(2023-10-28) Schroeder The Science Fiction Of The1900s

Karl Schroeder: The Science Fiction of the 1900s. I grew up during the cold war and I remember sitting around with friends in high school talking about what we would each do in the 10 to 20 minutes we’d have left after the nuclear attack sirens went off.

We’re still terrified today.

The despair of helplessness in the face of climate change, of fascism rising like Dracula from its coffin; of resource overshoot and political decay, all feel different to me than the instant nuclear annihilation

Part of that difference, I think, is that nuclear war was a binary thing: it would happen, or it wouldn’t. And if it didn’t, then science fiction laid out a future we could look forward to.

I think, in general, we are staggering into our present crises armed with visions of a post-crisis future that are woefully out of date—that are literally from a different century. (collapse)

let’s reframe 20th century science fiction as science fiction of the 1900s.

how do you recognize when you’re living in the transition moment between one and the other? For me, it was a book I read that first divided my perception of time into ‘now’ and a discontinuous ‘then.’ The book was Charles C. Mann’s 1491.

Once you learn that there were giant cities and flourishing literary and artistic cultures in the Americas while Rome was just getting its act together, you can no longer see the European settlement of the Americas as a sign of progress

If the terror of my youth is different from the terrors of today, maybe I can also reframe the science fiction of the 1900s as carrying a different set of promises than we need in the 2020s. Maybe its main tropes are no longer relevant to the current moment.

the world’s richest man, Elon Musk, has made it his mission to implement the 1900s vision of what the 21st century was supposed to look like

Don’t get me wrong—he’s done a lot of good by dragging the transportation sector kicking and screaming into electrification, and it’s not that his other projects aren’t beneficial as well (X aside).

It’s just that they are all about the 1900s vision

Ten years ago, Neal Stephenson invited myself and a number of colleagues to contribute to an unusual project

Hieroglyph Project did so well that in 2015 it won an award for Most Significant Futures Work by the Association of Professional Futurists

Much of the Hieroglyph project was driven by Stephenson’s frustration at the seeming stagnation in imagination in our present civilization

Examples of hieroglyphs are easy to find: the classic finned rocket-ship, the time machine, the blocky toy robot, the Star Trek communicator, VR goggles. The 1900s were packed with hieroglyphs. (cf Design Fiction)

where are the hieroglyphs of the 21st century?

My story, “Degrees of Freedom,” (Schroeder Degrees Of Freedom) is about the future of governance, which to me is the single most important thing humanity can focus its creative energies on right now

In 2019, I presented the idea of the ‘deodand’ in Stealing Worlds, and that is definitely a hieroglyph by Stephenson’s criteria. A deodand is an AI that believes it is some natural system, such as a river or forest, and acts in its own self-interest, that being the preservation and thriving of that natural system.

Are your ideas and plans for confronting the crises and opportunities we face in the 2020s based on ideas ‘from the 1900s?’ If so, it is possible that there are new ideas and plans that are a better match to our current situation?

set this as my own design constraint for the next few years. I’m going to write short stories, novels, and collaborate with as many people as I can on real-world projects to reframe and reinvent our future

I’ll show how I and my collaborators are making them concrete in new stories and real-world projects such as ViV Games and The Deodands Project.