, actually.
“Vast ignorant hordes can overcome insouciant educated peoples.”
That is exactly Warner Walden’s premise.
Yes, I am afraid that the “entitlement” philosophy expressed these days by many of our most powerful politicians is so strongly entrenched due to a half-century of Leftist-Liberal Marxist brain-washing, that the only way to end it is to let the country literally collapse – and then hope we can put the pieces back together again “under new management”.
As I expressed in my previous comment, if our politicians see hundreds of thousands of White kids dropping out of high school and instantly going on welfare, and demanding all the lifetime entitlements that the Blacks demand, then something will be done. I don’t know what the politicians will do, but even the most technically illiterate politicians realize that it is those White kids who are the future of our technological society. And without them our entire society and culture will collapse, and they along with it.
I think the devastation of that neighborhood in Queens, and along the Jersey beach, is a portend of the types of problems that will begin all across this country, if there are not enough technically capable people available.
But then again we can always ask Communist China to send tens of thousands of Chinese engineers and scientists to take over running our country. I wonder how our politicians will handle that. But by then most of those politicians will no longer be with us. On the other hand, we can ask the Germans to send technically qualified help; that is unless the Muslims have taken over Germany along with all the rest of Europe and driven it back into the Middle Ages. One wonders just what Hitler and his Third Reich Nazi ubermenschen would think of Germany today!
If any of the current generation of Sci-Fi authors reads this, maybe it will inspire a new crop of novels. Too bad Philip K. Dick is no longer with us.
Most of the comments here agree with the writers general outlook and then wring their hands about how its all so true and inevitable and that if only we could have gotten our way, we would have been saved.
I say “baloney!” I too agree with the authors, I just don’t look at it the same way. The fact that the left has done what it has is only a travesty if we let it be. We should be looking at this as an opportunity. One thing I’ve learned during my life is that you don’t fight the flow because you can’t. And the flow right now is decidedly against western thought, objectivity, reason and the values we were raised with and still hold dear.
The left has, unwittingly, given us a unique opportunity to get rid of the deadwood and troglodytes and move to a new world without these encumbrances. And how do we do it? We agree with them. White people–and conservatives, in particular–are fundamentally flawed: we are racist, warlike, money-grubbing devils that should be quarantined from the rest of civilization. Obviously we hold down minorities and keep them from realizing their full potential. How could they possibly want us around? We free ourselves by freeing them from us. We “quarantine” ourselves in the SE where social conservatives can live according to how they see fit, and in the NW where libertarian conservatives can be free to pursue their own happiness.
We are the most itinerate society in the world. Let’s take that to its natural conclusion and agree to divide the country along idealogical lines. Minorities would be more than welcome to create a new country with conservatives. Fact is, the productive ones who believe what their parents once did that hard work and strong values are primary in creating success could be nothing other than an asset. But the world they will be entering will be truely color-blind.
Why fight the inevitable downfall of America? It has served its purpose and, like George Washington, maybe its greatest gift will be stepping down to allow new, better things to sprout from its fertile ground. Our founding fathers gave us the gift of reason, objectivity, The Enlightenment, and a belief in the individual’s God-given rights. We’ve had over two hundred years to sort out those people who are probably genetically predisposed to “get it.” The others in all likelihood never will really understand what sets us apart.
We are fast being outnumbered by those who have no capacity to understand any of this. Fine. This is our great opportunity. Let’s use it to get out, drop the deadwood and start fresh. And even if it never comes to pass, I also know that the very threat of dividing the county will most likely end in concessions to hold it together. Though it is hard to write a list of the minimal requirements that would have any chance of being agreed to. And others, like demanding that Hollywood stop writing anti-American, anti-white, anti-male scripts, go against my own cherished belief in freedom of speech. This is where things plainly become irreconcilable.
Do we really want to futilely continuing to hope that one day they will all come to their senses while the world collapses around us? Its time we stop complaining and do what conservatives do. We don’t whine; we solve problems and then get on with it.
People don’t “get on with it” unless they’ve generally been radicalized in one of two ways: the first is through rhetoric built around a principled stand. In our case the Revolutionary War started in such a way; the Stamp Act wasn’t that big a deal. People were doing just fine. Our Civil War was largely started through principled stands and rhetoric. On 9/11, men flew planes into buildings basically because of what they saw as principles. There was nothing threatening them or their cultures in real terms. Words can radicalize people into violence.
The second way people are radicalized is through actual violence done against them. In our case that would probably be through crime. People might say enough is enough.
Unfortunately, most of the radicalization through rhetoric that may lead to violence is coming from the Left, though they ardently state otherwise. The political Left in America regularly indulges in what is in fact hate-speech, though once again the Left ardently states it is the Right that is the problem there.
I have no idea what will happen. It’s tempting to say something’s got to give but so many American’s are like sheep today I don’t know what it’ll take before they say “enough.” Too many Americans think America is an airport at the service of the Third World and that the failure of minorities is our fault. That type of guilt and lack of resolve has already caused us to put up with stuff I wouldn’t have believed a while back. That’s why slippery slopes are dangerous. People get used to the absurd and unacceptable.
(When you mention “radicalization,” that forces me to do some of my own self-reflection.) But a societal break-up doesn’t have to be violent. Look at the demise of Soviet Union or the perfectly amicable division of Czechoslovakia. (I think it was done on nothing more than a vote.)
If we choose to divide now, we still have the numbers to make it happen. If we wait until the country is mostly made up of those reliant on the government (coming VERY soon) and immigrants who have no understanding nor appreciation for our values, they could forcibly and credibly stop a division.
Our future is not there to be left to the fickleness of fate. If we don’t grab now, we could very soon lose our chance forever.
And there goes the last best chance for western civilization.
You don’t get it. We’re their cash cow wage slaves. They won’t just let us go.
Then make them prove it.
the problem with your design is that too many wolves in sheep’s clothing would be trying to get into the conservative section of the country. We would be at war all the time with minorities who demanded their right to be there even though they couldn’t pull their weight.
Until we can stand up to deadbeat minorities, we will be defeated.
I really can’t imagine those predisposed to liberal politics wanting to sneak in to a conservative country. If you think that deep down inside most liberals accept that a conservative country would out produce a liberal country and so would want to get a piece of that larger pie, that’s a long shot. It may be larger, but with far less pork in that pie (which I think they would clearly recognize). Even if some did “sneak in,” they would be so outnumbered their vote would be useless.
Agree here also. What needs to be done is almost at a point of being politically unfeasible. That only leaves collapse, bankruptcy and and civil unrest. My only question is: What arises? A fascist authority or a reform and return to a strict Constitutional Republic. My hope in the latter is not very high and, in any case, we would go through the former first.
The current Democratic party will drive us there at warp speed. The current Republican party will simply let it go slower.
Try thinking about how the Roman Republic fell apart and was replaced by the “Principate” or Roman Empire. Lots of people reach for the “fall of Rome” analogy to predict our future, but we’re not there yet. Most individuals still have valuable skills on the world market — however the typical adult personality has become much more childish and defective compared to 50 or 100 years ago. Consequently US Government policies now-a-days are almost always woefully misguided, just plain silly, or both — proving that we can no longer sustain a sophisticated form of government based on elections and the formally expressed will of the people. Hence the period leading up to fall of the Roman Republic is a better historical analogy.
That’s because our system only ensures we elect the most popular or the best liars. It doesn’t actually give us the best leaders or people with the best ideas.
going to say something that may not be very popular (and it has nothing to do with this election or any other election in particular) I think modern polling technology has given political liars a strong competitive advantage over more honorable political types. Why? Because they tell the liars exactly what lies to tell.
Before polls were invented, there was no practical way for politicians to tell the difference between, say, a 60%-40% voter split and a 50%-50% split, so all the other advantages an honorable man has over a dishonorable man — however accomplished a liar the dishonorable man may be — tended to determine how the election went. Another way of putting this is that if you don’t know which way to lie while running for office, you might as well tell the truth and gain the advantage of sounding more sincere as you campaign.
It’s interesting to realize that it would be very easy to return to the pre-polling days. All one candidate would have to do is instruct his supporters to lie to any pollster who calls them up. At once, neither side can be sure of their poll results and the entire campaign returns to a pre-poll environment. I suspect that any politician who was significantly more honest and honorable than his opponent would have a lot to gain and little to lose from such a maneuver.
