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Praise for Star Dragon
"Seldom does a storytelling talent come along as potent and fully mature as Mike Brotherton. His complex characters take you on a voyage that is both fiercely credible and astonishingly imaginative. This is Science Fiction."
-- David Brin"Star Dragon is terrific fare, offering readers a fusion of hard science and grand adventure."
-- Locus Magazine"Star Dragon is steeped in cosmology, the physics of interstellar travel, exobiology, artificial intelligence, bioscience. Brotherton, author of many scientific articles in refereed journals, has written a dramatic, provocative, utterly convincing hard science sf novel that includes an ironic twist that fans will love."
-- Booklist starred review"Readers hungry for the thought-provoking extrapolation and rigorous technical detail of old-fashioned hard SF are sure to enjoy astronomer Brotherton's first novel."
-- Publishers Weekly"Mike Brotherton, himself a trained astrophysicist, combines the technical acuity and ingenuity of Robert Forward with the ironic, postmodern stance and style of M. John Harrison. In this, his debut novel, those twin talents unite to produce a work that is involving on any number of levels. It's just about all you could ask for in a hardcore SF adventure."
-- Paul di Fillippo, SCI-FI.COM
Why Charlie Stross is a Stupid Smart Person and Near-Future Science Fiction
October 1st, 2008
I posted a link yesterday to a Charlie Stross rant where he opened with:
We are living in interesting times; in fact, they’re so interesting that it is not currently possible to write near-future SF.
This is total bullshit.
The purpose of science fiction is not to accurately predict the future, and it is not necessary to do this in order to be able to write it.
Charlie is totally correct that it is next to impossible to accurately predict the future, but then he draws a ridiculous conclusion.
Let me discuss a number of things here, briefly, that are relevant. Back in the 1950s writers were clueless about the near-future in several fundamental ways, particularly about the role of computers in revolutionizing the world. But the implication of Charlie’s post is that they were ok writing near-future sf back then (I’m thinking Heinlein’s slide rules for his space explorers), but now we’re not.
Near-future science fiction has NEVER been accurate. If you write it to make predictions, you’re in the wrong line of business. Perhaps it gets proven wrong a little more quickly these days than back then, but just set your story a little farther out there. There are an infinite number of stories that can be told that aren’t wrong. Big things happen all the time, but plenty of things stay the same. To a homeless kid in Rio, five years from now is unfortunately all too similar to today.
And I’ve also recently discussed the Black Swan and prediction in general. The author’s point is that it is impossible to predict some things, and it matters a lot in business among other places, and it does. But there are also things that are predictable. He goofed on his story about discovering the microwave background radiation, for instance, and he also wrote about how Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were sitting on a powder keg years before last month’s meltdown.
OK, some things predictable at some level, some things not. Same as it ever was, but perhaps a little faster today.
Still, not the point.
Science fiction is about seeing humanity juxtaposed against situations not possible to see in the normal, every day. And science fiction is written in the present, so it’s about the present intrinsically. The predictions can be warnings that never have to come true. They can involve predictions about paths we’ll never take, but that would present interesting choices.
Write something interesting, entertaining, and True About Life. It doesn’t have to be right on the prediction front. (Of course it can’t be wrong on the science front, or I’ll spank you. Sorry. My thing I can’t get around.)
A personal aside. When discussing my next novel, near-future sf, with my editor, she suggested pushing it out at least 20-30 years. You have time and space that way to get things right, or at least plausible, even if they go wrong in the interim. Stross would probably freak out that 30 years gives us the Singularity and that’s even worse, but hey, it’s science fiction. It isn’t future forecasting.
Summarizing:
The point of science fiction is to tell interesting stories that reveal truths about life possible in no other way, not accurate predictions of the future.
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October 1st, 2008 at 6:30 pm
I thought Stross’s argument that between the idea for a near-future novel and publication something is likely to be developed to invalidate the novel’s premise.
For example, I wrote a novel abut, oh, say Google develops neural net software to sync all the Android phones on the market into one mind. I write it up and while it’s in proof Apple develops the same tech for iPhones.
October 1st, 2008 at 9:24 pm
Who is actually writing novels about things that can happen two years from now? I mean, I buy that that is a big part of his argument, but this isn’t very interesting, is it? These are things that can happen now, so his near-future SF is really just a present day story. Maybe near-future simply need not be specified for dates?
