I can think of recent examples in science fiction where the authors treat "the future" as a game instead of an exercise in serious foresight. For example, John Scalzi's Fuzzy Nation (2011), about the discovery of an intelligent species on a Earth-like exoplanet, insults the reader's intelligence by having the human characters in some unspecified time in "the future" use allegedly futuristic gadgets called "infopanels," when we can buy those things now from businesses like Walmart and call them smart phones, tablets or iPads. He might as well have portrayed televisions as a futuristic technology and given them a fancy name, like the "visiplates" in 1930's science fiction. In other words, Scalzi didn't want to bother with the challenge of thinking about what life really could look like in a society capable of interstellar travel. His novel would make more sense if he set it in 2011 in a place like New Guinea and have it deal with cryptozoology.
Thomas's observation that cryonicists should (ideally) focus on "the future" as a personal issue still remains valid, however. Though with the aging, infighting, attrition and financial problems of the cryonics movement, I can see how that has gotten problematic. It also doesn't help when some cryonicists still engage in handwaving about imaginary "molecular nanotechnology" and "mind uploading" as the solutions to our survival problems, when physics or neurobiology may not allow these things to exist or happen in our universe. It probably damages the cryonics movement's credibility with serious, educated people who might otherwise feel inclined towards our goals to keep invoking speculative futurology from circa 1990, when the world has moved on from then without progress towards these technological fantasies.
From Cryonics magazine, June 1986:
From Cryonics magazine, June 1986:
CRYONICS AND THE DEATH OF SCIENCE FICTION
by Thomas Donaldson
At one time or other in their lives, many cryonicists read science fiction avidly. I myself have a lot of attraction for it. At bookstores I will go to the science fiction section and look over the new books available. But for some reason, I almost never find what I want and leave the science fiction section empty-handed.
Cryonicists also will note, much more than most people do, how hostile most science fiction seems to cryonics. Cryonics almost never appears, in science fiction, as a positive thing. From Larry Niven's "corpsicles," one of whom is batted to the center of the Galaxy and back like a tennis ball (in "A World Out Of Time"), to Norman Spinrad's Jack Barron (in "Bug Jack Barron"), who is the victim of the evil plotter Benedict Howards who holds a stranglehold over life and death through his control of cryonics, science fiction authors have never caught on to the wonder and promise of what we are trying to do.
Furthermore, even immortality has a bad press among science fiction authors. One of the most interesting, and most characteristic, ways in which immortality comes to us is as a gift (or a curse) from the aliens. It's rarely something we human beings discover for ourselves. We discover Faster Than Light (FTL) drives for ourselves quite often, but immortality (which in practical terms is likely to open up the stars at least as effectively), almost never. Even John Varley, who of all the contemporary science fiction authors has most assimilated the possibilities and meaning of biotechnology, has his biotechnology coming to us via aliens from the "Ophiuichi Hotline," not as the result of our own scientific and economic efforts. (Varley is a very interesting case and deserves extended discussion elsewhere).
What is the reason for this bias among science fiction writers? What accounts for this hostility?
The reason why science fiction authors don't like immortality and cryonics is because it means the end of science fiction. Now, I expect this to be a controversial hypothesis, especially with any science fiction fans who are also readers of CRYONICS, but I think I can defend it well.
Let's look at the role that the future plays in science fiction. Its biggest role is to provide a faraway unreachable place, the ideal location for dreams and terrors. No one expects to live in the world of Robert Heinlein's Friday. It's just a place to play with ideas and possibilities. Frederick Pohl is another interesting case in point. In "MAN PLUS," Pohl gives us a castrated bionic man (does anyone out there believe that such a thing could seriously happen as Pohl described it?). In "AGE OF THE PUSSYFOOT" (which is one of the most positive science fiction novels dealing with cryonics), the story Pohl presented seems very unlikely when seen in its own terms. Why would all of these people flee from life and responsibility by entering suspended animation when a global crisis arises? We might just as easily (and incredibly) suppose the plot device of everybody deciding to go to sleep just before the dam breaks! The elements which these stories lack is concerned, careful involvement with reality. I don't mean that their authors have to get everything right, I mean that they don't even try.
