The Science Fiction of the 1900s

It's time to talk about what we're done with

The future is terrifying. It wasn’t supposed to be.

I grew up during the cold war and I remember sitting around with friends in high school talking about what we would each do in the 10 to 20 minutes we’d have left after the nuclear attack sirens went off. I remember the sound of those sirens when they were tested; it wasn’t a theoretical discussion. We seriously expected that moment to come, and soon. If it didn’t, we thought humanity would burst through the horror into a new era of peace and prosperity for all.

We’re still terrified today. We can all list the uncertainties and threats that circle our fragile society like wolves in the night. Our fear isn’t greater now than when I grew up; still, it’s different. The despair of helplessness in the face of climate change, of fascism rising like Dracula from its coffin; of resource overshoot and political decay, all feel different to me than the instant nuclear annihilation I was promised as a kid. Part of that difference, I think, is that nuclear war was a binary thing: it would happen, or it wouldn’t. And if it didn’t, then science fiction laid out a future we could look forward to.

Now I’m going to make a terrible accusation. It’s not true for many specific writers who are crafting gloriously creative and new visions of a post-crisis future. But I think it’s true of popular culture in general. I think, in general, we are staggering into our present crises armed with visions of a post-crisis future that are woefully out of date—that are literally from a different century. At some level, we recognize that we’re working to build a future we no longer believe in. It’s our parents’ future, it’s not ours.

How to make that clear? Try this: let’s reframe 20th century science fiction as science fiction of the 1900s. Hmm. Do that, and somehow the whole genre looks different. ‘The 20th century’ still feels continuous to now (especially if you grew up there). The 1900s, though, like the 1800s, are a different story; they’re history—they’re the part of the pre-anthropocenic age. And when you then take, say, a literature of the future, that is supposed to be built on a foundation of fresh, new ideas (science fiction, maybe?) you can ask how many current works in the literature are based on ‘ideas from the 1900s’—and do they help us picture a way forward that’s relevant to today? This is like wondering how much current culture and thought is based on the ideas of the 1800s, or the 1700s; it’s a different mental operation than imagining us as present on a timeline that seamlessly passes back into the 20th century.

It doesn’t matter that much of our present crisis was imagined during the 1900s; living through it is different than picturing it ahead of time. For one thing, we lack the double-vision of nuclear war’s binary option: in the slideshow of our mind, we can’t flip back and forth between the image of the mushroom cloud and the Utopian city. It’s not that simple. Our future now is an exhausting spectrum of scenarios, each with its own promise, and its own problems.

We’re used to talking about different eras—the Belle Epoque versus the Modern era, for instance. But how do you recognize when you’re living in the transition moment between one and the other? For me, it was a book I read that first divided my perception of time into ‘now’ and a discontinuous ‘then.’ The book was Charles C. Mann’s 1491.

Published in 2005, this study of the Americas prior to Columbus upends the entire narrative of European colonization of the New World. Reading it was a revelation that has forever changed how I see where, and when, I live. It lays out the history of the Americas as historians now understand it, as opposed to the patchwork of propaganda and inference I was taught in the 1970s. It calls into question the framing of a pre-Columbian era in the Americas. Once you learn that there were giant cities and flourishing literary and artistic cultures in the Americas while Rome was just getting its act together, you can no longer see the European settlement of the Americas as a sign of progress. The First Nations call this period ‘the Invasion.’

This past week, the Canadian government announced $23 billion in reparations to First Nations children, part of an ongoing follow-through on their promises of Reconciliation. Reframing the past, and recognizing when you’re living through a transition between eras can feel overwhelming at times, but it’s a powerful process and a necessity for the maturing of a people.

The Fantasies of the 1900s

If the terror of my youth is different from the terrors of today, maybe I can also reframe the science fiction of the 1900s as carrying a different set of promises than we need in the 2020s. Maybe its main tropes are no longer relevant to the current moment.

