[ExI] Defeatist Science Fiction Writers

John Grigg possiblepaths2050 at gmail.com
Mon Jul 21 05:15:23 UTC 2008


Stefano Vaj wrote:
What I was saying is: "Even for virtually immortal characters as in
Egan's stories [and probably even more in Heinlein's stories] there
are risks worth taking". On the fact that Egan's characters
specifically seem more inclined to spleen and boredom than Belle
Epoque upper-middle class late teenagers we may well agree. :-)
>>>

What of Stross, Vinge, Haldeman, Scalzi, Ringo, Simmons, Hamilton,
Stephenson, McDevitt, Banks, Bujold, Brin, Reynolds, Moriarty, and
Sawyer, among others?  I would think most of these authors are not
mired in dystopic pessimism.  I realize not all of their main
characters are shown to be blessed with indefinite lifespan and the
challenges that come from such a gift.

Not every SF writer has negative attitudes about Transhumanism on par
with Greg Egan or Ken MacLeod! lol  I will never forget MacLeod's
swipe at Extropians.

he continues:
What is pessimism and what is optimism?

Is it really "optimist" from our point of view to see, e.g,
old-fashioned, perhaps neoluddite, forces defeat and destroy - for
their own good, needless to say - some sort of posthumans, with the
author obviously expecting the reader to rejoice?

On the contrary, a writer may perfectly sympathise with H+ values or
heroes, and qualify as a transhumanist himself, even though in his
fiction they happen to be overcome by an adverse fate.
>>>

I recall a short story entitled "Monster" where a very indoctrinated
young man with a very big and sophisticated gun pursues a transhuman
superman who is only trying to escape a war torn Earth (due to a very
ugly war between the enhanced minority and unenhanced majority that
started it) so he can join his peers in space and live in peace.  At
the end of the tale the hunter gets the drop on his transhuman prey
and shoots him, causing mortal injuries.  In his final moments the
enhanced human forgives his killer and tells him that if he would only
switch sides he could live for many millennia and explore the unknown
depths of the universe.  The young soldier recoils in horror at such
an invitation but a splatter of blood got into one of his wounds and
the nanites over time transform him.  The final scene has him
hairless, with an enlarged skull and other modifications, looking to
escape vigilante hunters and leave the planet.  I consider this to be
one of the finest stories I have ever read that explore such plot
ideas.  It definitely had the Transhumanist vision, despite showing
how in some ways the future could go terribly wrong.

On the other hand I just finished reading "God Emperor of Dune" by
Frank Herbert.  It shows the psionically prescient Leto II merging his
body with a sandworm larvae.  This allows him to live for thousands of
years and also grants him great resistance to physical  attack.  I had
mixed feelings about Leto, he was sort of an enlightened monster/super
dictator who felt his prescient god-like visions showed him why it was
so necessary to manipulate and cull the galactic population for the
sake of the "Golden Path" and the future of humanity.

I personally think the present time is a golden age for science
fiction (despite fantasy ("elves and dragons" type novels taking up so
much shelf space).  I don't think pessimism has entrenched itself yet
among most of the cutting edge SF authors.

Tom Nowell wrote:
I think there's always been a pessimist strand in SF. Certainly, the
proto-SF of "Frankenstein" is based on a nightmare of a creation going
wrong, and "Gulliver's travels" (which I've seen labelled as proto-SF)
has a long strain of weariness at human folly throughout. While Jules
Verne was optimistic, HG Well's wasn't. Aldous Huxley's "Brave New
World" is a dystopian vision of human biotechnology, and Carel Kapek
(the man who gave us the word "robot" from the original Czech usage)
used "RUR" and "The War with the newts" to portray a bleak future if
people continued to exploit those they saw as "Other" or lesser. These
examples are all before world war II, and the ensuing explosion of SF
magazines and books. After WWII, SF was bigger, but the atomic bomb
brought to SF visions of world annihilation.

I suspect in the longer view of things, it may be that the
techno-optimism of the 50s and 60s may be seen as an aberration
against a long term trend.
>>>

Please keep in mind that some people would like to change the name of
science fiction to "speculative fiction."  I think a function of well
written science fiction is to speculate on various scenarios that
humanity might encounter down the road, both positive and negative.
And by doing this science fiction does us a great favor aside from
it's  entertainment value.

John Grigg



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