October 2nd, 2008 at 6:55 am
Mike, as far as I’m concerned, 30 years out isn’t near-future SF. It’s mid-to-long-term.
I’m staring down the barrel of a contract for a novel set in 2020 or thereabouts. It has to be written by next August, and it will be in print in August 2010, and in mass market in August 2011.
Now, projections out to 2020 are fair game — a whole ton of weird stuff can be expected to happen in 12-13 years. But these are some pretty fucked up times we’re living through this month, this week. Would you like to take a stab at predicting the broad trend of events between now and August 2011?
Even playing fair and ignoring the black swans and long term stuff, I need to get the shape of the next couple of years right in order not to look like a complete dork when that book comes out. It’s currently not obvious whether the USA will have a viable financial system in 18 months time, when that book comes out, or be presided over by FDR 2.0 or a know-nothing Jesus-robot from the territories. It’s not obvious whether gas will cost US $250 a gallon (due to a collapse in the dollar as planetary reserve currency combined with peak oil) or be down to $50 a gallon (dollar doesn’t collapse, turns out there are more oil reserves than we knew). It does look as if we’re at a macroeconomic tipping point with huge implications for the shape of global politics … and did I say the book contract is for a near-future thriller, i.e. something that will be directly affected by this stuff?
Back in 1992, a whole bunch of technothrillers were still dribbling out of the pipeline which posited a strong, militarily aggressive USSR with a choke-chain on Eastern Europe. I really don’t want to follow their example. I don’t want to cop out and write an alternate future history, either. (Smells like surrender.) I mean, it’d be easy to spin up a back story in which Washington DC is smashed by a Tunguska-grade meteor during the swearing-in ceremony in 2009, the headless chain of command accidentally launches on Russia, and we have a world dominated by China and the EU … but that doesn’t tell us anything terribly interesting about our own likely future, does it?
October 2nd, 2008 at 7:46 am
Thanks for chiming in, Charlie. Maybe we disagree about what “near-future” means, and being under contract for a particular book is different from being able to pick and choose from any sort of near-future story, but your opening is definitely hyperbole. Engaging, eye-catching hyperbole that sparks discussion, but hyperbole.
If you’d just said that writing about the world today is risky, because by the time the book comes out something major may have changed, I couldn’t disgree with you. Not as good of a hook, though, of course.
And I think your definition of “near-future” isn’t any different from contemporary mainstream fiction with their lead times, especially given your thriller examples, so why even say “near-future?”
I think you need to write about black swans (e.g., your Tunguska), or avoid them altogether, and it’s always been a roll of the dice. The Billy Joel song, “We didn’t start the fire” — any line in that song could derail some part of anyone’s book. Your book has just got to be about your view of life. What do you, Charlie Stross, think the world is like? I’m not talking about specific things like the price of gas, because no one has a foolproof way of being right on those, and no one has in decades (Opec could have come along years later or years earlier).
And if you’re that uncomfortable trying to write this kind of book, stop pitching them!
October 2nd, 2008 at 11:30 am
Contemporary mainstream doesn’t tell us much about how the human condition changes in the future, far- or near-term. Technothrillers don’t, either: they use high-tech toys as window dressing, but it’s fundamentally a very reactionary genre. That’s why I find writing near-future SF such a fun challenge — if infuriating at times.
(Here’s what I think is important right now: logistics, bandwidth, and supply chains. Here’s what I think is going to be important in a decade: distributed manufacturing, omnipresent surveillance, and fault-tolerant networks. Oh, and environmental pressure, of course. And whatever comes after our current stage-managed PR-spun variant on democracy, once everyone’s personal history is on the web. And whatever comes after the current corporatist-managerialist top-down command economy model of running businesses, once the MBA culture is finally discredited — though that may take some decades.)
October 6th, 2008 at 8:47 pm
[...] week I wrote a post about Charlie Stross’s hyperbolic assertion that it’s become “impossible…. He posted some additional explanatory comments there, and also posted an additional explanation [...]
March 15th, 2009 at 7:47 pm
[...] just strikes me as ironic that someone who has issues with writing the near-future because of the fast-changing technology could blow it on something that was already known at the [...]