Great Science Fiction

is never about the gadgets.


It is always about what the gadgets

might make us do.

If, as Faulkner said, great literature is about "the problems of the human heart in conflict with itself", then this genre of literature has always been about the problems of the human heart in conflict with tomorrow.

And the measure of any writer who wants to play in these fields has always been three-fold:

First, can he or she conjure a plausible Universe into being? A possible future, a different past or an alien place.

Second, can he or she spelunk deeply enough into the human spirit to understand what it will do – how it will bend or shatter or mutate -- when that conjured world has it's foot on our throat?

Third, does he or she have to chops to write about it well enough to make us care and make us think?

Doing all three well is a terribly tall order, which is why when someone as formidably talented as William Gibson talks about it, I listen.

Here are some snips from his interview in this 40th Anniversary Interview with Rolling Stone:

You made your name as a science-fiction writer, but in your last two novels you've moved squarely into the present. Have you lost interest in the future?

It has to do with the nature of the present. If one had gone to talk to a publisher in 1977 with a scenario for a science-fiction novel that was in effect the scenario for the year 2007, nobody would buy anything like it.
…

In the past ten years, we've seen incredible advances in nanotechnology and synthetic biology. Does any of it amaze you?

My assumption has always been that at some point we would lock on to a literally exponential increase in human knowledge. That was my best guess, somewhere back in the Seventies. There hasn't been anything that made me sit back and say, "Golly, I would never have imagined that." The aspects of recent history that have caused me to do that have been, in every case, manifestations of retrograde human stupidity.

How do you mean?

It's been an extraordinarily painful decade or so. I just never in my wildest dreams could have imagined that it could get as fucked up as this guy [George Bush]. It still amazes me how dumb so much of our species can manage to be. But that's kind of like being amazed at life.

Does any of it scare you? A new synthetic life form or nanobot running amok?

That could happen. It could all go to gray goo. But it just isn't in my nature to buy a lot of canned food and move to Alaska and try to escape the gray goo.

In a few, quick strokes, Gibson effortlessly sums up the calculatedly schizophrenic position of the thinking person in the 21st century.

The rueful, head-shaking stance anyone who thinks seriously about the future must take when confronted with the evidence of our own monstrous stupidity and swinishness that swirls around our ankles every day…

…and the hard-eyed and hopeful-but-not-childishly-Pollyannaish stance anyone who thinks seriously about the future must take when trying to figure out how to help our species survive its idiot infancy.

For the whole thing, head over here.