In science fiction, the future is a convenient place for dreaming. No one would ever actually end up there. They could have chosen Timbuktu or Ethiopia just as well; except that nowadays retirees with heart conditions can buy tickets to Timbuktu for $400, and sleep comfortably at the local Hilton when they arrive.
And so, into this fandom of the "future" as the quintessentially unreachable and faraway place, steps CRYONICS AND IMMORTALITY. The future suddenly stops being "Friday"'s world and becomes the middle of next week. It's close. Nobody writes science fiction about the middle of next week. They look at their schedules to see what appointments they have.
What would happen to Friday's world if most of the people who read Heinlein's book seriously expected to be there? They would read it in the same frame of reference in which they read their appointment schedules. If they seriously believed it (very unlikely!), they'd immediately start thinking of what they could do to stave off such a disaster. Or, more likely, they wouldn't even bother to read such fantastic drivel.
Embodied in science fiction we see a particular attitude toward the future which is fundamentally nonactivist. The future is a place of dreams, to be visited only by dreamers. There's nothing wrong with dreaming, but it's hardly what we, as cryonicists, are doing when we think about and plan for the future.
The important thing about science fiction is the location of the dreams and the consequences this implies. Any sustained plan of action aimed at altering the world must involve coming to grips with the future. If the future is the location of our dreams, we cannot seriously attempt to come to grips with it. I once attended a science fiction convention because, on the surface anyway, it seemed a likely place to recruit more cryonicists from. What better group of people to approach than one which was concerned about, as a serious issue, the world of the future?
But my expectation was far from the mark. I didn't find people who were interested in getting to the future, or even people who were concerned about the real possibilities of tomorrow -- or the next hundred or five hundred years for that matter. What I found was people who were interested in playing mind games. People who were interested only in building intellectual sand castles; complicated fantasies which would be washed away with the next wave. The science fiction community, virtually to a man, was not populated with people who were at all concerned about the future as the location of action, but rather with people who dressed in costumes from the Middle Ages or who were concerned with creating interesting, exciting, and above all safe fantasy worlds. Safe because there was never for a moment the possibility they could experience any of the danger, hard work, or disappointments associated with those worlds -- were they to become real. (One is reminded of the definition of adventure: Someone a thousand miles away having a hard time.) All of us have dreams and fantasies which we would never wish to see become real and in which we would never invest more time or energy than it takes to create and contemplate them on a rainy afternoon. There are many, many more of these kinds of dreams than the real ones -- the ones that change the world and shape the future. To take an activist attitude toward the future can be very threatening to someone who places their idle dreams and escapist fantasies there.
Stop and look at science fiction for a moment. Really look at it. What does it concern itself with? Why, contemporary themes, of course!: pollution, or nuclear disaster, or changes in reproductive biology which are on the horizon or are already here. Dreams, after all, are the way we emotionally absorb our desires and experiences. Everyone has such desires, fleeting attractions (sexual and other), worries about job, spouse, prospects, fantasies of winning the Lottery and being the center of everyone's gaze. Every single one of these dreams depends upon very particular circumstances of time and place. Even a small change in economics or biology would make such a dream pointless.
Once someone (who was not and never will be a cryonicist) asked me what my ambitions were, after I was frozen and revived. To which I could only answer that all such ambitions depended too much on time and place, to have specific ambitions in such a future would be like wanting to be chief oarsman in the trireme in 1986.
Our present dreams assume a LOT of specifics about our biology. A species able to change sex at will just wouldn't have the same kinds of fantasies we have now. No way! Even if that just became an OPTION, the fantasies would have to change. I believe that this underlies a lot of the hostility science fiction has shown to biological technology. Even to noncryonicists, it's very evident that as we advance in THAT direction, the basis of our fantasies will blow away. An accurate tale of the future would tell the story of people doing alien things to achieve goals equally alien. This is not the stuff of which people want to make their fantasies today.
This isn't even a problem unique to biological technology. It's just a statement about history and change. Six hundred years ago the enterprising young man wished to attain knighthood and a fiefdom of his own. There was no such thing as a nation-state, hence no concept of patriotism, nor of the common good. To attempt medieval knighthood in 1986 becomes laughable. It had even become laughable by 1600, as Cervantes showed (but then, who reads "Don Quixote" now?).