Well, in this SF writer’s opinion, the only thing one can be at all confident about is that the future won’t be anything like what we expect. But speculation can be good fun, as long as there’s no money riding on it.
My preferred model for Mankind’s continuing political, economic, and social experience is “galactization.” Just as happened after the Big Bang, local perturbations within large sociopolitical masses will cause them to fragment, and the fragments to re-coalesce around their internal commonalities. This is already in progress; watch the way American demographic and economic cohorts are distributing and redistributing themselves around the U.S., and in our suburban and exurban neighborhoods. More excellent evidence is available in the “social media” constellations on the World Wide Web.
The galacticization process is both recursive and cyclical: once fragmentation has reached an irreducible minimum, pervasive gravity draws all the fragments back together, and the song repeats. I expect that this would be replicated analogically among men and nations. However, the time scales are uncertain, just like everything else about the nature of Man. In other words, as the Marines have often said: Be polite to others; be professional about your undertakings; and most important of all: have a plan to kill everyone you meet.
Very cool. You say the song repeats, and in the real world so far, it has. The best-known variation is the cycle between tyranny and democracy…so maybe the song always remains the same.
But this time? — well, this time perhaps it really is different. The rate of change is accelerating at a speed that’s more than just a matter of degree. Kurzweil’s singularity ahead? Could be, but there’ll be huge changes before we get there. And opportunities.
Too few appreciate the disastrous trajectory we’ve established, let alone have the will to alter its course, despite the consequences for this generation’s progeny.
well said.
I believe you are completely correct.
Between political and social upheaval, and the overpopulation encouraged by political correctness, the diseases that are progressing plus the craziness of the population will decimate our numbers.
See you in the woods.
Life will be better _inside_ the city walls; ‘Oath of Fealty’, not ‘Zardoz’.
From my limited reading it appears that good science fiction writing is mostly about the present: the writer extrapolates current trends into the future as a way of magnifying them and making them more apparent. That can result in an interesting way to look at things.
As for actual prediction efforts, well, trends are never linear; there is feedback and reaction and counter-reaction in everything, so extrapolating current trends results in almost the worst predictions possible. Nevertheless it results in interesting fiction, while truly serious efforts at prediction – which try to account for non-linearities and feedback, etc – are less interesting fiction because they have little apparent connection to our current condition.
I’m currently reading the excellent Doom Star series by Vaughn Heppner, and I just realized it is sort of a science fiction cross between Gulliver’s Travels and Pilgrim’s Progress (both of which highlight aspects of the contemporary world through the conceit of travelling in strange lands etc). He is also obviously a big fan of PJmedia’s Victor Davis Hanson (even mentioning him by name), as well, I guess, a reader of Mark Steyn.
In mathematics, there are two ways to extract information from data:
1. Interpolation – by which you look at data that describes actual results and make predictions about other points between them. You can make highly accurate predictions by correct analysis of that data. Note that I did not say you WILL, only that you can.
2. Extrapolation: by which you analyze data, then project the trends of that data out to some future point. This can sometimes be accurate (for highly repeatable things like the turning of a clock or gear), sometimes be WILDLY inaccurate (I sold one gizmo two years ago, two gizmos last year. My business is doubling every year, so in thirty years I’ll be selling billions per year).
I can’t agree more that if the trends we see today continue we are headed for catastrophe. We have close to 1/2 the population taking more from society that they contribute. You have race mongers stirring racial hatred for political and financial advantage for themselves (Al Sharpton, Joe Biden, Obama, long list). You have federal bureaucracy expanding in size and power completely unchecked. The EPA has evolved into an extremist, fascist, jack booted tyranny whose mission is to crush and destroy anyone with the unmitigated gall to question or oppose their merest whim. ObamaCare will expand to the pharma sector, and will eventually pull all medical workers into the federal bureaucracy to “reduce costs”. Costs will skyrocket anyway. They always do. The feds are about accruing power and money to themselves. Everything else is smokescreen.
All that said, it’s difficult to predict to the future, to extrapolate based on current trends. Who predicted any of the Black Swans of last 30 years that so affected the world?
But that DOESN’T mean the trends aren’t dangerous or that the prediction we make about where they’re taking us aren’t accurate. I fear they are.
Everything we get enough data points to decide we can fit a curve and extrapolate, an outlier shows up. And then another. The one constant behavior of a dynamic system with feedback is that large changes can happen very quickly, from the screwiest of inputs, and are mostly unpredictable.
For SF writers, I’m surprised no one really talked about science. I’m pessimistic over the short term but optimistic over the long term because I think science and technology fill address two critical areas. First, energy. New energy sources always lead to increased standard of living and I think nuclear fusion will be solved. It won’t come from the massive govt projects like took mark but will come from the relatively small efforts focused on Bussard-like reactors ( look it up).
Second, biotechnology will address some of our serious chronic diseases. Diabetes, obesity, possibly dementia will be solved eventually. The combination of practically unlimited energy and the easing of major health burdens will have profound effects on how we govern ourselves and who we are. Should be interesting.
“Science” (another word for “knowledge”) has always been our salvation, because it’s a dynamic system: we bounce along at our limits, until we learn something that pushes those limits further out. In ancient Egypt, knowledge of when the Nile was going to flood, based on observations of the stars, allowed the culture to expand beyond the size of the village. In Europe, a further improvement on the astronomical model allowed navigation to the far parts of the globe. Advances in agriculture due to knowledge of chemistry and genetics has allowed the Earth to support many more people than it would have minus that knowledge, and thus opened new frontiers because there were more thinking people and they had more previous knowledge to work with. This will never end, assuming we don’t knock the population down to small enough levels that there aren’t enough real thinkers seeded amongst them.
DD at first, but eventually p-B Polywell fusion and direct conversion
to (very) high voltage DC power ~2MeV. Essentially free energy to power
industry and society. The hard part is stopping ‘The Marching Morons’.
As someone who has read SF for 40 years and worked with SF authors for 25 years, I must say they suck at predicting any specific event. As a group they have massively influenced our future by fueling the possible via speculation that some group(creators) makes a reality.
Someone mentioned we can be saved by science, biotechs may end up giving us easy to make plagues. Energy physics research may end up giving us shop-built fusion explosives.
And no I am not really a pessimist, I am enjoying the fruits of progress even at this moment; but when I see those who abuse those same tech wonders to propagate a false ideology (muslim fanatics), false reality (media), and false science (AGW) , I remember a great high school play written by a brilliant bi-polar classmate entitled “Tomorrow could go either way”.
I certainly hold with the US breaking up. The difference between the feral, taking liberal and the productive Conservatives is just too great. The government the liberals have created and grow to ensure the subjugation and plunder of the productive to buy votes from the rest can’t go on forever. We are seeing now in the wake of Sandy what happens to them when the gravy train is cut off, they go full bore feral.
I don’t know that it can be avoided either since both parties are taking us to the same end, the only difference being the speed with which we will get there. Obama is taking us there by express, the Republicans by bus.
This could all be mooted, however, if Obama keeps up his assault on energy and agriculture. If he does the things I suspect he will, most small farms and other agriculture will be wiped out in a couple of years, likely including mine. He will also likely kill coal and oil power plants before there is any suitable replacement in operation and not just on the drawing board. Both will be done by the EPA and both will devastate the economy. Think things are bad now after Sandy? Just wait until power and food shortages become the norm rather than the exception.
…and then the Hordes will move in and take whatever spoils they wish to. And history will begin again.
A Canticle for Leibowitz. Best science fiction prediction of the future ever written.
I’m quite optimistic about the future.
I’m the last generation of Americans who, as schoolchildren, had to cower under tables or against walls in those “duck and cover” shelter drills.
Back in the 1950s and early 1960s, at the height of the Cold War, very few expected that eventually the Cold War would end peacefully, with the collapse of Communism. Most science fiction writers had a field day writing stories about the aftermath of nuclear war or the aftermath of a Soviet conquest of the West. But none of those things happened.
Of all the sci-fi I read as a kid, only ONE sci-fi story (“Bookworm, Run!”) came close to predicting that the Cold War would end pretty much as it did in real life: The end of the U.S.S.R. without firing a single nuclear shot. That scenario would have been considered fantasy, back in the 1950s.
If we could overcome the Cold War, we can overcome today’s challenges. And tomorrow’s.
