#scientifiction

[diana-andraste]

Illustration for Edgar Allan Poe's 1845 short story, "The Sphinx". Published in Amazing Stories, The Magazine of Scientifiction, 1926.

"…I perceived the huge jaws at the extremity of the proboscis suddenly expand themselves, and from there proceeded a sound so loud and so expressive of woe that it struck upon my nerves like a knell … and I fell at once, fainting, to the floor."

[grayrazor]

1860s dashing imperialist adventurer steps out of the steaming steel capsule, and takes a deep breath of the fragrant air of the Venusian jungles. He adjusts his pith helmet, and spots a gorgeous-looking fruit growing from a nearby tree. Eager to sample the bounty of the new world, he takes a bite. Immediately keels over dead. (Opposite amino acids)

[mostlysignssomeportents]

1900s futurism

I'm on tour with my new, nationally bestselling novel The Bezzle! Catch me in TUCSON (Mar 9-10), then SAN FRANCISCO (Mar 13), Anaheim, and more!

I'm profoundly skeptical of the idea that the future can be predicted, and doubly skeptical that sf writers are any kind of prophet. The former grotesque fatalism (if the future can be predicted, then what we do doesn't matter); the latter is tragicomic hubris.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/03/07/the-gernsback-continuum/#wheres-my-jetpack

That said, few people have been more consistently useful in understanding and anticipating (and yes, building) the future than my friend and colleague Karl Schroeder, whom I've known since I was 16 years old. Karl was the first person I heard say the world "internet." Also: "fractal," "World Wide Web," "ftp," and numerous other touchstones of the future just over the horizon.

Karl is, in fact, a futurist ("foresight consultant") who approaches the work with the same shrewd insight, wild imagination and humility that he brings to his fiction. In a new essay written with both his futurist and sf writer hats on, he nails down the toxic shadow cast by the 20th century sf, or, as he calls it, "The Science Fiction of the 1900s":

https://kschroeder.substack.com/p/the-science-fiction-of-the-1900s

Karl starts by describing the odd "double vision" of the future of the 1900s. On the one hand, many of us (myself included) were convinced that nuclear armageddon was inevitable. Unlike the unhinged architects of the nuclear arms-race, realists understood that a nuclear war would effectively end the future. As Einstein put it, "I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones."

But the flipside of that certainty that the future would end with the first nuclear strike was the belief that if we could just somehow walk the tightrope over the chasm of nuclear holocaust, we'd emerge in a future worth looking forward to: "a new era of peace and prosperity for all."

Contrast that with the existential dread of today's polycrisis: environmental collapse and political decay up to and including fascism. These aren't the binary proposition of nuclear annihilation vs Utopia – rather, they're a continuum of worse-and-better outcomes of every description. As Karl writes: "It’s not that simple. Our future now is an exhausting spectrum of scenarios, each with its own promise, and its own problems."

For Karl, we have entered a new epoch, but we've dragged in the long-expired way of imagining (and hence creating and navigating) the future with us. What makes this a new epoch? For Karl, it's the kind of future on our horizon. He cites Charles C Mann’s 1491, a superb history of the Americas before Columbus:

https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/107178/1491-second-edition-by-charles-c-mann/9781400032051/readers-guide/

1491 radically reframes "the patchwork of propaganda and inference" that makes up the received narrative of the so-called "New World." It describes a land of flourishing cities, art, science and culture "in the Americas while Rome was just getting its act together." Contact with colonizing Europeans was a disaster for First Nations people, who call this period "The Invasion." It was an epochal break.

Futurism is an inextricably historical discipline. The willingness of some settler-colonialists states to consider this epochal break forces us to reframe our literal place in history, the story of the land under our feet. At its best, this futuro-historical work can begin the long work of reconciliation, as with the Canadian government's promise of $23b in reparations for the First Nations people who were kidnapped as children and sent to murderous "residential schools" before, during and after the Sixties Scoop.

The sf of the 1900s is no longer fit for purpose, if it ever was. It's a literature that was steered by open fascists like John W Campbell, who explicitly saw the literature as a means of inculcating a societal narrative of the triumph of white, corporate technocracy over all other forms of government:

https://locusmag.com/2019/11/cory-doctorow-jeannette-ng-was-right-john-w-campbell-was-a-fascist/

Karl isn't the first sf writer to try to overturn this orthodoxy – indeed, it was continuously challenged by radicals within the field, as with the New Wave, personified by the likes of Samuel Delany and Judith Merril (who both mentored and introduced Karl and me):

https://pluralistic.net/2020/08/13/better-to-have-loved/#neofuturians

The cyberpunks took a good hard run at it, too. For plenty of writers (including me), Bruce Sterling and William Gibson's 1981 story "The Gernsback Continuum" was a wake-up call:

http://writing2.richmond.edu/jessid/eng216/gernsback.pdf

Not for nothing, William Gibson has long insisted that his 1984 classic Neuromancer should be read as utopian: after all, it depicts a future in which the inevitable nuclear war only reduces a few cities to radioactive ash, sparing the rest of the planet.

