A Century Of Science Fiction

By Bruce Sterling

Science fiction is a native 20th century art form that came of age at the same time as jazz. Like jazz, science fiction is very street-level, very American, rather sleazy, rather popular, with a long and somewhat recondite tradition. It's also impossible to avoid, no matter how hard you try.

Science fiction boasts an impressive predictive track record--if you squint hard and ignore most of the evidence. Atom bombs, spacecraft, comsats, credit cards, jukeboxes, waterbeds, gene splicing--they all appeared in science fiction first, well before showing up at the mall or on the military base. But science fiction is visionary by design and prophetic only by accident. You'll have a hard time finding androids, aliens, time travelers or psychic powers at the K-mart, even though science-fiction writers have obsessed about them for 70 years.

The U.S. Congress's Office of Technology Assessment had all the virtues sometimes claimed for science fiction. The OTA was concerned with genuine hard-core technological prediction. It paid close scholarly attention to technical trends and their social implications with facts, figures and footnotes--and Congress abolished it in the mid-1990s. The OTA didn't work out; science fiction suits us better. American society prefers having supergizmos dropped on its head out of nowhere, with no time to prepare and no real thought of the consequences. We love it that way. It's livelier, funnier, freer and just more American. "Leap, and the net will appear!"

If science fiction outlived the OTA, it also gets more girls, gold and glory than its other big rival, professional corporate futurology. Corporate trend spotting, after all, is limited to gizmos that might conceivably make someone money. Science fiction, in its sleep and entirely by accident, makes absurd amounts of money: SF films, comic books, action figures, CD-ROMs, computer games, chrome cards, costumes--there's no end to it.

Science fiction is a fun-house mirror for a society warped by raging technological advance. Science fiction doesn't want or need to make much sense. It seeks astonishment, terror, wonder, ecstasy and dread. It is spectacular and mythic, an oxygen tent for society's daydreams. Science fiction cordially ignores many vital technologies, such as, say, garbage recycling. Recycling is hugely important, but it has zero science-fictional thrill.

SF's saga of the techno-sublime is about power, speed and transcendence of human limits. Ray guns, starships, artificial intelligence, virtual reality, nanotechnology--all beloved of SF, and every last one of them a big Technicolor disruption of the mundane.

When science fiction gets over its trite romance with the parts catalog, it can achieve unnerving power. Aldous Huxley and George Orwell are the classic exemplars of that small, elite class of science-fiction writers who frighten and annoy science-fiction devotees. Huxley's Brave New World (1932) bursts with prescient speculation: "feelie" multimedia, Prozac-like "soma" tranquilizers, test-tube babies. Late in life Huxley became a psychedelics guru, seduced by the potent allure of brain chemistry.

Orwell holds the world record for scaring us away from a future that seemed perfectly plausible. People like to claim that Orwell "got it wrong," as if it were Orwell's fault that we don't dwell in some ghastly dystopia. His 1984 (published in 1949) is the bitter work of a dying man. Granted, political correctness and language theory haven't become Newspeak just yet. But Orwell's portrait of a debased Britain, singing machine-made pop songs and obsessed with vast public lotteries, has a certain uneasy resonance even now.

On the grim subject of networked surveillance, maybe Orwell was just a big, mean, bring-down pessimist. On the other hand, we haven't yet seen an Internet society in the grip of a genocidal land war. Security videocams are already ubiquitous; they've become too commonplace for fiction to notice.

Huxley and Orwell, of course, didn't think of themselves as science-fiction writers. The true artists of the genre are a tribe apart. Many created "future histories" that are worked out in exquisite detail. Robert A. Heinlein, for instance, was a hugely popular SF writer but of a surprisingly gloomy and gothic cast. His prediction for the late 20th century was summed up briskly: "Considerable technical advance during this period, accompanied by a gradual deterioration of mores, orientation and social institutions, terminating in mass psychosis." It was hard to watch the Clinton impeachment trial without feeling ol' Bob was on to something.

Heinlein also forecast a 21st century America seized by evil right-wing Christian fundamentalists plugged into cunning propaganda networks. These way-out notions of Heinlein's were composed in the 1940s; he probably thought he was being very provocative, out there and outrageous.

Time has been less kind to other works of SF, despite hard work and serious intent. Harry Harrison's novel Make Room! Make Room! (source of the movie Soylent Green) predicted a New York City crammed with 35 million people, each allotted a meager four square yards of living space. That novel is set today--in 1999. It was published in 1966. The scenario made sense back then, before the advent of widespread birth control. All you had to do was follow the exponential curves.

If the tag end of the century resembles the work of any single SF writer, it must surely be J.G. Ballard. One might make an argument for the prescience of William Burroughs (if you're a junkie) or the uncanny knack of William Gibson (if you're a career computer criminal). But Ballard is surely the most insightful artist the genre ever produced. While most SF writers of his generation were down at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory cheering on the moon landings, Ballard was in a London art gallery throwing a Pop Art happening with a crashed car and a topless model. Ballard's approach to the future was never rooted in engineering, physics or rocket science but rather in medicine, psychology and Surrealism. Time has been kind to him.

Ballard was the first SF writer to realize that there was something basically lunatic about space travel. Ballard never predicted events or devices; instead, he described future sensibilities--how it might feel, what it might mean. A bizarre contemporary event like the paparazzi car-crash death of Princess Diana is perfectly Ballardian. No flow chart, no equation, no profit projection could ever have predicted that, but if you've read Ballard, you swiftly recognize the smell of it. I daresay that's the best the SF genre will ever do--and no more should ever be asked of it.

Science-fiction writer Bruce Sterling has published 12 books. His seventh novel, Distraction, was released in December