Worlds Beyond: Bleak views of the future from authors Will McIntosh, Christian Cantrell and Anthony Huso
By Clay Kallam, Correspondent, Mercury News, 11/01/2012
"There's nothing soft about 'Soft Apocalypse' by Will McIntosh (Night Shade Books, $14.99, 248 pages). The author's near-future description of the slow slide of modernity into barbarism is soft only in that it takes 10 years (2023-2033) for the end of the world as we know it to arrive, rather than some abrupt disaster that plunges the planet into immediate chaos. ...
"'Containment' by Christian Cantrell (47North, $14.95, 304 pages) is also about surviving in an increasingly harsh environment. But young protagonist Aric is an essentially uninteresting genius, and way too much of the book involves explanations and exposition. Then again, Cantrell is a software engineer, and not surprisingly his book reads like it was written by a software engineer. ...
"Between the gore and destruction, Huso's plot involving the oddly named Caliph Howl -- though perhaps it's just a riff on the king of pain, which is certainly justifiable since the least of his suffering is being killed and brought back to life with full memory of the death -- and his vain attempts to figure out his no-longer-human and now immortal lover while at the same time saving the world. He doesn't, of course, but goes through a long, torturous, losing battle that results in everyone he cares about dying in agony. ..."
"Between the gore and destruction, Huso's plot involving the oddly named Caliph Howl -- though perhaps it's just a riff on the king of pain, which is certainly justifiable since the least of his suffering is being killed and brought back to life with full memory of the death -- and his vain attempts to figure out his no-longer-human and now immortal lover while at the same time saving the world. He doesn't, of course, but goes through a long, torturous, losing battle that results in everyone he cares about dying in agony. ..."
Apologies to any science fiction writers or fans who hate the abbreviation Sci-fi, but it was used in this blog heading to keep that heading from becoming even more long and ungainly than it already is. The above review of McIntosh, Cantrell and Huso I am using as an excuse to make a few brief points on some core problems I see infecting much of science fiction and futurism.
First, the obvious point. As others have noted, any prediction of the future can be pretty much waylaid by not imagining any watershed technological advance. An excellent example is that no matter how brilliant someone would have been in the past as a forecaster, if they had not thought of the invention of the computer, or at least something computer-like, their vision of our present world would not be too brilliantly accurate.
Another less recognized problem is that various predictions are often way too chronologically optimistic. Maybe that is done deliberately. For example if you are Ray Bradbury and you want 13-year-olds to read your books, there definitely would be an advantage to having them believe that when they are 33 they will be piloting a spacecraft to Saturn's moons. And this relates to the third problem.
Science fiction, futurism or futurology tend to be overly optimistic in general, to the extent that even dystopias are often presented too hopefully, at least in their resolution. This is because most lovers of science fiction and the future often seem unbound by science--the science of ecology. Many such writers pride themselves in their faithfulness to science, and yet science without the science of ecology is no science at all.
I'm not quite ancient yet, but can recall when I was a kid the common prediction that most people long before now would be merrily flying their hovercars to and from work. Obviously the technology is not impossible, so why hasn't this happened?
There are two obvious problems. Generally ignored by the future-oriented is that humans do not have unlimited wealth, wealth that is ultimately founded upon cheap plentiful natural resources. A related problem is that as human populations continue to mushroom, they place an ever greater strain on those natural resources, as well as various human systems and their source cultures.
So let's say, without any hovercar infrastructure, which would also be hugely expensive, we start by making hovercars available for purchase to residents of Los Angeles and New York City at $1.2 million each. Sign me up! Actually I have no idea what they would cost, but surely considerably more than the most expensive surface car, which very few of us can afford. Then if you could somehow make it come to pass that tens of millions of Americans are zipping around the sky, you have the nightmare of all traffic-control problems and the countless plummeting dead and the resulting dead of those they have plummeted upon. And it goes on from there.
Now to cruelly critique 'Blade Runner.' This is actually one of my favorite films. So skillfully showing an incredibly detailed yet impressionistic, visually and musically stunning version of an alien third-world multicultural teeming anthill dystopia that America and the rest of the West are rapidly becoming. But in at least in one version of that film--spoiler alert--the Harrison Ford character and his beautiful robot girlfriend have in the end escaped Los Ugliness and are finally gliding over an impossibly lush green Eden. But in such a dystopian world, would such an Eden even still exist to escape to?
Obviously science fiction is not science. It is also art. So it would not do for a satisfying ending to have the happy couple finally escaping from a dystopian L.A. only to have to set up housekeeping in an abandoned landfill in Lapland. Still, it gives the impression to young people that no matter how much we hammer down the earth's environment, we are still going to be able to fly off and get a fresh clean green start in some idyllic setting, preferably accompanied by a luxuriantly tousled brown-haired eyes-you-can-lose-yourself-in actress supermodel (sorry, told you I liked that film).
In this regard, my personal unintentionally comical favorites are all of the countless science fiction stories I have read and watched that unfold as follows: Humans, having turned the earth into burnt toast, then say to themselves, 'Whatever shall we do?!' Answer. 'We earthlings shall henceforth merrily blast off into outer space and bravely colonize another planet!' End of story.
First, you have to wonder exactly what planet that would be. But beyond that, once the earth has been rendered uninhabitable, there will no longer be vastly wealthy technologically advanced civilizations that could blast colonists off to other planets to start anew. When civilizations start turning into wastelands, usually having something to do with overpopulation, they start coming apart at the seams. So this is not the most excellent time for them to embark upon some hugely expensive and complex colonization of some far-off planet. On the other hand, this is what does commonly happen on film sound stages and on the laptop screens of poolside science-fiction writers.
I should note here that the brief newspaper review above says that these three stories are pretty grim, so maybe my overall criticisms here do not apply to them. But I am not saying that stories of the future should represent grim hopeless nihilism. If I were to try to write such fiction of the future, I would supply hope, but hope conforming to the laws of nature.
First, you have to wonder exactly what planet that would be. But beyond that, once the earth has been rendered uninhabitable, there will no longer be vastly wealthy technologically advanced civilizations that could blast colonists off to other planets to start anew. When civilizations start turning into wastelands, usually having something to do with overpopulation, they start coming apart at the seams. So this is not the most excellent time for them to embark upon some hugely expensive and complex colonization of some far-off planet. On the other hand, this is what does commonly happen on film sound stages and on the laptop screens of poolside science-fiction writers.
I should note here that the brief newspaper review above says that these three stories are pretty grim, so maybe my overall criticisms here do not apply to them. But I am not saying that stories of the future should represent grim hopeless nihilism. If I were to try to write such fiction of the future, I would supply hope, but hope conforming to the laws of nature.
In summary, again, most science fiction and futurism is vastly overly optimistic, even when describing dystopia, and completely un-grounded in at least one of our most important sciences: ecology. And also un-grounded in at least one of our the most important concepts: reality.
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