Roadside Picnic

When I was seven or eight, I went on a long train trip with my grandparents. To entertain myself, I walked from one end of the train to the other, watching the scenery sweeping by the windows: old villages, new industrial towns, woods, grasslands, fields filled with neat rows of crops like Lego studs, mountains in the distance keeping pace with us.

I fantasized about what it would be like if a great hero of the past, say, Hannibal of Carthage or Emperor Wu of the Han Dynasty, were transported to my train and I had to act as their tour guide.

“Yes, this iron dragon is more powerful than a hundred elephants. No, it doesn’t know how to fight in a war. You just twist this and water comes out of the pipe, see? Have you ever moved this fast in your life?”

I imagined their shocked expressions and looks of wonder. For all their great deeds and accomplishments, could they accept the reality of this machine? Could they believe that a few thousand years after their faded glory, humans would travel further in a few days than they did in their entire lives?

I was all about Star Trek. I thought Spock and Data must be Asian American Model Minority Myth victims, specifically second generation Korean-Americans, and so I felt seen.

I very much dislike the claim that reality is stranger than fiction. We judge reality and fiction by completely different standards. If the things we regularly see in movies were to happen in real life, we would lose our minds. Science fiction is more relevant now than it's ever been, because we live in a technologically saturated world, and fiction that ignores the role of technology in our lives feels out of touch. Science fiction is not about prediction or forecasting trends; it's a way of thinking about the inevitability of change and how we cope with that.

Maybe some writers really think they are predicting the future when telling stories; I never do. I don’t even think I’m writing about “possible futures”—many of the futures in my stories are manifestly, intentionally impossible. I think speculative fiction functions like technology itself: it amplifies human tendencies and aspects of existing reality.

Technology is a force-multiplier. It gives those who wish to oppress more levers to exert power, but also those who yearn for freedom more tools for fighting back. Speculative fiction, on the other hand, functions as a lens on the world we live in. It amplifies sociological trends, extrapolates technological developments, evolves nascent conflicts, so that we can see, via a caricature of reality, ourselves more clearly. The act of imagining the future, which is always based on our (perhaps flawed) understanding of the present, allows us to see deeper into the moment we’re in, into our own nature.

The author Omar El Akkad said in an interview: “I’m not as interested in the question of whether the ideas at the root of my fiction could happen, so much as I am with the fact that, for many people in this world, they already have. I think of what I write less as dystopian and more as dislocative.” I love this idea of dislocative fiction, that shakes the present moment loose so you can look at its constituent parts.

The Cybernetic Cultures Research Unit coined the term “hyperstition” to describe this process of fictional elements that make themselves real by writing themselves into history, or rewriting history. As Ballard said, fiction does not exactly predict or influence reality, but invents it by participating in it.

Capitalism itself could be thought of as a hyperstition: the financial system is based on future speculation that it invokes or invents in order to justify itself. Our economic landscape is entirely built on mutual fictions and hyperstitional loops, justifying themselves by predicting their own future value.

On the other hand, as loops get tighter and close faster, where the made-up can become real very quickly, writers have to be wary of the way their fictions might be co-opted. I know artists, for instance, who make fictional projects intended to critique corporate value systems, whose ideas are then stolen (or bought) by for-profit companies who see them as earnest proposals—or who see the critique as beneficial to subsume.

There was a moment when reality television—a scripted and edited artifice sold with a wink as unmediated reality—overtook (at least temporarily) conceptual and performance art. For a generation, these outré artforms seemed outdone. And in this current moment, where a reality television star has become the commander-in-chief of the world’s most powerful army (and its nuclear stockpile) it is indeed difficult for speculative writers to credibly come up with satire. We may only be able to make sketches of the ship as it goes down. Or, this is an inflection point before a currently inconceivable new stage. That’s rather dramatic, but is how I see it. In any event, speculative fiction has always used ideas of the future to comment on the present. So art now (as always) must engage in this moment. If it is successful, it will fulfill its function of articulating that which is hidden, name the unnamed or unnameable, and allow us to recognize this world as it is transformed or destroyed.

We often seem surprised when an invention, fully matured, does not do what the inventors thought it would do. The internet turned out to be not only a wonderful medium for giving us access to unprecedented amounts of information (as envisioned in those early, pioneering days), but also the breeding ground for trolls, radicalism, bullying, movements based on hatred, surveillance, and all kinds of oppression from governments, corporate entities, and mobs. But that kind of “surprise” is the rule rather than the exception in the history of technology. Human nature has a way of evolving every innovation—computers, plastics, democracy, rocket engines, genetic engineering—into forms both beautiful and horrifying.

