Charles Stross on Why Scifi Matters More When the Future Looks So Dangerous
“Hello? Is this the complaints department? I want to register a complaint about last year’s future; it’s completely broken!”
Quite a few of us have probably snarked like that about the
anno horribilis 2016 (leaving politics aside
entirely let me just say: David Bowie, Prince, Carrie Fisher*) but there’s a germ of truth in the assertion that global politics on December 31st, 2016 was completely unpredictable from January 1st, 2016. Just contemplate the U.S. presidential election for a moment: while Hilary Clinton’s candidacy was almost locked in by January 1st, the Republican candidate (and his electoral college majority) were not on even on the radar of his own party. Similarly, very few informed pundits anticipated that the usually-compliant voters of the U.K. would bite the patrician hand and by a narrow majority reject continuing membership of the European Union.
2016 was the year in which global politics went nonlinear. On which note, I’d like to stop talking politics and explain what this means for science fiction.
Over-generalizing wildly, science fiction falls into two categories: scifi with a far future setting, and scifi about the present or the near future. Far future settings are fun to write, and they also insulate you from the slings and arrows of contemporary history in the making. If you’re playing in a
Star Trek setting circa 2400, the events of 2016 are as remote as the events of 1916, or even 1816. And by “remote” I don’t mean that the denizens of 2400 might not have heard of Donald Trump; I mean they might not have heard of the United States of America—2400 is as far away from us in time as 1632.
Near future settings, however, are another matter entirely.
I’m writing here because my publisher is keen to get the word out about my latest novel,
Empire Games, which is set in the alternate-history version of 2020 that evolved from my earlier
Merchant Princes books—a series that pulled a bait-and-switch by setting itself up to look like a portal fantasy, then took the premise seriously (and ended up in technothriller territory, with the President assassinated in 2003 by a stolen US backpack nuke, an India/Pakistan nuclear war, and finally B-52s carpet-bombing the eastern seaboard of another time-line’s North America with H-bombs). I finished the last novel in the previous series in 2009, and began work on
Empire Games in 2013, to a background of WikiLeaks, Edward Snowden’s veritable bombardment of leaks from the NSA, and my editor telling me to downplay all the stuff about spies and Russia in my book because “spies are dusty and old-fashioned.” ...
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