Hate to break it to you, but the Cold War never really ended. It just moved over here, close and dirty.
I must point out that the breakup of the Soviet Union is not the same as the end of communism. Now that the overtly Evil empire is gone communism doesn’t seem as scary to most people, because most people are stupid and don’t understand what communism really is: a criminal conspiracy that operates better in darkness than it does in the open light of day.
I too cowered under my desk during A-bomb drills in school, and was delighted to see one of the nation state proponents die under Ronnie’s leadership 35ish years later. But I think the Cold War was only a practice session for the _real_ Long War. You know, the one that’s been going on since 622. The one the bad guys were “celebrating”/avenging 11 years and almost 2 months ago, when they flew jetliners into the WTC towers:
http://www.historytoday.com/walter-leitsch/1683-siege-vienna
Winning that war is going to take real intestinal fortitude, and decisiveness on our collective parts. And some actual leadership. All in all, a good excuse to pray, in my opinion.
I too cowered under my desk during A-bomb drills in school, and was delighted to see one of the nation state proponents of Communism die under Ronnie’s leadership 35ish years later. But I think the Cold War was only a practice session for the _real_ Long War. You know, the one that’s been going on since 622. The one the bad guys were “celebrating”/avenging 11 years and almost 2 months ago, when they flew jetliners into the WTC towers:
http://www.historytoday.com/walter-leitsch/1683-siege-vienna
Winning that war is going to take real intestinal fortitude, and decisiveness on our collective parts. And some actual leadership. All in all, a good excuse to pray, in my opinion.
I want to agree with Hoyt that technology is the key. Throughout history new technology has freed people from the yoke of government, which then worked to re-yoke the peasantry. Some tech allowed workers to escape the guilds, when then reformed as unions to control who, and who didn’t, work. The automobile allowed the masses to flee the cities but then the cities followed. So tech is just a tool, it can be used to free or used to enslave.
Ultimately, I think our future lies in how we respond to pornography. Whether the pornographer is Larry Flynt or FDR, whether Hugh Hefner or Bill Clinton, whether some creep or Barack Obama (but I repeat myself) the allure of pornography is that by trading some decency you can glimpse the forbidden fruit. Whether you’re lusting over naked pictures or stealing from your neighbor, you’re giving power to the pornographer and all it takes is a bit of your soul. Well, your soul and your future. Our future depends on how we respond to the “kiddie porn” that is modern politics where all the politicians are always “doing it for the children”. Heed the Second Law of Thermodynamics which is commonly referred to as “there ain’t no such thing as a free lunch” (or TANSTAAFL for short). What the pornographers are giving away for “free” isn’t anywhere close to free. The last 100 years has shown us the high cost of a free lunch.
FYI, pornography has been a major driver of new technology and of gaining experience with new technology.
In the late 19th century, only a few years after Edison’s newfangled movie cameras became available, folks started experimenting with them to produce erotic images of nude women.
And around the same time, one of the very first things that junior officers on U.S. Navy warships did with their newfangled radio sets, was to send erotic messages to their wives and girlfriends back home. (This was back at a time when every warship captain still thought he was Horatio Hornblower, and balked at coordinating via radio with his superiors in Washington.) Of course, this constant use of radios enabled officers to gain experience, to learn about atmospherics, etc.
In the 1970s and 1980s, a major selling point for cable TV was that you could receive porn movies in the privacy of your own home. VCRs became popular so you could record said movies and play them back.
Long before CNN and other news sources were streaming videos on the Internet, the porn industry had gotten there first. Pornographers were among the first to start offering video streaming of their offerings.
In American homes, broadband gained wide acceptance over dialup, due to demand for porn. Surveys showed that around one-fifth of American households with broadband were using it to download and stream porn.
Today, a major driver of 3G and 4G communication has been the consumer demand to watch porn movies on smartphones. (You didn’t really think folks wanted 4G just so they could watch little home videos on YouTube, did you?)
Indeed. Porn is only dangerous to a few people who use it wrongly and have addictive personalities to begin with. It is extremely widespread and is mostly used as soma. And it bears no resemblance to and is completely independent of actual inter-personal relationships. It’s just a way of letting of “steam” in a harmless fashion.
You are making an assumption that flies in the face of facts, namely, that nobody other than consumers of porn are affected. The production of pornography is harmful to those involved in the production.
Porn does NOT drive the development of new technologies, it is simply an early adopter. Porn sells without having to be particularly good. This makes it easy to set up shop in a new medium where there isn’t any competition.
If you’re looking for opinions regarding future events, check out, “Hurtling Toward Oblivion: A Logical Argument for the End of the Age” written in 1999 by futurist/physician author Richard A Swenson, that examines profusion through irreversible progress, ballooned into a phenomenon of exponential growth.
‘Fallenness’ in the world systems (government/societal/environmental bring on a profusion of negatives, leading to what he terms, ‘the threshold of lethality’ of the entire system.
If the ‘trigger for lethality’ takes place; such an event would bring on the end of ‘life’ as we have known, but Mr. Swenson leaves room for hope in the end chapter, so it’s not a total ‘downer’ as an evening read.
Not to belittle your sci-fi predictions (I love good sic-fi…!) Here are some of the top sic-fi’s predictions from 1987….
I love how many of them thought – even in 1987 – that Reagan was going to destroy us all…
http://www.writersofthefuture.com/time-capsule-predictions
ISAAC ASIMOV
Assuming we haven’t destroyed ourselves in a nuclear war, there will be 8-10 billion of us on this planet—and widespread hunger. These troubles can be traced back to President Ronald Reagan who smiled and waved too much.
GREGORY BENFORD
YOUR FUTURE AND WELCOME TO IT
… 25 years from now.
World population stands at nearly 8 billion.
The Dow-Jones Industrial Average stands at 8,400, but the dollar is worth a third of today’s.
Oil is running out, but shale-extracted oil is getting cheaper. The real shortage in much of the world is…water.
Most Americans are barely literate, think in images rather than symbols, and think the future is something that will happen to somebody else…just as today…
The outer-directed, social-issues consciousness of the USA, only nascent in 1987, will have peaked and run its course…leading to a fresh period of inward-directed values, perhaps even indulgence…though there will be less ability to indulge.
The French will still like odd Americans, unhonored in their own land (like the comedian Jerry Lewis), and will have just produced another desiccating critical theory of literature. Their food will be the same, too.
Berkeley, California will have a theme park devoted to its high period—the 1960s.
Bases on the moon, an expedition to Mars…all done. But the big news will be some problematical evidence for intelligent life elsewhere.
In science, the Icks (physics, mathematics) will be eclipsed by the Ologies (biology, psychology, ecology…).
There will have been major “diebacks” in overcrowded Third World countries, all across southern Asia and through Africa. This will be a major effect keeping population from reaching 10 billion.
The Crazy Years surrounding the turn of the century will have petered out, millennialfaiths will be boring again, and the attitudes expressed in this collection of predictions will seem very outmoded and “twen-cen.”
I will be old, but not dead. Come by to see me, and bring a bottle.
ALGIS BUDRYS
Because we will be in a trough between 20th-century resources and 21st-century needs, in 2012 all storable forms of energy will be expensive. Machines will be designed to use only minimal amounts of it. At the same time, there will be a general expectation that a practical cheap-energy delivery system is just around the corner. Individuals basing their career plans on any aspect of technology will concentrate on that future, leaving contemporary machine applications to the less ambitious or to those who foresee a different future. The most socially approved-of individuals will constitute a narrowly focused aristocracy, and will be at the mercy of dull functionaries and secretive rebels who actually perform the day-to-day maintenance of society. It should be noted that most minimal-energy devices process information and microscopic materials, not consumer goods. The function of “our” society may depend on processing information and biotechnology to subjugate goods-producing societies. These societies may be geographically external, or may be yet another social stratum within central North America. In either case, crowd-management technologies will have to turn away from forms that might in any way impair capital goods production. Social regimentation will then have become so deft that most people will regard any other social milieu as pitiable.
GERALD FEINBERG
A Message to Those Alive in 2012
Greetings! In writing these guesses about the technology that you will be using, I am assuming that there have been no gross discontinuities in human life from such catastrophes as nuclear war or an airborne mutation of the AIDS virus. From the standpoint of 1987, one type of technology that holds great promise for the next generation is nanotechnology, which involves the manipulation of individual atoms and molecules instead of the large solid objects that 1987 technology manipulates. With nanotechnology, it becomes possible to create structures in which every atom has a specific place and function. Such structures could for example, contain immense densities of information, rivaling and surpassing that of the human brain. This information would be contained in tiny volumes, as small as individual bacteria, so that the information could be processed much more quickly than by 1987′s computers, be they made of carbon or silicon.