The root for our constant surprise regarding innovation lies in our tendency toward the narrative fallacy. I think we, as a species, evolved to tell stories as a way to understand the world. We can’t help but see patterns in the randomness of the universe, to attribute cause and effect to contingencies, to invent character arcs and anticipate plots and extrapolate from what already is to what must be. But reality isn’t scripted; history has no inevitable arc; and we cannot think what we already know will determine what will come after. We can’t continue to tell ourselves comforting tales about how good must triumph over evil, or that the world must evolve in ways we like.

Speculative fiction tends to evoke shocking visions of the future through breakthrough innovations or revolutions, but in our world, massive changes are almost always the result of a steady accumulation of tiny changes. Don’t ignore small changes; understand them and take care to adapt. But don’t get carried away by stories that promise everything will be fine or paint pictures of doom. We make our own future.

Innovation is one of those words that’s become hollowed out by its current usage in a product-driven market culture. Innovation, which probably just means invention, but is inflected with the implication “for profit,” is a relentless imperative. So what about uncoupling invention from the profit motive?

I think we’re in a state of perpetual cognitive dissonance where, on one hand, there’s a technological utopia promised by the internet-in-our-pockets and deep-dish pizza delivered by drones. And on the other hand there’s a growing sense of alienation, anxiety, the rise of authoritarianism and racism, and the slow apocalypse of climate change. Lately I’ve thought that maybe this intense 50-50 divide in our political system, as reproduced in the cracked mirror of social media, might be less one created by fake news and propaganda than simply an honest reflection of our imperilled selves—half good and half evil. May we be smart enough to save ourselves from ourselves.

I often say that science fiction is a post-Industrial Revolution form of storytelling, because prior to the Industrial Revolution, innovations spread so slowly that no one ever saw the world transformed by a new invention within their lifetime. Science fiction is a response to the way that innovation changes our lives in the modern era.

Technology is one of the things that creates culture. While there are a few forms of art that don't require any technology, like song and dance, most every other medium is built on material technology. New technologies will always create new opportunities to make art, and thus culture.

I love Octavia Butler’s series of affirmations that she wrote in her notebook in 1988… “I will be a bestselling author…each of my books will be on the bestseller list of the LAT, NYT, PW, WPT, etc.” She definitely manifested her own hyperstitional loop! She is a brilliant example of a person who claimed power and agency by writing characters in the process of claiming power and agency. In a broader sense, all critique can be co-opted, so I have a hard time holding onto the traditional art-historical belief that artistic critique is a form of resistance. We might need sneakier forms of resistance at this point. Writing books that dislocate reality can be a form of resistance, because new stories elbow a bit of space in the tight quarters of capitalist realism we are living in. They can expand the political imaginary. They can address power by undermining the stories power tells about itself.

Within an economic system that values the concentration of wealth over human rights, to do something labelled as useless, worthless, and which serves only to impoverish you—i.e. writing innovative fiction—does to me seem a form of resistance. Whether it’s an effective form of resistance is a different question.

If science fiction has an archetypal story, it's this: the world starts out as a familiar place, then a new invention or discovery has wide-ranging consequences, and then the world is forever changed. This is fundamentally different from traditional "good vs evil" stories, in which victory over evil means things go back to normal. Broadly speaking, stories in which good guys defeat bad guys are about maintaining the status quo, while science fiction stories are about overturning the status quo. That makes science fiction stories implicitly political, because they are about change.

Last year, I came across a quote from the critic Mark Fisher, who wrote "emancipatory politics must always destroy the appearance of a ‘natural order,’ must reveal what is presented as necessary and inevitable to be a mere contingency, just as it must make what was previously deemed to be impossible seem attainable." These are exactly the goals of science fiction.

Earlier, I alluded to the idea that reality doesn’t follow a script. Now I’m going to say something that feels like a contradiction but isn’t: the future is always the result of a story.

What I mean is this: because humans understand the world through stories, their ubiquity causes us to underestimate their importance. Individuals, families, cities, professions, companies, nations…make sense of themselves and derive meaning from existence through what I call foundational narratives: mythologies about who they are.

