http://www.mikebrotherton.com/?p=834

Here’s the headline and opening, to which Charlie responded…

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.

As you succinctly pointed out, hard/good science crammed into a story is ‘not for you’. What we read and what we write comes down to personal taste – just as our definitions of science fiction do.

Your definition of science fiction is not my definition. For me, the ’science’ comes first in the equation. That might be the premise, or it might be chapter upon chapter of detailed engineering and physics regarding make-believe FTL drives.

Without the science first, it’s not science fiction. Maybe fantasy, maybe not even that, but most certainly not SF – near-term or otherwise.

I don’t know if you saw it, but OS Card was over at the B&N blog answering questions yesterday and he said, (paraphrasing) ‘there is no science fiction any more’.

Makes me wonder what he’s writing then. Makes me wonder what some all of the rest of you are planning on writing also.

The field (more often than not an American institution) has almost always been a mirror to our culture, and now it seems, even more so: the country is examining its purpose of being and trying to re-define exactly what it is, just as the genre has been doing for at least the past two years.

I already know what science fiction is (for me). No need to look into the mirror. I just wish the publishers would start printing some of it again…

(I closed with a provocation, just as you opened with one, lol.)

(Kidding, of course.)

And yeah, shame on me for perhaps not emphasizing enough that I’m talking about near-future science fiction, and that a “deep” understanding really means “enough to seem really, really smart at cocktail parties, but not enough to get a Ph.D or anything like that.”

The main thing (for me) is synthesis and believability. I don’t think we can linearly extrapolate any *single* change and end up with an enduring near-future scenario. I think we need to be aware of many changes so we can knit together a believable, enduring near future. If that’s what we want to write. I do a reasonable amount of near future (and alt history, and far future, and . . .) so maybe the blogpost is:

a. A way to encourage myself to keep up with all of these fields.
b. A very belated and oblique answer to Charles Stross’s post on the impossibility of writing near-future science fiction.

And yeah, to one of your excellent points: whatever you write, it should also be a damn good story in its own right.

I think Jason’s original point makes a number of unfortunate assumptions about science fiction, and while he does eventually reference “near-term science fiction,” that doesn’t come across as a clarifying thrust of the article.

Moreover: I’d be tempted to argue that the vibrant pace of creation by engineers, and the exciting evolution of theory under scientists makes the *present* writing of both near- and far- term science fiction an entirely open-ended proposition. Yes, Jason’s right, you need to be conversant with a lot of stuff in order to project in a manner plausible to the sophisticated reader, and even then your chances of getting right are somewhere near nil. But as you point out, they always have been.

However, I dare someone to say that there could be no new Arthur C. Clarke’s in science fiction, for there would surely be some brilliant, philosophically inclined imaginer come along to disprove it.

So, I see Jason’s point, and it’s valid in a certain domain, but given more thought I have to agree with your original tweet: It’s beside the point.