Predicting versus Contesting

Few, if any, readers and writers of science fiction believe it exists to predict the future. Strikingly on-target foretellings of future events and technology are occasional, serendipitous accidents. Rather, it speculates on the questions "What if...." and "If this goes on...." Cory Doctorow's latest LOCUS essay delivers a slightly different, more radical perspective on what science fiction does:

SF Doesn't Predict

This article consists of the text of a speech he gave in June 2023, when receiving an Honourary Doctor of Laws from York University’s Faculty of Liberal Arts and Professional Studies in Toronto. He begins with an anecdote from his educational career. At the age of seventeen, already professionally selling short science fiction, he inquired at York University's humanities department about getting into the creative writing program. He was turned down because, as he was told, "they only teach literature." I had a similar, although less blunt and final experience, as an undergraduate. After taking the introductory course in creative writing, I enrolled in an advanced, workshop-type fiction writing course. At the end of the first semester, the professor hesitated to let me into the second semester because I'd submitted only fantasy and horror. He reluctantly let me continue, and I dutifully wrote a slice-of-life story about a military wife coping with a toddler and a baby while her husband was deployed. Nobody could have asked for a more spot-on "write what you know" work. As far as I can recall, it was an okay story and certainly didn't lack vividness or realism. But that wasn't the path I wanted to follow; the marketplace abounds in writers of realistic fiction, and I knew I'd never measure up to most of them. While I sometimes enjoy reading about contemporary settings and characters with no trace of the fantastic, I have no interest in trying to write that genre. (Yes, even though it claims the status of "mainstream," it's a genre.)

Doctorow later rejoiced in belonging to a community, the tech realm, whose members didn't view his science-fiction output with disdain. Rather, he "was surrounded by people who thought that SF writing was literally the coolest thing in the world." The rest of this blog explains why he agrees.

He defines optimism and pessimism as "just fatalism in respectable suits. . . .Both deny human agency, that we can intervene to change things." He subsumes both under the category of "inevitabilism, the belief that nothing can change." This attitude, according to Doctorow, is "the opposite of SF," whose purpose is to imagine alternatives. What it contests is the assumption that there's no alternative to the status quo or the predicted future, that "resistance is futile." He lays out several examples, climaxing with his metaphor of a bus speeding toward the brink of a canyon--unless we take the risk of swerving. The essay concludes, "Hope begins with the ability to imagine alternatives. And there is always an alternative."

That affirmation reminds me of something that irritates me about the fantasy and SF shows I watch on the CW network. A continually recurring line of cliched dialogue laments, "We haven't got a choice!" (I've often wondered whether the same writers compose the scripts for all of those series.) I keep wanting to yell at the screen, "Yes, you featherbrain, you always have a choice."

Margaret L. Carter

Carter's Crypt

Do-Overs

A vintage short story that was filmed as a TWILIGHT ZONE episode features an elderly millionaire who wants to relive his life, with his memories intact, for the thrill of making his fortune all over again. He stikes a deal with a demon and is duly returned to his home town in the early 20th century. Unfortunately, the past turns out to be less golden than he imagined, and, most important, he forgets to specify having his youth restored. Therefore, he suffers a heart attack and dies for lack of modern medicine. As he faces death, the demon taunts him about his request that he keep his memories: "Can we help it if your memory is lousy?"

The hypothetical question often arises, "Would you live your life over again, knowing what you know now?" Occasionally pondering that fantasy, I definitely would not accept a do-over from childhood or even my early teens. Go through all that again, with the added horror of being treated like a dependent child while having the mind and memories of an adult in my seventies? No, thanks! In the movie PEGGY SUE GOT MARRIED, a middle-aged woman reverts to her high-school self with her memories intact, faced with the decision of whether or not to repeat the choices that led to marrying her present-day husband, from whom she's currently separated. After reliving part of her senior year (spoiler), she reawakens to her reasons for loving her husband and, upon returning to the present, decides to stay with him.

Would I repeat my life starting from, say, my marriage at the age of eighteen? In T. Kingfisher's latest horror novel, A HOUSE WITH GOOD BONES, the narrator returns to her grandmother's house (now her mother's), where she lived for part of her childhood and teens. Upon waking up in her old bedroom on the first morning, she experiences a disorienting moment of terror that her entire life since the age of ten has been a dream, and she'll be condemned to repeating high school, college, and graduate school—and writing her PhD dissertation all over again. I can identify with that nightmare. I'm not sure I'd have the stamina to struggle through all my university courses and the rewriting of my dissertation from scratch, although I might perform better in my advancement-to-candidacy oral exam with the memory of my previous blunders. On the other hand, I would have a fair chance to avoid most if not all of the worst mistakes and wrongdoings of my first lifetime. And yet, knowing I'd have to relive some painful events that are outside my control, would I want to face them again?

A further concern: If I repeated my life from my wedding day on, we might end up without all the children we've had in this timeline. Alternate history novels often include real people from the primary world but in different roles from the ones they played in our version of history. Although that's an entertaining trope I enjoy reading, in fact it's a vanishingly remote possiblity. A minor change in the timing of a sexual act could more likely than not result in the conception of a different individual. A difference of a month would, of course, definitely do so. Given a point of departure in the 19th century—say, the familiar scenario of the South winning the Civil War—virtually none of the people alive today, at least in this country, would ever have been conceived. On a lesser scale, the same result would happen in a family after a point of departure in one couple's married life. In Jo Walton's novel MY REAL CHILDREN, the protagonist faces a moment of decision in early adulthood when she decides whether or not to marry the man whom she's been dating. That decision splits her life from then on into two separate timelines, one in which they marry and one where they don't. In her final years, she remembers both lifetimes and families she's had. One interesting aspect of this novel, by the way, is that neither timeline is our own history. One alternate world turns out worse, the other better; in a further intriguing twist, the protagonist's personal life is happier in the dystopic world than in the optimistic one.

So if a genie offers to grant me a wish to re-do my adult life, I think I'll turn it down. That scenario would hold too many risky variables.

Margaret L. Carter

Carter's Crypt