The techniques for nanotechnology were already being developed in 1987. Tunneling microscopy and X-ray holography can be used to visualize objects on an atomic scale. Molecular beam lithography and trapping of individual atoms by laser beams or magnetic fields have been used to move and place atoms as the experimenter desires. These techniques will surely be refined to the point where we become capable of doing engineering on the nanoscale as we can now do on the macroscale. It was this mastery of atoms and molecules which led to many of the most prominent features of the world you now inhabit.
SHELDON GLASHOW
Written on the Eastern Air Shuttle between Boston and N.Y.
What will life be like in the year 2012? There will have been no nuclear war, and the threat of such a war will have been removed by the mutual nuclear disarmament of the major powers. SDI, Reagan’s ill advised Star Wars program will have come to nothing.
Japan will be the central economic power in the world, owning or controlling a significant part of European and American industries. This “economic dictatorship” will be beneficial to Japan’s client states, since Japan benefits by keeping its customers healthy and wealthy. Indeed, a peaceful and prosperous world community will owe its existence to this Pax Japanica.
Many diseases will be curable: diabetes and gout, for example, will be treated by ‘genetic engineering’ techniques. Multiple sclerosis and Parkinson’s disease will be effectively cured. However, AIDS will not yet have been controlled. It will have become the leading cause of death worldwide with millions of new cases each year.
The American economy will have experienced a gentle yet relentless decline. Our children will not live such comfortable lives as we do. The spread between the rich and the poor will have grown, and crime will have become so prevalent as to threaten the social fabric. The rich and the poor will form 2 armed camps. Most automobiles and heavy machinery will be manufactured in Japanese owned planets located in America. Yet, agriculture and higher education will be our most successful exports. There will be no fast trains connecting American cities, but a network of levitated superconducting trains will be under construction in Western Europe and in Japan.
…..
FREDERIK POHL
LETTER FOR A TIME CAPSULE
Dear People of the Future,
In my day there were professional entertainers, and fake psychics, who specialized in telling total strangers all sorts of intimate details about themselves. The process was called “cold reading”. I’ve never done it before, but I think I can do it for you. I think I can tell you quite accurately what your lives are like as you open this time capsule.
For example, you live in a world at peace. Something like the World Court, as an arm of something like the United Nations, resolves international disputes, and has the power to enforce its decisions. For that reason, you live in a world almost without weaponry; and, because you therefore do not have to bear the crippling financial burden of paying for military establishments and hardware, all of you enjoy and average standard of living about equal to a contemporary millionaire’s. Your health is generally superb. Your life expectancy is not much less than a century. The most unpleasant and debilitating jobs (heavy industry, mining, large-scale farming) are given over to machines; most work performed by human beings is in some sense creative. The exploration of space is picking up speed, both by manned colonization and robot probes, and by vast orbiting telescopes and other instruments. Deforestation, desertification and the destruction of arable land has been halted and even reversed. Pollution is controlled, and all the winds and the waters of the Earth are sweet again.
This is a very short description of your life, but it could be made even shorter. A single word can describe it: it is very close to what every previous age of mankind would call “Utopia”.
How do I know these things?
It isn’t because I’ve made a probabilistic assessment of present-day trends. Quite the contrary. All the evidence of what is going on in the world today leads to the conclusion that none of these good things are going to happen, because our country, the richest and most powerful nation in the history of the world (and, I have always thought, the best) is bankrupting itself to recruit and train terrorists in Latin America, give arms to terrorists all over the world, develop and employ fleets, armies and weapons systems which have no purpose except to pound any country which disagrees with us into submission. Since, unfortunately for us, the people who disagree with us have terrorists, fleets, armies and weapons systems of their own, the most plausible future scenario is all-out nuclear war.
It is therefore clear that to make the predictions above is to bet recklessly against the odds.
It’s still a good bet, though.
In fact, I don’t see how I can lose it. Anyone opening the capsule to read these lines will have to agree that my low-probability predictions pretty well describe the actual turn of events…because if the high-probability ones of mass destruction and species suicide should prevail no one is likely to be around to read them.
JERRY POURNELLE
A computer will win the Campbell & Hubbard Awards.
TIM POWERS
Probate and copyright law will be entirely restructured by 2012 because people will be frozen at death, and there will be electronic means of consulting them. Many attorneys will specialize in advocacy for the dead.
ORSON SCOTT CARD
Predictions for 2012
We must count ourselves lucky if anyone has leisure enough in 2012 to open this time capsule and care what is inside. In 2012 Americans will see the collapse of Imperial America, the Pax Americana, as having ended with our loss of national will and national selflessness in the 1970s. Worldwide economic collapse will have cost America its dominant world role; but it will not result in Russian hegemony; their economy is too dependent on the world economy to maintain an irresistible military force. A new world order will emerge from famine, disease, and social dislocation: the re-tribalization of Africa, the destruction of the illusion of Islamic unity, the struggle between aristocracy and proletariat in Latin America—without the financial support of the industrialized nations, the old order will be gone. The changes will be as great as those emerging from the fall of Rome, with new power centers emerging wherever stability and security are established. The homogeneity of Israel will probably allow it to survive; Mexico and Japan may change rulers, but they will still be strong. If America is to recover, we must stop pretending to be what we were in 1950, and reorder our values away from pursuit of privilege.
ROBERT SILVERBERG
We’re coming out of a time of troubles into a time of risks and promise—as we have been doing since the beginning of history. I think the 21st century will be a time of terror, surprises, miracles, and glory—with the emphasis on surprises and miracles.
JACK WILLIAMSON
GREETINGS TO 2012:
If we had a time-phone, now in 1987, we would beg you to forgive us. We have burdened you with impossible debts, wasted and polluted the planet that should have been your rich heritage, left you instead a dreadful legacy of ignorance, want, and war.
Yet, in spite of that, we have a proud faith in you. Faith that you have saved yourselves, that you are giving birth to no more children than you can love and nurture, that you have cleansed and healed your injured planet, ended hunger, conquered crime, learned to live in peace.
Looking toward a better future for you than we can see for ourselves, we trust that you will use your computers and all your new electronic media to inform and liberate, not to dominate and oppress, trust that you will employ the arts of genetic engineering to advance the human species and make your children better than yourselves. We know that you will be inventing new sciences that would dazzle us, opening brave new frontiers, climbing on toward the stars.
We live again through you.
Sincerely,
Jack Williamson
GENE WOLFE
MORE THAN HALF OF YOU CAN’T READ THIS
But the Writers of the Future Contest has asked me to read your palm, nevertheless. Twenty-five years is not great length on the scale of the history, and thus I am conservative, limiting myself to the following five predictions—one for each finger. And indeed, they are less prediction than certainty.
• The Thumb—Power: America and the U.S.S.R. preserve an uneasy accord, each testing the other’s will within well-defined limits. No major nuclear war has taken place. Soviets are more like Americans (and Americans more like Soviets) than anyone else.
• The Index Finger—Learning: Vestiges of reading, writing, and spelling remain in the curricula of the public schools. Those who can read a few hundred common words are counted literate. The schools train their students for employment—how to report to computers and follow instructions. (Called interaction.) Fifty million adult Americans are less than fluent in English.
• The Fool Finger—Entertainment: Sports and televised dramas are the only commonly available recreations. The dramas are performed by computer-generated images indistinguishable (on screen) from living people. Scenery is provided by the same method. Although science fiction and fantasy characterize the majority of these dramas, they are not so identified.
• The Ring Finger—Love: There is little sex outside marriage, which normally includes a legal contract. A single instance of infidelity is amply sufficient to terminate a marriage, with damages to the aggrieved party; this is a consequence of the two great plagues of the past 25 years. (I do not include the one we call AIDS, because it began well before this was written.) The population of the planet is below six billion. People live in space and on the moon, but their numbers are not significant.
• The Little Finger—Minority: A literate stratum supplies leadership in government and most (though not all) other fields. Its members are experimenting with sociological simulations that take into account the individual characters and preferences of most of the population. Its aim is to increase the power of the literate class and further limit literacy, without provoking war with the U.S.S.R. or alienating the rising powers—China and the Latin American block. A literate counterculture also exists.
