THIS FUTURE SUCKS

You climb into the time machine. You know what that is because an author wrote a book about one, 6 generations ago. 

You find that author, give him a different book, certainly inspired by his, barely 3 generations later. He reads the opening lines, looks at you, asks:

“what the fuck is a television?”

Nobody ever predicts the future, and those who try to are wrong, over and over again.

As science fiction writers, predicting the future is not our job. Like that second author said: “The future’s already here, it’s just not evenly distributed yet.”

Our fiction might be set in the year 2088 or 2307, with characters living in New Vancouver or the planet Charybdis, but none of that really matters. We’re writing about the where and the when that we see all around us, just with the pitch shifted up a bit. To invent a world-changing gadget or build a cosmic civilisation, you don’t need to know much about engineering or anthropoids. All we really do is grab a single idea and run a marathon with it.

Take REM Shearing in I Need Better Dreams. This started out with a single conversation back in 2021:

I’m paraphrasing, of course, but that’s the mythos. We took that core question and spread it all over modern life. First of all, we worked out what wouldn’t change: Our setting is still capitalism. It’s still the 21st century, in a British city, with the hangovers of class, race, sexism lingering in the back of its throat. The characters would still struggle to balance their creative practices and their social lives and their (mental and physical) health all against the need to make fucking money. These are the things that I Need Better Dreams are really about.

The themes, then, precede the world. If we need to write about class, we need rich and poor. If we want to write about work, we need the characters to work, to lose their grip on their own lives as they’re pressured to squeeze every single hour of the day into the productivity juicer, to count the pennies they’re handed back and buying things that don’t make up for what they’ve given up… yeah, I’ve had a busy week. All these things are happening right now, to me and you. It’s not the future. We’re not predicting a fucking thing.

But we set it in the future anyway, for a couple of reasons. Number one is because it’s easier. When you’re walking down the road, it’s easier to look ahead and guess where a path might lead than it is to write about the cobblestone rubbing a hole in your shoe. If we wrote about REM Shearing in 2026, there’s all sorts of present-time bollocks that you as a reader might know about (and we, as authors, don’t) for our gadget to rub up against. The gaps we’d have to fill have already got shit in them.

By filling in those gaps, we can make our points a bit more obvious. Our boy in Better Dreams, drifting through his life of drowsy bullshit, only needs to think about what’s important to us as storytellers. We don’t need to spell out the entire history of the Somniscience corporation to make our points, but we can decide it’s been around long enough to achieve global dominance without creating the kind of black hole in the economy if we just inserted the thing into [present year.]

The other reason we set it in the future is because it’s fun. It’s fun to riff off other trends and invent new ways to make the world horrific. To imagine that nobody owns a car in the same way that nobody owns a copy of the film they’re watching, that it’s easier just to rent one for a quick drive then plug it back in. To imagine that a restaurant might only have a single member of staff because all the other jobs are automated, but at least that lone, bored worker gets to be ‘manager.’ These ideas are fun for us as readers, and bake in the terror that lurks in every corner of modern life, if you look closely enough.

The final reason is that, if it’s in the future, people won’t take us too seriously. That’s a real thing, by the way. Readers look to science fiction for analogy, but they don’t think too hard about it. That’s a mixed blessing, but today’s news headlines involve the police investigating a music act who called for an end to an ongoing genocide without due subtlety. I could do without being arrested for saying that working for a living when you want to be making art is shit, and frankly you already knew that it was.

So yeah, Science fiction isn’t about ‘the future’ at all. It’s about the now, the tangible, just stretched a little bit past what you can already touch. It’s about having a few more tattoos, a bit more neon, and a cool electronic gizmo you can wear on your head… but then, if you’re signed up to the mailing list, you already knew that.