This matters because in our modern technological society, science fiction tells us what to spend our time and money on. Do I really need to argue for this?—after all, the world’s richest man, Elon Musk, has made it his mission to implement the 1900s vision of what the 21st century was supposed to look like. Look at the things he’s working on: Space flight. Settling Mars. Cyberpunk-style brain-computer interfaces. Artificial Intelligence. Self-driving electric cars. Humanoid robots. These are the 1900s’ vision of the 2020s; he’s trying to catch up to where 1980s SF thought we’d ‘advance to’ by now. The cliche complaint of “where’s my flying car?” is literally his complaint about the world, and he aims to do something about it.

Looked at this way, Musk’s program is revealed as profoundly conservative. He’s about as far from being an original or innovative thinker as it’s possible to get. He’s fighting the intellectual battles of the last century, a 1900s hero dropped into the 2000s with an unlimited budget to reshape the future to fit the era he’s from. Don’t get me wrong—he’s done a lot of good by dragging the transportation sector kicking and screaming into electrification, and it’s not that his other projects aren’t beneficial as well (X aside). A lot of them are pretty awesome realizations of the future that we did need in the 1980s. It’s just that they are all about the 1900s vision. None give us a picture of a current future—a future for the 2000s.

Hieroglyph

Ten years ago, Neal Stephenson invited myself and a number of colleagues to contribute to an unusual project sponsored by Arizona State University and published by Harper Collins. Hieroglyph: Stories and Visions for a Better Future is an anthology of original science fiction stories edited by Kathryn Cramer and Ed Finn. It was very well received; check out the Los Angeles Review of Books review. Hieroglyph did so well that in 2015 it won an award for Most Significant Futures Work by the Association of Professional Futurists, and some of us authors were invited to the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy to talk about the ideas behind this extraordinary project.

Some of the Hieroglyph authors

Here I happily admit that the idea of a significant difference between the imagination and ambitions of the 1900s and our present era is not mine. Much of the Hieroglyph project was driven by Stephenson’s frustration at the seeming stagnation in imagination in our present civilization, compared with the previous century’s. To dramatize this difference, he presented the notion of the hieroglyph. His hieroglyph is a science fiction meme that detonates in the public consciousness, sparking society-wide bursts of creativity. Examples of hieroglyphs are easy to find: the classic finned rocket-ship, the time machine, the blocky toy robot, the Star Trek communicator, VR goggles. The 1900s were packed with hieroglyphs, each one inspiring whole generations to enter engineering and science careers and make some hieroglyph real. The anthology posed a simple question: where are the hieroglyphs of the 21st century?

Each of us authors tried to answer that in our own way. My story, “Degrees of Freedom,” is about the future of governance, which to me is the single most important thing humanity can focus its creative energies on right now. We do not face any other problems that we can’t solve (not even climate change), provided we learn how to pull together.

I’m proud of that story, but it doesn’t really give us the kind of explosively mobile meme that a hieroglyph is supposed to be. In 2019, I presented the idea of the ‘deodand’ in Stealing Worlds, and that is definitely a hieroglyph by Stephenson’s criteria. A deodand is an AI that believes it is some natural system, such as a river or forest, and acts in its own self-interest, that being the preservation and thriving of that natural system.

Looking back, I can see that Stealing Worlds was written partly to prove to myself that new hieroglyphs in Stephenson’s sense are possible; we can have a science fiction of the new century.

Making it Real

Hieroglyph was a project where a specific design constraint was imposed on a set of authors and scientists, forcing them to reframe how they looked at science fiction, and the future. I’m not looking to repeat that exact experiment; but I am going to ask this of you:

Are your ideas and plans for confronting the crises and opportunities we face in the 2020s based on ideas ‘from the 1900s?’ If so, it is possible that there are new ideas and plans that are a better match to our current situation?

I’ve set this as my own design constraint for the next few years. I’m going to write short stories, novels, and collaborate with as many people as I can on real-world projects to reframe and reinvent our future. This newsletter is where I’ll lay out our discoveries, and you can wind-tunnel them and tell me whether we’re on to something or just blowing smoke.

So get ready; for the next few weeks I’ll be doing a brain dump of 21st century ideas and reframings. And I’ll show how I and my collaborators are making them concrete in new stories and real-world projects such as ViV Games and The Deodands Project.

Come with. Together we can put the future of the 1900s behind us and design one that fits who we are and what our world is now, in the 2020s.