Its products, too, are largely science fiction and fantasy; it tries to broaden the literate base, in part in order that its output can be read. It is of course to you of this counterculture that I write to say, take heart! Twenty-five years is no great length upon the long scale of history. In my time too, the age was dark. But we are summoning the sun.
DAVE WOLVERTON
In 2012 We will see:
1) That economic cycles caused by rises in technological levels will begin to level out—countries that have a falsely inflated economy will be forced to export their technologies to third-world countries where people are willing to work for less money. This will lead to a situation where knowledge, the key to our technologic success, will be spread across the world. We’ll see rapid decreases in starvation levels, but will still be plagued with political turmoil.
2) Men’s Rights—We will see a reaction to the women’s movement. Men will demand to be portrayed by the media as the sensitive, caring creatures that they are. They will also demand equal rights in custody battles where children are seldom awarded to a father because our society chooses to believe a mother is a better care-taker by nature.
3) Introduction of x-ray microscopes in the early 2000′s will lead to rapid progress in gene splicing. Look for rapid growth in medicine and mining, and food production. We may also see bacteria being engineered to simulate parts of the immune system (which could cure immune disorders such as AIDS and allergies).
ROGER ZELAZNY
It is good to see that a cashless, checkless society has just about come to pass, that automation has transformed offices and robotics manufacturing in mainly beneficial ways, including telecommuting, that defense spending has finally slowed for a few of the right reasons, that population growth has also slowed and that biotechnology has transformed medicine, agriculture and industry—all of this resulting in an older, slightly conservative, but longer-lived and healthier society possessed of more leisure and a wider range of educational and recreational options in which to enjoy it—and it is very good at last to see this much industry located off-planet, this many permanent space residents and increased exploration of the solar system. I would also like to take this opportunity to plug my new book, to be published in both computerized and printed versions in time for 2012 Christmas sales—but I’ve not yet decided on its proper title. Grandchildren of Amber sounds at this point a little clumsy, but may have to serve.
I also find amusing the general liberal bent of their attitude, and how it is conservatism that will doom us. When it has become obvious that the opposite is true…
I agree but remember that Progressive Liberalism (like all its cousins) is a fantasy. “Worker’s Paradise”, “Dictatorship of the Proletariat”, not to mention the economic predictions of Khruschev about leaving Capitalism in the dust… SF writers are Liberals but Liberals in general “live” in a world of fiction.
Anybody who swings by Chaos Manor (Pournelle’s website) will find out real quick that Pournelle is not a liberal. Neither are most writers of “military science fiction.” Orson Scott Card is most definitely not liberal either… On the other hand, Kim Stanley Robinson is a card carrying watermelon.
I would venture to say that most SF writers today fall somewhere between classical liberal and libertarian.
You do realize none of these authors could even remotely be consideted liberal right?
Zelazny, Card and Pohl were/are.
Sure. I even sent this link to Jerry Pournelle, thinking he would get a kick out of it. I know Pournelle is a conservative, but I don’t follow the politics of science fiction writers. They generally don’t make themselves obnoxious about it like authors. Yet read through them – the gist of many of them is standard liberal trope. Not all (but I never claimed that…) But assumptions such as Reagan leading us to nuclear war, over polluting the planet, 8 billion (we have reached 7 billion, and population growth has been decreasing faster than thought), starvation – you name it. All liberal fears.
SF writers are libs. The head of the SF Writers of America is John Scalzi and they don’t come any more moronically politically correct than him.
If you doubt that, reading SF today will cure you. Despite the meme that liberals are the artists in this world, generally speaking, I don’t think progressive liberals are capable of making great art. They are too prone to lapses of perception that allow them to only see stereotypes from the past, and not project a new thing in new clothes into the present or future. For example, the fact that libs can only see racism as basically coming from whites, and men at that, or the KKK and Nazis show how lacking in perception they are.
No surprise, SF today is a cavalcade of endless stereotypes with prose that comes off like it was all made on the same software editor. Probably the best place to be is somewhere in the political middle, eyes open. But that’s not a place SF welcomes today. Like fine art, SF, once the most challenging of genres, now detests being challenged itself.
I’m a SF writer. Am I a lib?
Fail Burton
Funny, I thought “All X are Y” was a leftist class war meme. Just because John Scalzi leans so far left he’s forgotten he has a right side doesn’t mean everyone does (and the mere thought of Tom Kratman being included in that bucket is enough to inspire the kind of laughter usually reserved for the seriously funny, like mainstream news notions of ‘truth’).
Deadite, perhaps you aren’t aware that since the Industrial Revolution damn near all famine has been caused by government? You obviously have issues with distinguishing between extrapolation from current trends – which is what it looks like all my fellow authors were doing, just like I was – and prediction.
Both of you: the fact that I don’t like the trends towards more and more intrusive government across the political spectrum does not mean I can’t look at the implications of the ugly places they can go. I don’t wear Pollyanna glasses and I never have.
@Fail.
You were joking, right?
You didn’t really think I meant every single SF writer, or that I know the percentage? I was generalizing. In my opinion, the overwhelming majority of SF writers are liberals. If I had to take a guess, I’d say 85%. This is exacerbated by the fact PC liberalism is an actual selling point nowadays, since there is an unprecedented amount of contact between writers and the fan-base. I imagine any SF writer who went after Obama on a panel at a big SF con would be booed, if not censured in the future. Certainly a reading of Kratman’s “Caliphate” (which I own) wouldn’t even be allowed. It would be said to be racist and Islamophobic and that would be that. And, out of curiosity, what makes Kate Paulk an SF writer?
On the flip side of this, what seems to pass for conservative SF usually means war novels. Not a great advert for conservatism. Alongside this resides this clique that believes in the “Human Wave,” something I find confusing, since examples to push back against are never given. I would prefer the HW not concentrate solely on content but equally on form. If you want to write anti-novels go whole hog, rebel, and really create a movement.
Blinded by their own weird narratives of the world they live in, liberal artists are passing off the perceptual torch. It remains to be seen whether the other end of the spectrum can take it up, or be equally blinded by their own constrained narratives.
For the purposes of this article I went with both SF and Fantasy authors as both are experienced at saying “what if.” Moreover, urban fantasy IMO blurs the lines between SF and Fantasy — and Kate is an accomplished author of same.
What makes you the final arbiter on what is and is not SF.
Additionally, I think you’ll find there are far more conservative/libertarian genre authors out there than you realize. It’s not so much that the authors or fans are liberal, but that the gatekeepers you have so lionized in the past are. If the only thing you can sell is liberal twaddle, all you’ll write is liberal twaddle.
Kate Paulk has 4 novels at Amazon with a total of 12 reviews between the lot. Hardly “accomplished.” And none of them are in the slightest way SF. You don’t need to be a final arbiter to say that, merely have common sense and no dog in the hunt. I understand the desire to defend friends. There is no need to bend reality itself to do so or put that on me. These genres and definitions were not established by me. I merely acknowledge them. If you want to say fantasy is SF, fine. You don’t need my seal of approval.
As for “twaddle,” would that include Monster Hunters and the 8 millionth novel about a vampire, carefully researched until one takes credit for being an academic historian while conveniently not having to meet the same standards?
Only libs redefine genres to expansively take credit for something they don’t actually do – that’s what wrecked the fine arts in the ’60s – painters couldn’t paint and photographers couldn’t take a photo – nevertheless they subsumed those genres like a cowbird. Conservatives are happy with what they actually do.
All forecast change happening too fast, way too fast.
What has really changed? The Interwebs and cell phones, mostly. Globalization economically. Space exploration much much more modest than anyone had thought.
If anything, we in the US and the world are richer and lazier than anyone ever imagined, yes even in the midst of this global recession. The safety net and socialism are rampant, the MSM press collapsed for no apparent reason, the US elected a circus clown for president, well, several in a row, depending on how you look at it. Electoral government is grinding to a halt.
Niven’s “Children of the State” aka “A World Out Of Time” is set first 50,000 years in the future, and then three BILLION years in the future. At least he got the timeframe right, for significant change.
Yeah, what *did* ever happen to that technological singularity, huh guys? LOL.