Bruce Sterling once paid me the supreme compliment of describing a 2003 story I wrote about the ways that algorithms will enshittify self-driving cars as "making everybody else in the business look like they live in a dark basement growing on the mulch from old STAR TREK scripts":

https://craphound.com/stories/2005/10/12/human-readable/

Schroeder – along with today's new radical sf writer cohort – wants to fashion a fictional futurism that is fit for this world and its crisis: "in our modern technological society, science fiction tells us what to spend our time and money on." The fact that our mediocre billionaires are mired in the sf of the 1900s means that we're getting some decidedly old-fashioned futures.

For Karl, Musk is a poster-child for this profoundly conservative, backwards-looking vision: "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." Musk's obsessions – "Space flight. Settling Mars. Cyberpunk-style brain-computer interfaces. Artificial Intelligence. Self-driving electric cars. Humanoid robots." – are 1900s science fiction.

Ironically, much of this fiction labels itself "hard sf," despite the fact that interstellar travel is utter fantasy – as is mass-scale, near-term interplanetary civilization:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/09/astrobezzle/#send-robots-instead

Karl wants "a future for the 2000s." He points to some efforts to make this happen, like Neal Stephenson's Hieroglyph anthology, edited by Ed Finn and Kathryn Cramer:

https://www.harpercollins.com/products/hieroglyph-ed-finnkathryn-cramer

The "Hieroglyph" is Stephenson's shorthand for a recognizable, tangible, meme-able gizmo or other touchstone for a 2000s-era vision of the future – a replacement for jetpacks and flying cars. Karl's story for the anthology, "Degrees of Freedom," focuses on an abstraction (governance: "the single most important thing humanity can focus its creative energies on right now"), and by Karl's own admission, it's not quite the hieroglyph Stephenson was looking for.

But Karl did come up with a hieroglyph in a later work, the "deodands" of 2019's Stealing Worlds – a software agent "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":

https://memex.craphound.com/2019/06/18/karl-schroeders-stealing-worlds-visionary-science-fiction-of-a-way-through-the-climate-and-inequality-crises/

(My own contribution to Hieroglyph was very gadget heavy – "The Man Who Sold the Moon," about autonomous lunar 3D printers. It won the Sturgeon Award):

https://memex.craphound.com/2015/05/22/the-man-who-sold-the-moon/

I've been impressed with Karl since the day I met him in 1987. There's no one whose thoughts on the future I'm more interested in hearing. I don't think that's a coincidence, either: Karl is an autodidact who was raised by a Mennonite TV repairman – the first TV repair shop in the Canadian prairies. If you want to understand the future, try being raised by someone who takes that kind of deliberate approach to which technology to adopt, and how.

Name your price for 18 of my DRM-free ebooks and support the Electronic Frontier Foundation with the Humble Cory Doctorow Bundle.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/03/07/the-gernsback-continuum/#wheres-my-jetpack

[adastra-sf]

Happy New Year!

The logo at the center spells out Scientifiction, as written by a fountain pen driven mechanically by two gears that read FACT and THEORY.

This comes from the first true science fiction magazine, Amazing Stories (you can read most of the original issues here), whose famed editor (Hugo Gernsback, for whom the Hugo Award is named) sought to bring interest in science through publishing what at the time was called "scientific romances," soon to become known as science fiction.

He used this logo on most issues, but it was front and center as the cover art for the September 1928 issue.

Anyway, here's to a great and wondrous 2025!

[vintagegeekculture]

Alex Schomburg, 1940.

[obsidian-sphere]

Amazing Stories, October 1930.

Back when they were still trying to make calling it Scientifiction a thing.

[fallentechnate]

check this out!! my drinking glass glows under uv light!!

[anerea-lantiria]

Mélamírë, Master Smith of the Gwaith-i-Mírdain :: Crafting of Galadriel's Mirror "Calling upon the Threads of Vairë was never easy, and invariably she was nauseated, sometimes violently ill, afterward. But he had trained her to see them even if it was an exercise in which she engaged infrequently."