This sort of constitutive narrative can be cynically dismissed as irrelevant, but they are absolutely vital in our lives. American democracy, for example, relies for its healthy functioning not just on good institutions and efficient execution of the laws, but on a shared mythology about who we are as a people. The most fraught arguments we have in America right now are precisely arguments over who is included in “We the People”; who gets to tell the story of America; how that story must evolve to account for the voices that have been silenced or excluded. These fights over the soul of the nation determine the future we live in. The real Constitution of America isn’t a document, but a collective myth that we believe in.

This is true at the level of individuals as well. Our lives may be the result of contingencies and coincidences, random perturbations in the fabric of space-time. But randomness isn’t the principle through which we understand our lives. We retroactively craft plots and character arcs for ourselves so that our own journeys would make sense.

So here’s how to reconcile the apparent paradox between what I said earlier and what I said just now: the future isn’t a story that’s already been told, but is in the process of being told. We can’t be complacent about innovation bringing us wonders that will solve all problems, but neither can we give in to the despair of an inevitable technological surveillance dystopia run by the forces of hatred. The story of the future is being written right now, day by day, and we are the authors. We get to tell the story we want.

Art’s job is not to be instrumental in the sense of having an identifiable cause and effect. Art in the service of a specific ideology would be fascist, as Hannah Arendt would say. I’m wary of any art that purports to solve a problem or instigate a specific change. Art should resist its cooptation as much as possible—perhaps by questioning the very supremacy of human-led change in the first place.

One thing art can do is to offer new forms of meaning-making in situations that seem painfully meaningless. That meaning might take the form of transmitting knowledge, of finding humor, of forging empathy, of creating intersubjectivity. For instance, reading speculative fiction helps me make connections between the human scale and the scale of the planet or the universe, between a lifetime and an eternity, between my experience and other experiences—human and otherwise. This helps me make meaning out of a system of economics and value that otherwise feels oppressive in its arbitrariness.

Would a world that contained no art follow the same course as a world full of art? I think the answer is clearly no, which means that art definitely changes things. Art inspires people, and that affects what they do. It may not be easy to draw a clear line between a given work of art and a major historical event, but the same is true of things like voting or protesting.

Teenagers have been organizing rallies around all sorts of issues, including the climate crisis, gun control, and immigration. I don't remember anything like that happening when I was a teenager in the 80s, so I'm glad to see political activism making a comeback.

One of the consequences of our hyper-connected world is a loss of the sense of scale. Because we are bombarded with images of the most horrific acts from around the world and strangers from thousands of miles away can intrude into our consciousness on social media, we are threatened with a sense of helplessness, of being overwhelmed by outrage.

The answer is to return to human-scaled interactions, to find ways to make a concrete difference. I really do think it’s helpful to curate and block and prune our social media feeds until we are interacting only with people we know as people, to volunteer and mentor and encourage and cheer, to derive positive energy from giving ourselves to communities and to share that energy. Every time I get a chance to encourage another writer to tell the stories they want to tell, to amplify a voice that I wish would be heard by more, to point to a bit of beauty in the world and delight in it, I’m reclaiming a bit of my own humanity from the dehumanising effects of the commodifying surveillance society we live in.

Equally important is to persist in making things. The modern world’s need for commoditized services as well as goods has reduced most jobs to repetitive tasks, routines, meaningless office drudgery that machines are just a few steps from taking over. To find meaning and purpose in our lives now, it’s even more critical to make beautiful things that contain some shard of our soul. To hold onto that is the beginning of hope.

I’m given hope by the relentless organizing of determined people. The news may have stopped covering the protests that began in the second half of 2019 around the world, but the resistance hasn’t slowed down. I spent six weeks in Hong Kong in the fall of 2019 and was given hope from seeing the kind of resistance that persists for its own sake beyond newsworthiness, when there is nobody telling the story.

A sustainability expert named Jem Bendell wrote a paper in 2018 called "Deep Adaptation," where he explains that resilience—whether that of humanity or of the natural world—is not about the capacity to return to a pre-catastrophe state after the fact. Resilience means the ability to retain the things you value most despite the fact that everything is different. So the question is not, “Will the world as we know it collapse?” This is inevitable. The question is: “What do we want to hold onto when it does?”

Hope is not the same thing as believing that the planet will be fine, that biodiversity will be preserved, that stratification of wealth will not continue, or that the human species will survive another millennium. I don’t believe climate change will be stopped, much less reversed. I am hopeful that human connection and creativity will persist despite the hopelessness of the situation. I’m hopeful about this because the world is already weirder than I could ever speculate on.