Y’know what’s odd, none of these guys seem to talk about us going Borg – that wasn’t seen on Star Trek until about 1988 (for origin and better version see Michael Swanwick’s “Vacuum Flowers”, obscure but outstanding little novel). But is this a threat – or a dream? Doesn’t it seem like the most fervent dream of everyone you know, is to *be* Borg’d! Forget that “Resistance is futile!” bit, it’s “Stand on the yellow rubber line, and no pushing!”
When it comes to Liberals “assistance is futile”
)
For a good and quite accurate set of predictions one can read “The End of the Modern World” by Romano Guardini. Right on the money!
All of Europe has huge and growing unassimilated enclaves whose goal is a return to the middle ages. Their electorates support policies of appeasement to the political (and actual) Luddites, as long as they receive sufficient government goodies. In the inevitable conflict between zealous, fecund true believers and indolent hedonists, I’ll put my money on the energetic bunch.
We have the same tension here but I think our geography and philosophy of rights might lead to a schism where hard Progressive areas form a sub-union of states countered by less organized alliance of fed up, Constitutionalists. A firming up along the red/blue lines with “leaning states” forced to choose sides. Then it becomes a battle of attrition. The left begins with the most technically and commercially sophisticated areas giving them force multipliers beyond their tactical talent. However, as their policies take hold, pressure will build for the skilled and entreprenurial class to flee to where they are sufficiently rewarded. Resist long enough and Soviet style decay will allow a restoration. Whether we would still recognize the constitution will depend on how vicious the battle and how revengeful the revisers.
Of course the PC appeasers could accelerate their idiocy and end up in the Caliphate. Controlling both coasts with virtually unlimited reserves to throw into the fight, I could say it’s over folks. Thankfully, I have faith that the Big Guy is the real el supremo.
Agree that the EU is toast, for lots of reasons and in all foreseeable circumstances, not just Hoyt’s (though he’s well on target). But the US analysis is awry. SF often involves a flight from reality, not just an extrapolation of it.
America as we are today is also doomed — many will say good riddance — but America as we want her to be certainly isn’t. The shining city on the hill is still in reach and in view, and the time to begin the great change is now.
The black swans out there will screw up any specific predictions, but conjecture isn’t a waste of time. Staying grounded helps, so does spotting things hidden in plain view by our treasonous and despicable MSM.
Examples: the resurgence of American manufacturing, especially high-end materials; the cost advantages and global competitive edge flowing from new recovery techniques/massive surpluses in natural gas; the near certainty that new shale extraction techniques + locomotive technologies lead to US energy independence; the growing demand for complex/luxury American products among the middle- and upper-classes in nearly all emerging markets; and the impetus to repatriate American jobs and treasure as low-cost manufacturing centers in China implode and/or cease to be competitive (lots of reasons). Also, let’s not overlook the enduring prominence of American ingenuity and innovation. And ask yourself: Where’s the next China? Where’s the country with the infrastructure or population or energy level to handle low cost manufacturing on the scale the planet needs when China unravels? — you’ll end up at home again.
If you can’t see a clear road ahead, you aren’t trying. Oppressive gov’t has to end. No compromises. Above all, no public sector unions.
Job one: take out the trash — and take the time to do it right. Electing Romney is a baby step forward, but we need much, much more. That includes highly public trials of the usual suspects, ignoring the predictable pansified mewling of the shuffling mediocrities in the Stupid Party. Holder belongs in the slammer, so does Obama.
Some will be upset and inclined to riot. Good, let’s get it on.
Meanwhile, vote for Romney.
” not just Hoyt’s (though he’s well on target)”
Err, she’s on target.
Sarah Hoyt is a her.
Orwell’s 1984 was truly prophetic. We are living it. And enthusiastically willing socialist academics and journalists in lockstep have imposed it on us.
Just read Richard Fernandez on conditions in housing projects without water and power. I Guess Escape From New York was prophetic, too.
Muslems will be killing Muslems, and everybody will still hate and blame the Jews.
You can’t predict the future. It’s out of your control. What happened to the various utopias and dystopias that earlier experts told us were just around the corner? What happened to the plague/famine/population explosion/ice age that was supposed to kill us all? What happened to the one-world government that should have been keeping the world at peace by now? Why are insane seventh-century religious throwbacks still murdering people in the name of God? Where’s my flying car? How come I’m not living in a giant spinning space station or a Martian colony? Why do I spend dollars and cents rather than “credits?” Why are there no cures for allergies, tooth decay, and obesity? All that stuff was supposed to have happened by now.
Predictions that do come true do so in bits and pieces, not all at once. We have robots building stuff in factors, doing surgery, and exploring Mars but no robot butlers answer the door and driving the kids to school. People predicted how “intelligent” machines would become but not how difficult it would be to simulate human thought and behavior. We have lasers, but no rayguns. People predicted energy-beam weapons, but not how difficult it would be to power them. It’s easy to predict “things,” but impossible to predict how a massively complex system like a country or a civilization will look in the future.
And if we put no faith in the ‘experts’ who are predicting global warming catastrophes, why should we put faith in any other ‘experts’ who are predicting other sorts of catastrophes? There’s more psychology than prophecy involved here – people projecting their fears, hopes, and prejudices into the future. There is no such thing as a clinical, unbiased prediction.
P.S. – That’s why I’m “predicting” an Obama victory in the election. I could rely on the poll numbers or the “predictions” of “experts” on the right and left. But my gut tells me that enough people in this country want what Obama is selling to give him a second term. Looking at the world with my own eyes, I perceive that there are more of “them” than there are of “us.” Best of luck to Romney; I’m voting for him and I’ll be the first one to eat crow if he wins. But remember – my gut can no more predict the outcome than the pundits and the bookies can.
My feelings exactly. Call me a pessimist but even if Romney wins I expect some kind of “situation” designed to delay the transfer of power or annul the election. These things are never solved without some bloodshed.
Sadly I think you are right. Most humans have always seemed to be willing to sell themselves for bread and circuses. It has been the case for most of human history that people lived under psychopathic power junkies who had total control over them, including that of life and death dealt with a single word (which makes reports of the delight Obama gets when personally working up the drone kill lists disturbing).
Have you seen The Avengers yet? As much as it might annoy a lot of people, Loki was right when speaking to that crowd. Worst of all, studies bad him up. Most people are easily corrupted not only to kneel but also join in the oppression of those who won’t go along. Studies and real world experience also show how quickly people become addicted to handouts. None of it bodes well for our future, neither near or long term.
I think we’re giving to much traction to the idea that SF is a genre that predicted rather than stories that presented such things as plot hooks and “what ifs.”
Having said that, the one consistent area SF has warned and been accurate about is not science and technology but decadent social trends in the West, particularly America. Go onto youtube and watch a Gary Glitter video on Tops of the Pops and realize that SF writers had been using such fops as fodder anytime they wanted to show a stupid, jangly, discordant future for a long time.
Despite the idea that Gibson and Stephenson were breakthroughs in this regard, such authors as Van Vogt in 1942, The Weapon Shop and Fritz Lieber in his great short, Coming Attraction, (1950), Bester with “The Demolished Man, (1953) and Kuttner/Moore “Fury,” (1947), had been doing such things for a long time. Look around you at the mental violence of criminals and our “arts,” and those authors have been spot on.
True. We can’t just say “Science Fiction has predicted the future.” We have to be more specific. Each science fiction story is a thought experiment. It’s it’s easy to pick certain writers and stories out of the SF canon and say “Look how prescient they were.” If we have hundreds of writers writing hundreds of stories about hundreds of possible futures, some of them are bound to “get it right.” Problem is, for every SF writer who seems to have gotten it right there were at least as many who got it completely wrong. If we’re generalizing about SF, we have say something like “Science Fiction has predicted the future about half the time; the rest of the time, it hasn’t.”
I guess my question is, how do you decide which of the hundreds of science fiction writers active today are most likely to “get it right” about our future? Is it the ones with the most college degrees? The ones who actually work in the fields of science their stories are based on? The ones whose politics agree with your own? The ones with the wildest imaginations, the darkest, the most paranoid? The ones who write the most like the ones in the past who’ve gotten it right?
Ultimately, we’re talking about people who imagine things for a living. I’d rather take advice from people who don’t.