@finweanladiesweek day 6: Original Characters - Mélamírë (Grandaughter of Caranthir)

Mélamírë is my favourite OFC. Created by pandemonium_213 out of a need to link Robert J. Oppenheimer with his ancestors (according to the pandë!verse in Trinity ), she takes on a robust life of her own with a full-bodied personality and unique adventures. Born in Ost-en-Edhil to Culinen (daughter of Caranthir, master of the healers' Guild of the Heart) and Istyar Aulendil, Mélamírë becomes a master smith of the Gwaith-i-Mirdain. She survives the sack of the city, is captured by and subsequently escapes from Sauron into the distant East before returning to Imladris at the end of the third age to play an essential if low-key part. (She's mentioned in LoTR, although not by name).

Pandemonium_213's writing creates such vivid imagery in my mind that I'm simultaneously inspired to paint them and also daunted that I'll do her justice.

This illustration is from The Writhen Pool: Commissioned by Galadriel while in Ost-en-Edhil to create a scrying device that "flows with the very Currents of Time, a device by which the viewer can see not only what was, but also what is, and further, what will be, or at least the possibilities of the future", Mélamírë crafts the vessel from a custom alloy while drawing on the "Threads of Vairë" to imbue it with the requisite properties. The one stipulated condition is that she makes it herself; Galadriel doesn't want Aulendil—or Celebrimbor for that matter—laying their skilled-yet-dubious paws on it.

One of the aspects I enjoy so much in the Pandë!verse—other than excellent characterisations, engaging stories, and satisfyingly 'blasphemous' viewpoints (equally relevant to our Earth as to Arda)— is the scientifiction that pays homage to some of the fascinating (if not always quite so readily understandable) scientific theories of our age.

Mélamírë features in a number of stories (some of which are as-yet unfinished yet entirely worthwhile reading nonetheless) including The Writhen Pool, Risk Assesment, The Jinn and The Glitter of Swords. I also highly recommend reading The Apprentice first, and, oh gosh, just enjoy going down the whole enticing rabbit hole that is Pandemonium_213's excellent collection of fiction. (There is a chronology list, although some of the links are broken so just use the links from the fic title list or the search feature.)

Snippet from The Writhen Pool:

"It's daunting, the idea of tapping into the Currents of Time. The curwë for such a scrying device has not even been invented."

He sat up in the chair, no longer relaxed, but invigorated, as he always was when his mind's wheels started spinning. "Then you shall be the one to invent it. I can help. . ." he raised his forefinger to still her protest. ". . .I can help in a manner that is acceptable to Galadriel: simply the sharing of ideas. I have made notes on the mathematics of temporal oscillations; you may have them for reference. The materials? I will leave that up to you to discover, but my suggestion — and it is an important one — is to use water as the medium."

“Why water?”

“Because water is central to all life in Eä, not only here on Endórë. Ilúvatar may have released the Imperishable Flame to expand through the universe when it came into being, but He brought forth the seeds of life by watering them. Water has unusual properties: its essential components — the one and the two — resonate in a harmony that makes ice expand and steam float, that coats the cells in our bodies, supports the very thoughts within our brains. That harmony will allow your invention to link with the mind and act as a conduit to call upon the Threads of Vairë.”

She felt a tingle of both fear and excitement when she thought of the Threads, those bizarre strings of…well, she wasn't quite sure what they were. She just knew that by virtue of the Maiarin blood she had inherited from her father, she could visualize the things. The Threads, Father had taught her, resonated not only in this manifestation of Eä, but touched upon others, too, a concept that she found unnerving: that there might be many versions of herself living at any given moment in Middle-earths that might obey different laws than this one did. The Threads crossed not only Space, he said, but Time as well. He had explained them to her as probabilities, not certainties, and to be wary of the visions they showed. It was only when Vairë the Weaver plucked them from the multitudes of being that the probabilities became locked in this world as past and present.

Calling upon the Threads was never easy, and invariably she was nauseated, sometimes violently ill, afterward. But he had trained her to see them even if it was an exercise in which she engaged infrequently. Sometimes the visions were too terrifying and alien to process.

“Yes. The Threads of Vairë,” she said. “I see what you mean. But it is one thing to follow them twisting among the stars when you are at my side, helping me to see them. It is another to apply the principles to a material object. Have you derived equations that describe the Threads and their behavior?”

He shook his head. “I have attempted to do so, but I have not arrived at definitive solutions. That will be your province. I will do what I can to assist you, but I am in agreement with Galadriel: this must be your work, not Tyelpo's, not mine. You should use her commission to step out of our shadows.”

“Then you deem the project worthy of a woman's touch?”

He winced with no small drama. “Ouch. That stung.”