麻豆传媒

The Future of Science Fiction? We鈥檙e living in it. Those 鈥淔uture History鈥� charts in the back of every paperback, when I was about 14, had the early 21st century tagged as the 鈥淐razy Years鈥�. He had an American theocratic dictatorship happening about then. I hope we miss that one. Otherwise, I鈥檓 assuming these are those years.

The thing called science fiction that we do with literature will always be with us. The genre we鈥檝e called science fiction since about 1927, maybe not so much. That鈥檚 something to do with the nature of genres, though, and nothing to do with the nature of science fiction.

The single most useful thing I鈥檝e learned from science fiction is that every present moment, always, is someone else鈥檚 past and someone else鈥檚 future. I got that as a child in the 1950s, reading science fiction written in the 1940s; reading it before I actually knew much of anything about the history of the 1940s or, really, about history at all. I literally had to infer the fact of the second world war, reverse-engineering my first personal iteration of 20th-century history out of 1940s science fiction. I grew up in a monoculture 鈥� one I found highly problematic 鈥� and science fiction afforded me a degree of lifesaving cultural perspective I鈥檇 never have had otherwise. I hope it鈥檚 still doing that, for people who need it that way, but these days lots of other things are doing that as well.

A few years out from discovering Heinlein鈥檚 Future History chart, I adopted, as a complete no-brainer, 鈥榮 dictum that 鈥淓arth is the alien planet鈥�, that the future is pretty much now. Outer space (as far as science fiction went) became metaphorical. Became inner space.

When I started to write science fiction myself, in my mid-twenties, I found I could only leave Earth in a self-consciously nostalgic, low-orbit sort of way, the future having migrated into different emergent constructs, one of which I decided to call 鈥渃yberspace鈥�.

When I was twelve, I wanted nothing more than to be a science fiction writer. Today, I鈥檓 not sure I ever really became one. I suspect I was already something else when I began 鈥� probably what (1928-2008) defined as 鈥減aramodernist鈥�, meaning any cultural text that is neither modern nor postmodern, but can be classified as either/both). I took it for granted that the present moment is always infinitely stranger and more complex than any 鈥渇uture鈥� I could imagine. My craft would be (for a while, anyway) one of importing steamingly weird fragments of the ever-alien present into 鈥渨orlds鈥� (as we say in science fiction) that purported to be 鈥渢he future鈥�.

If I could magically access one body of knowledge from the real future, I think I鈥檇 choose either their history of the ancient past or whatever they might have that most resembles science fiction. The products of two different speculative activities. They鈥檒l know a lot more about our past than we do, and trying to reverse-engineer history out of dreams, as I recall, was quite a uniquely exciting activity.

Read all the articles in our Science Fiction Special