The two general areas SF has mostly got it right are in extrapolating out the population explosion, and the rise of decadence due to increasing urbanization and therefore abstractions of thought which leads to over refinement and even delusion. For example, a farmer will never to worry about straying too far from reality because he deals with reality daily. In cases where SF deals with spaceflight, it tends to show people who are not overtly decadent, because, like a farmer’s life, space offers harsh realities and so the characters are pragmatic.
However, despite the fact that SF deals almost exclusively with the future, I don’t think people read it because of it’s predictive powers but because of the wonderful sense that anything can happen, and the fact that new and actually unpredictable and weird combinations of circumstances can lead us to a new type of poignant drama. Think of the people wandering in the forest in the falling snow memorizing books in “Fahrenheit 451.”
SF, and fantasy, also offers nice opportunities for prose in a somewhat more artistic and expressive fashion than mainstream literature. Think Vance, Bradbury and Lovecraft.
Absolutely right. Sci fi is literature – for enjoyment, enlightenment, expansion of the mind. It’s not the Farmers Almanac.
No science fiction writer has the tools to tell the greatest story ever told as i see now unfolding with the coming of the queen of sheba and then what follows next week
In the islam writing about the sun worship of the queen of sheba the secret with Solomon and then ask why does the Great Sun bow down to a mere human being. Why will the moon starting next week bow down?
What is a human being that the Sun and Moon look like the children along with the many many changing and growing clouds crying out for attention but this is not need on their part on sharing love. Science has made the belief stronger that another human is hell because they do not have the key open the door on how another human is heaven. Ask yourself who are we and where did we come from and why are we here?
The Sun can split and come down as a man or woman through what appears as a falcan to human eyes but we can not appear as a sun or moon. Do you know why?
You have never been allowed to ask very important questions to find out who you are and where you are going.
We before the suns were born had so many other ways to make love and would in the name of love devour all suns all are children. But here we are to make peace with are children and see how the great love of all our children despite having all the power bow down to us out of deep respect for what we created and the willing to limit our power to sustain the universe we see
The rebellion on the other hand from the third of the stars was the need to complete this great devouring circle of love yet in this great war our children are not seduced to join them out of the memory of our great nurturing love for them so the first will be last and the last will be first, the most powerful become the weakest and the weakest become the most powerful and I know more when Solomon arrives next week I believe
Well, it’s hard to argue with that!
If only because none of it made any sense…
It is briefly worth the effort of wondering, is waxwing01 just good at pretending, or are they in fact under care?
“a boy can take you into the open at night and show you the stars; he might tell you no end of things about them, conceivably all that an astronomer could teach. But until and unless he feels the vast indifference of the universe to his own fate, and has placed himself in the perspective of cold and illimitable space, he has not looked maturely at the heavens. Until he has felt this, and unless he can endure this, he remains a child, and in his childishness, he will resent the heavens when they are not accommodating. He will demand sunshine when he wishes to play, and rain when the ground is dry, and he will look upon storms as anger directed at him, and the thunder as a personal threat.” Water Lippman
I must admit when 10,000 thunders and lighting on my right and 10,000 on my left I do look back from wonder if my flesh body is back there lying on the ground but for some reason this just makes me become younger more robust and who know if this will continue in my elder years I have enter but to have the sun bow to me and perhaps the moon this week I suspect this is because of my vast experience and not babe in the words erudite big boys
All I can say to waxwing’s post is WTF?
Yep SF writers suck as futurologists, to be fair most of those guys were already over 50 (as I am now) and most of them were maudlin.
I like to say thanks to Roger Zelazny for writing such words and tell such great tales as he waited around in the Green Room at DFW Con back in ’86. “grandchildren of Amber” the man could laugh at a franchise.
At this point I don’t see any way to avoid a future centered around some sort of all-knowing police state. Countries in Europe already monitor the location of every vehicle in real time, as well as a detailed record of past movement, using the ANPR system. Facial recognition is already good enough that in 2006 the FBI scanned the crowd at the super bowl and arrested a few dozen people with outstanding warrants just by using computers to match their faces to pictures in their database. The vast majority of my generation, and many of all other ages, upload billions of pictures of themselves and others on to online services such as Facebook and tag the faces of those they know. I guarantee this information is being data mined and used to build a facial recognition database of frightening accuracy such that nearly every person’s location will eventually be monitored in real time. Even without facial recognition a cell phone has become a de-facto necessity in today’s world, and many courts have upheld the ability of police to track the locations of these without a warrant. The microphone in a cellphone can be turned on remotely by authorities and used as a bug to listen in on what goes on around it, even when the phone is “off”. Nobody a couple of decades ago would’ve believed that one day virtually everybody would carry a tracking device and listening bug with them at all times, yet it has happened. Your ISP is right now monitoring your internet activity through deep packet sniffing technology under the guise of copyright protection, the only way I can get around it is by using a securely encrypted off-shore VPN, but the days of even that will soon come to an end no doubt.
The days of anything resembling privacy are long past and growing ever more distant. My generation has a very different concept of privacy than ones past. It is almost inconceivable to most of them why I would refuse to put my life into the public sphere through things like facebook or twitter for all to see. 98% of my generation has some kind of social media presence, probably 75% are actively placing the intimate details of their private lives into the public sphere. Talking with them, most don’t care that the government can track them through their phones, they think it’s good in the name of “safety”. Someone like me of the 2% who refuse to put details of their life online is regarded with a great deal of suspicion. When a generation like this comes into power, bad things will get worse. Nothing good can come of it (to those who care about liberty), mark my words.
Big government and big business both want to know every detail of your life, and technology has given them the ability to do this. Laws have not stopped them, and will not. Republicans will not stop data-mining in the name of “security”, and Democrats will super-size anything intended to increase the role and power of the state.
How does any thread RE the prediction of what will be history, fail to mention Robert Heinlein?
I’m fairly sure it’s because Patrick’s Quija Board was down for calibration and so Heinlein wasn’t available for comment. So, given that RAH wasn’t going to be making any predictions, that the article was about our predictions, and we didn’t have Quija boards we could use to ask Heinlein, either…
Ahem. What would you really have expected mention of Heinlein to do?
No need for him to be alive, he made predictions and outlined trends. It is a certainty if we keep Obama and like follow-ons we will be putting himself on Curve “C”, where Romney might be a strong Curve “B”.
The man anticipated the waterbed, and extrapolated call screening when phones became able to permit it. It hardly like he had nothing to say of worth.
But what does any of that have to do with the question Patrick asked? And if nothing, what’s the point of bringing up Heinlein? Has it become some sort of taslimanic thing? You can’t talk about the future without invoking the name?
Yeah but he’s DEAD.
@Fail- actually she’s written more than that..I know..I’ve beta read em.
she, meaning Kate Paulk.
You mean stuff never published? Kinda lassoing, gerrymandering and wrangling the word “accomplished” there aren’t ya pal? Why can’t a relatively new author just be that? It’s not a scandal.
Accomplished doesn’t have to mean “written a lot” is why. Kate is an accomplished author in that her prose is well written, polished and readable.
Moreover she has many short stories published in anthologies, many of them SF. Not only that, but Mercedes Lackey invited her to a recent anthology as well.
I know several authors who have published many novels I’d consider anything _but_ accomplished.
Oh, and I just heard from her publisher that her latest is in the pipeline for publication as we speak.
I like how he’s picking on Paulk because she’s not accomplished enough because of how few reviews she’s got on Amazon. So dismiss Kate because she’s new. Whatever.
Meanwhile, I’ve got thousands on Amazon and a couple thousand more over on Audible, plus I’ve won some awards, been nominated for others, and had some national bestsellers. But I guess I just write “liberal twaddle”…
Okay, I’ve been accused of a lot of things in my life, but liberal has never been one of them.
Well, Truman Capote didn’t write but what? Three novels including “In Cold Blood?” But I guess since accomplished means “writes a lot” he’s not accomplished either…
Larry, anyone who accuses you of writing “liberal twaddle” needs their medications adjusted. Especially if they make the accusation after having read your books.
You guys are like a union. That’s what cliques are. Telling each other you’re talented is not the same thing as being talented. Actually I simply said that Paulk IS new. That is not being dismissive. You have to start somewhere. You don’t start at “accomplished.” If you want this argument both ways, you’re doing a great jobs arguing both sides. I have nothing against Paulk. I’ll try out the Vlad novel sometime.
