When it comes to literal creativity, science fiction is truly amazing. There’s nothing you can’t write in sci-fi. You are not touching an historical past with firm references, an actual present with its limitations, the future is unknown and the future could turn out to be… anything and everything really.
The secret for great sci-fi in my opinion is to project historical trends and current features of the present into the future. Extrapolating some existential or universal traits of human beings and developing them into surreal and yet potentially valid scenarios. Doing it so well that it might actually come true or, at least, readers feel it might, one day, be real.
Isaac Asimov’s Foundation Series is a masterpiece of sci-fi literature. I stumbled upon it in my late teens and I see it as one of the many influences for my adventurous attitude in life. I read it again in English last year and I highly recommend it to anyone who wants to gain a detached and sophisticated sociological and political understanding of the world.
Think of space travel and many planets in a galaxy with different nations, cultures and levels of knowledge, centrally ruled by a decadent Empire. Complot, war and complex politics, dystopian mutant dictators, heroic members of society, and a fight to protect a secret science and its emerging civilization. The use of emotional and psychological science and techniques to govern and subconsciously control people, alongside more conventional material and technical development.
Determinism is my favourite philosophy, in a nutshell it implies what comes after is the inevitable result of what happened before. What if we could develop a science based on statistical and mathematical notions to predict the future? Computer power is increasingly sci-fi fabulous and mass personal “big data” gathering a current reality: welcome to Asimov’s Psychohistory. Like in a gas, the motion of a single molecule is very difficult to predict, but the mass action of the gas as a whole can be predicted to a high level of accuracy.
Facebook might be able to gauge and analise real time global reactions to a specific event or trend. Could this be translated into accurate group social predictions of behaviour? Used for selling stuff or… Do you have an idea of what emotional and psychological manipulation could actually look like?
As for dystopia, 2020 seemed a sci-fi tragedy in its own right. A global Pandemic with a deadly virus originated in China from nocturnal bats of all creatures. Really strange stuff so far included months-long lockdowns and striking individual rights limitations, news of mass graves in New York City, huge economic decline together with an all time high stock market. A mass vaccination project very publicly endorsed by a saviour-like tech billionaire. The American President calling on unsubstantiated electoral fraud, protesters storming Congress and the same President’s subsequent ban from major social media platforms. Moral panics, hype, fearmongering and confusion. A really terrifying (to me) piece of news propaganda, the so-called “New Normal”, introduced very early on in the Pandemic, implying life as we knew it will never come back. George Orwell couldn’t have thought it better.
As much as I recommend Asimov to anyone, I gotta warn you Orwell is not for the faint hearted. Not an exciting or even pleasant read, a great sci-fi book which is back in fashion according to “Google search volumes” is Nineteen Eighty-Four: A Novel. Why? Some of the key features of the story are mass surveillance, repressive regimentation of persons and behaviours within society, strong propaganda and Thought Police to persecute individuality and independent thinking. To limit the individual’s ability to think and articulate “subversive” concepts such as personal identity, self-expression and free will, Newspeak is strictly enforced by the Ministry of Truth. Oh yes, 1984 is rather grim and depressing, if you are in a psychological space where you need reassurance and peace of mind, consider limiting exposure to the (actual and current) news and choose a different book for a more leisurely read.
Not dissimilarly to comedy, sci-fi can be used to criticise and warn over a specific current landscape or reality without incurring political or legal backlash. Like fiction, comedy is only allegorically real and only some of the times. Mostly protected in the West by constitutions and historical practice, comedy and similar works of art originate from medieval jesters and fools, the only characters who could publicly mock the powerful.
In Huxley’s Brave New World, a somewhat easier and yet fascinating read compared to 1984, conditioning and psychological manipulation are brought to such a level of sophistication people don’t have the slightest clue it is happening. Children are raised and indoctrinated by the collective to fulfil pre-determined societal needs. Pleasure is guaranteed through ready and open sexual relationships as well as the regular consumption of Soma, an highly potent, happiness producing drug. Any form of individualism or deviation from societal codes is very rare and punishable by exile to an island of likeminded dissidents or, possibly, death.
Everyone belongs to everyone else, mothers and fathers no longer exist as children are cloned and born in vitro. The World State works perfectly well, its members are nominally free and seemingly unaware of their enslavement, yet resemble more soulless machines than human beings. Material stability, access to pleasure and relative comfort are obtained with the sacrifice of creativity, individuality, love and spiritual development.
Opposite to a liberal society, in Huxley’s World State there are no social, political, or spiritual questions, because they have all been solved by experts from the government.
Someone once compared personal life to a broken record of recurrence. We keep on making the same mistakes over and over until we gain awareness and heal our negative patterns of behaviour. History also repeats itself. Did we heal and develop enough, as a society, to avoid falling back into the mistakes that characterised the first half of the 20th century? Is worrying over world affairs useful in any way? Given the strangeness of 2020, it seems to me inevitable and I prefer to find perspective in the decades old wisdom of the highest works of literature than the screamed blindness of Twitter or hyped morality of CNN.
Science fiction is great but dystopia, like tragedy or horror, an interesting genre I occasionally delve in and one I like to keep in small measures in my life.
Since I stopped reading the news and engaging in social media debates of any type, my life improved for sure. Should the “New Normal” turn stranger and weirder though, what would be the best individual reaction? If this was 1940 Europe, would you enlist in the army like everyone else or run underground and join the resistance movement? Oh my… Too much for a Sunday afternoon. I am off to the beach 🙂