Science fiction authors therefore have a problem. They want somehow to transpose a contemporary world into another fantasy world, but without too many elements of fantasy. In particular, with nothing which would portend a fundamental change in the way people think, in what they believe and thus in how they behave. A bit of extra gadgetry, sure, but no fundamental inventions.
I believe this is why (citing a major contemporary development) computerization escaped them so much. Asimov's "FOUNDATION" novels, for instance, take place tens of thousands of years from now yet in a curiously 50's kind of world, where the sorts of things we do with our personal computers are done in the Fifties' way. Not only that, but Asimov is clearly aware of the technology. That's exactly what his robots are about. The interesting point about this is what this technology (his robots) is not doing rather than what it does.
Even birth control (a very tame biological invention!) plays little apparent role in this science fiction. Why? Because it was too fundamental, not enough like a gadget. Birth control meant something. It meant that women and men could neither of them have exactly the same kind of sexual fantasies, terrors, and inhibitions they had before that time. The dreams got changed. Only a little, but they changed.
In fact, biology and medicine have lots more to do with our dreams than do spaceships. Let's consider Poul Anderson's books, the Flandry series and the Polesotechnic League. These are novels of swashbuckling and derring-do. A really advanced medical technology, even of repair (much less of immortality) turns them to drivel. (Cryonicists experience this kind of shift in perspective every day: decapitation just does not have the same meaning to us!) What would happen to Flandry if he had had himself cloned and his memories duplicated? Flandry would go on, but his story would lose a lot in the transition.
We can see that a lot of art forms will be changed by immortality. Crucifixion scenes, for one, are likely to disappear... and yes, folks, science fiction is one of those art forms likely to disappear.
I think that for any human tool or device there is its particular form, and then behind that, the more general needs that it satisfies. Sure, the horse and buggy disappear, but the need for individual transport goes on. One interesting question to ask is "what may take the place of science fiction?"
Let's look at fantasy as an alternative. Fantasy takes place in a world by definition unreachable, because it does not exist. It's also a much more archaic world, where magic is used instead of technology. The fundamental problem with fantasy is that we've evolved a lot since the days of the witch and the prince. These old symbols just don't speak to a lot of our concerns today.
On the other hand, most science fiction stories don't present really technologically advanced worlds. Often the rocket just substitutes for the airplane: it gets you to another place, another world, what does it matter how this world came about or where this world may be? In science fiction terms, the trouble with a REALLY advanced world is that the concerns of people within it will bear about as much relation to our own dreams and terrors as witches and princes do.
One possibility for what will eventually happen is that the "future" might disappear from science fiction. It's easy enough to remove the pretense that these stories take place in the future. You simply invent another world, an alternate world. Some of the best "science fiction" stories I've read do exactly this. The point is that a story which takes place in the future must invent a historical connection between the present and the story. It must concern (like the world of Robert Heinlein's "Friday") entities like the California Republic, which bear some relation to the real here and now state of CALIFORNIA (a ridiculous one, after scrutiny). If the story hinges on some piece of new technology, what allows this other world to have it even though we don't (yet)? Proponents of science fiction of course may object that such a story would lose reality. Well, reality is a strange thing to ask of a work of fiction! What we ask of a work of fiction is that the conduct of people and affairs in it not violate our sense of how real people would really act. We ask this of all serious stories.
The other possibility is that science fiction may become populated with people who are genuinely concerned about the future and genuinely interested in what it will really be like. It is possible that science fiction authors may appear who are concerned with exploring the impact of developments that can be seen and predicted with some confidence today, but which are truly some distance in the future.
There would be several requirements to be met before such science "fiction" writers could appear. The first would be that they will have to care enough about the future to find out what's really ahead. They'll have to do their homework on biological technology and molecular engineering. They'll have to do some deep thinking about people: what makes them what they are; where do their needs and wants come from and how will changes in their biology and their technology alter these needs and wants? In short, they'll have to start thinking about and writing about the future not as some place merely to "escape" to, but rather as a place to live in.
By now, most of you will realize that the one essential change required to make that transition is to believe, really believe that you are personally going to confront that future. Only cryonicists can do that, and the fact is, most of us are too busy consulting our appointment books and worrying about how we're going to keep that date with tomorrow to give much thought to anything else.
So much for the future of science fiction.
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