I never said LC wrote liberal twaddle; I said it was twaddle – again there is this correlation where guns equal conservatism – I think that’s odd. Fantastic literature aimed at 8 yr. olds is doing fine. I congratulate you – I have nothing against YA fiction. SF and especially fantasy has been turned into the Mutant Ninja Turtles. I offer no congratulations to anyone for that. The genre’s are being infantilized. I guess Harry Potter taught everyone where the money is. The thing is, the writing and story-telling in Harry Potter are adult compared to most YA today.
I’m not impressed by awards or best sellers. How many best sellers and awards has Jackie Collins had and won? And accomplished means a distinguished body of work based on at least a modicum of having had a career recognized by peers and the public, not best friends. Talking about “debut” novels and “accomplished” at once is Orwellian.
Here’s from Capote’s Wiki: “…short stories, novels, plays, and nonfiction are recognized literary classics, including the novella Breakfast at Tiffany’s (1958) and the true crime novel In Cold Blood (1966), which he labeled a “nonfiction novel.” At least 20 films and television dramas have been produced from Capote novels, stories and screenplays.”
Capote was a prolific writer. Try again. Capote is Capote – and he had this thing called an editor, instead of a doting you’re-okay-I’m-okay best friend. Tough love – makes for better work.
This page won’t let me respond directly to that last post, but wow, Fail. You’re a like a literary genius.
I write young adult twaddle? That will come as quite a surprise to my mostly adult readers, my editor, my publishing house, major book review sites, and the sales staff of most of the bookstore chains in America. Good thing you are smarter than they are. I mean, you’ve totally redefined everything. You should call Amazon and let them know they’ve got me in the wrong section.
So, it doesn’t matter if I sell hundreds of thousands of books, it doesn’t matter if I’m on bestseller lists, it doesn’t matter if I get nominated for a bunch of literary awards including a Campbell for best new author, the Julie Veranger for best sci-fi novel in France, and just won an Audie for best audiobook for my alternative history, have a TV deal with the company that makes Walking Dead, am published in a bunch of foreign languages, or that I have a ton of books under contract, get paid lots of money… Heck, I even got a GI Joe based on me, but none of that counts, and I’m not a real writer.
Wow. It must be really hard to become a real writer. So it isn’t through sales, awards, praise, reviews, or any measurable sort of success, and anything fun is automatically just for kids. I wonder what kind of literati dreck I’d have to turn out to make somebody like you happy? Good thing I just write twaddle for a living and all my fans are dumber than you are!
But seriously, you’re a freaking idiot.
I never said you weren’t a real writer. You’re obviously doing quite well and doing it on your own terms, writing what you want to write. Why would you want to change and why would you think I think you should change? If you’re successful, happy and making your readers happy, there’s an awful lot to be said for that – maybe everything. Given all the things you mentioned, it’s probably a dream come true. There’s room in fantastic literature for all sorts of expressions and that is as it should be. It’s always been that way, from Wandl to Capt. Future to Stan Lee and Harryhausen to today.
Aside from the fact I dislike mutual admiration societies, my problem is simply recognizing the fact that SF and fantasy are in a way a victim of their own success. The genre has been mainstreamed to a degree where there is little diversity and the true eccentricity that was once the hallmark of the field is gone. Reading fantasy today is like reading cookie-cutter stories and prose written by the same person, perhaps the result of too many writing classes. The unique voice has been stilled.
I have no need for literati content but I would like there to be better written stories, that’s all. Trust me, no one has loved more stupid expressions of pop culture than me and fun is for everyone. Having said that, I don’t need to see another zombie movie or book, but it’s a genre all its own today, and one that once didn’t even exist. Is that where we want our genre to go?
Look at the old Flashing Swords series of PBs. Pretty much straight Sword and Sorcery, not exactly Jane Eyre. But perhaps half those short stories are minor classics. You couldn’t put an anthology like that together today. Worse, when you think that so many writers aren’t even as competent and creative as writers like C.L. Moore and R.E. Howard from the early-’30s, that’s troubling for me. That wasn’t literati, but it was damn fine writing. That’s 80 years ago.
There’s little difference in content from Conan slashing off heads or monsters hunters today doing it, but there was a whimsical, dreaming poetry to those stories and best of all, they weren’t conformist. I dunno; maybe the genre’s exhausted – exhausted of ideas. Popularity’s fine – it’s not everything and it’s not enough. I’m happy for every one who’s paying the bills and getting TV development deals. I’m not happy when Creepy, Eerie and Vampirella seem like rather sophisticated high art.
And by the way, if you’re writing YA and taking pride in not being literati, then own it. It is what it is. Stan Lee wrote for kids and is proud of his work and he should be. As for Joseph Campbell, he worked awfully hard to make it so that Ducem Barr and Bel Riose could basically fascinate us standing around talking. There’s the easy and the not-so-easy and if nothing’s ventured nothing’s gained. I doubt Campbell would care much for the people being nominated for his awards.
Interesting… And it does look like an unstable equilibrium between wealth generators (hard science, eng., management (aka productively organizing large group of people to create combined wealth greater than a sum of individual efforts)) and spenders (politicians, hustlers, soft “science” peddlers, etc.). Yes, one can call it inflection point. The problem though is that the underlying process is not smooth: rather it is a collection of jumps on various scales often looking chaotic.
Ok
The earth quake at Ringwood New Jersey
the first sign Wise King Solomon is getting closer to enter the 11th heaven where Queen
Sheba will also join him after her service on the thrones of hell and this 11th heaven called the Wise King Solomon and Queen of Sheba sanctuary is where this Ring of Power will be for the 2nd coming of Jesus Christ the Lord
Seldon crisis!!!
Apropos these extrapolations:
Man proposes, chaos disposes.
I don’t think sci-fi authors are terribly impressive at divining the future from present issues and trends. Observe.
http://www.gizmag.com/sf-time-capsule/23556/
Scientists of various fields, futurists, advertisers, and over celebrated historiographers or class/economics theorists don’t seem to be very good at it either.
“I think the next twenty years are an inflection point for human civilization.”
Isn’t that true about every twenty years? The past defines the future.
Well, 20 years ago the internet was in it’s infancy and widespread use of cellphones was still a few years away. Those have been huge game-changers. Will we see something similar in 20 years?
20 years ago, 1992 can be seen as the year zero for political correctness in some ways. That was the year the arguably first great PC moron, Sinead O’Conner, tore up a picture of the Pope on Sat. Night Live. Her entire career was built on PC; something relatively new at the time, but common today – politics can trump art.
Alongside that dismal woman is another one in 1992: an old bat who tried to hold scalding hot coffee between her legs in a foam cup while wearing shorts. The result was failure but, unlike previous people with common sense, she decided to blame someone else for her stupidity and successfully sued, and so PC was institutionalized into law.
PC has been another giant game-changer, and the world over. Our current President was probably elected because of it, and the demography of entire nations in the West are being changed forever as a result as well. Our societal policies, pop culture and educational systems are geared around PC.
So where is PC in 20 years? Unless it disappears it’s not the meek that’ll inherit the Earth but failure. And where does the world put the equivalent of 7 countries with the population of America? What happens to food prices at best and food itself at worst? If you’re looking for catastrophe, I say look to Nigeria, a hideously overpopulated country. You’re already seeing the breakdown of populations in Pakistan and Egypt and many other countries.
The future isn’t for predicting, it’s for pondering. A lot of SF writers over the generations have used it as a vehicle for their own message/warning; the rest is largely for entertainment value. It should be noted that none of the cyberpunk writers of the Eighties predicted the World Wide Web, and many of the Golden Age writers assumed that the Soviet Union would continue to exist well into the 21st century, so take any serious attempts at prediction with a huge grain of salt. As I believe Heinlein once said, writers are basically competing for Joe’s beer money (for that matter, I’m more interested in stories that show how a science-fiction future would affect Joe-the average person-than in how scientist characters react.)
By the rivers of Babylon
Psalm 137
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sUp-EgsqZnw
I agree with the overall feeling that we’re on the verge of collapse. It will, hopefully, be a slow one. Why? Space. Privatization of space. I’m surprised that all these sci-fi people don’t see the potential of us herding our cats and dogs and kids onto spaceships and heading out. Folks did it from a repressive and unfriendly Europe in the Sixteenth and Seventeeth centuries. By the way, my latest book, Strange Worlds, explores many different possible futures, if you want to check it out. So, keep your phaser handy and be careful!