Tin House #41 should be hitting your mailboxes or newsstand any day now. The dual theme is Hope/Dread (our designer, the fabulous Janet Parker, created stunning covers for each). In the dread corner, look for Nick Cave, Ander Monson,  Alex Lemon, Matthea Harvey, and other doomsayers. Flying the colors of hope, we have Karen Russell, Abigail Thomas, Mahmoud Darwish, Matthea Harvey (she’s good enough to have her cake and eat it too), and, as you’ll see below, Cory Doctorow. The “Genre” label created something of a controversy on this site awhile back, but Doctorow’s take on what Science Fiction is capable of is pretty tough to argue with. 

CORY DOCTOROW: RADICAL PRESENTISM

Every writer has a FAQ—Frequently Awkward Question—or two, and for me, it’s this one: “How is it possible to work as a science fiction writer, predicting the future, when everything is changing so quickly? Aren’t you afraid that actual events will overtake the events you’ve described?”

It’s a fresh-scrubbed, earnest kind of question, and the asker pays the compliment of casting you as Wise Prognosticator in the bargain, but I think it’s junk. Science fiction writers don’t predict the future (except accidentally), but if they’re very good, they may manage to predict the present.

Mary Shelley wasn’t worried about reanimated corpses stalking Europe, but by casting a technological innovation in the starring role of Frankenstein, she was able to tap into present-day fears about technology overpowering its masters and the hubris of the inventor. Orwell didn’t worry about a future dominated by the view-screens from 1984, he worried about a present in which technology was changing the balance of power, creating opportunities for the state to enforce its power over individuals at ever-more-granular levels.

Now, it’s true that some writers will tell you they’re extrapolating a future based on rigor and science, but they’re just wrong. Karel Čapek coined the word robotto talk about the automation and dehumanization of the workplace. Asimov’s robots were not supposed to be metaphors, but they sure acted like them, revealing the great writer’s belief in a world where careful regulation could create positive outcomes for society. (How else to explain his idea that all robots would comply with the “three laws” for thousands of years? Or, in the Foundation series, the existence of a secret society that knows exactly how to exert its leverage to steer the course of human civilization for millennia?)

For some years now, science fiction has been in the grips of a conceit called the “Singularity”—the moment at which human and machine intelligence merge, creating a break with history beyond which the future cannot be predicted, because the post-humans who live there will be utterly unrecognizable to us in their emotions and motivations. Read one way, it’s a sober prediction of the curve of history spiking infinity-ward in the near future (and many futurists will solemnly assure you that this is the case); read another way, it’s just the anxiety of a generation of winners in the technology wars, now confronted by a new generation whose fluidity with technology is so awe-inspiring that it appears we have been out-evolved by our own progeny.

Science fiction writers who claim to be writing the future are more apt to be hamstrung by their timidity than by the pace of events. An old saw in science fiction is that a sci-fi writer can take the automobile and the movie theater and predict the drive-in. But the drive-in is dead, and the echoes of its social consequences are fading to negligibility; on the other hand, the fact that the automobile was responsible for the first form of widely carried photo ID and is thus the progenitor of the entire surveillance state went unremarked-upon by “predictive” sci-fi. Some of my favorite contemporary speculative fiction is instead nakedly allegorical in its approach to the future—or the past, as the case may be.

Consider Bruce Sterling’s The Caryatids (Bantam, 2009), an environmental techno-thriller—Sterling once defined a techno-thriller as “A science fiction novel with the president in it”—set in a mid-twenty-first century in which global warming has done its catastrophic best to end humanity. Finally forced to confront the reality of anthropogenic climate change, humanity fizzles and factions off into three warring camps: the Dispensation, an Al-Gorean green-capitalist technocracy; the Acquis, libertarian technocrats who’ll beta-test anything (preferably on themselves); and China, a technocracy based on the idea that technology can make command-and-control systems actually work, in contrast to the gigantic market failure that destroyed the planet. The play of these three ideologies serves as a brilliant and insightful critique of the contemporary approach to environmental remediation. Sterling especially gets the way that technology is a disruptor, that it unmakes the status quo over and over again, and that a battle of technologies is a battle in which the sands never stop shifting. Casting his tale into the future allows him to illustrate just how uneven our footing is in the present day—and the fact that the book consists of humans getting by, even getting ahead, despite all the chaos and devastation, makes The Caryatidsone of the most optimistic books I’ve read in recent days.

Moving back in time, there’s William Gibson’s Spook Country (Penguin, 2008), a science fiction novel so futuristic that Gibson set it a year before it was published. This was a ballsy, genius move, which Gibson characterized as “speculative presentism”—a novel that uses the tricks of science fiction in a contemporary setting, telling a story that revolves around technology and its effect on people. Gibson’s protagonist is Hollis Henry, a washed-up pop star who is writing for an art magazine published by a sinister, gigantic PR firm. An assignment brings her into the orbit of a set of post-national spies fighting an obscure and vicious battle, with motivations that are baffling and, eventually, wonderful. Contrasting spy craft, technological art, and the weird, hybrid semi-governmental firm that is characteristic of the twenty-first century, this book makes you feel like you are indeed living in the future, right here in the present.

Go further back to Jo Walton’s recently completed Small Change trilogy:Farthing (Tor, 2006), Ha’penny (Tor, 2007), and Half a Crown (Tor, 2008), a series of alternate history novels set in the United Kingdom after a WWII that ended with Britain retreating from the front and ceding Europe to the Third Reich in exchange for an uneasy peace. Now that peace is fracturing, as fascist Europe’s totalitarian logic demands that all its neighbors bend their rules, norms, and laws—otherwise the contrast would make the whole arrangement unbearable. If Europe is persecuting its Jews and allied England is not, then there is an unresolvable cognitive dissonance between the two states, one that can only be resolved by England slipping, bit by bit, into a “soft” totalitarian mirror of Nazi Europe. In this naked parable about the erosion of liberties around the world brought on by America’s War on Terror, Walton isn’t writing about the past any more than Sterling is writing about the future. Her books are a relentless, maddening, inevitable story of how good people let their goodness dribble away, drop by drop, until they find themselves holding nooses.

Science fiction is a literature that uses the device of futurism to show up the present— a time that is difficult enough to get a handle on. As the pace of technological change accelerates, the job of the science fiction writer becomes not harder, but easier— and more necessary. After all, the more confused we are by our contemporary technology, the more opportunities there are to tell stories that lessen that confusion.