Jax Book Nook

When I took up writing fiction as a hobby, I started out in dark fantasy, but I’ve drifted into Science Fiction. It’s not technically sound science fiction, given that I don’t have a science background. However, having written a few novellas and novels, working through them with beta readers, and trying to get them published, it occurs to me that there’s a central problem that science fiction has to wrestle with: the future is will be awesome.

Let’s take a basic assessment of the facts: for the first 10,000 or so years after man discovered agriculture, humanity’s standard of living didn’t increase all that much. There were times and places such as the Roman Empire or Hahn Empire at their height, where people may have enjoyed more peace and prosperity than at other times, but this was by such a negligible amount we would scarcely notice it today. Then, around the year 1700, a miracle occurred, starting in Western Europe. Material progress for the human race took off like a dragster. While something like 95 percent of humanity used to live in what we would consider dire poverty, today only like 10 percent do. Child mortality rates were so high that you had a maybe 50-50 chance of living past the age of six. This is assuming that you and your mother didn’t die in childbirth. Diseases that once wiped out entire cities were cured by medical science. While humans spent most of their lives scrounging for food, now obesity is objectively a bigger problem than hunger.

Most of this could be attributed to improved technology, though free trade, democracy, and other liberal political institutions also played a role. The one downside to improved technology is that it made war deadlier, with World War II being the deadliest conflict in human history, culminating in the U.S. ending the conflict with the ultimate superweapon. However, as threatening as that was, since World War II, the amount of armed conflict in the world has actually been on the decrease, with the amount of war hitting an all-time low after the Berlin Wall fell. This might have to do with the spread of democratic institutions and free trade. Like I said, I don’t have a hard science background. I came from a political science background, and one of the things they teach you is that free trade and democracy lead to less conflict in the long run.

Recently, there’s been some backsliding on democratic institutions and free trade, but that’s happened before, and it tends to be temporary. There’s always a reverse democratic wave after a wave of democracy. There was a wave of democracy from the 1970s all the way to the 2000s, and then we experienced a very mild reverse wave of authoritarianism in the late 2010s and early 2020s, everyone freaked out about that because it was tinged with nationalism. I don’t think it’s permanent. Indeed, it seems like it’s just about to play itself out. Same thing with free trade. Protectionism was popular until the tariffs actually got put on stuff and prices went up.

Why is this important? Because the general trajectory of history is material progress, or at least it has been since the year 1700. More wealth, leisure, and peace. Less disease, war, and hunger. That’s obviously great news for humanity. It’s terrible news for science fiction. Why? Because science fiction is a genre of storytelling, and storytelling depends on conflict.

Star Trek is famous for imagining a world without racism, nationalism, or other forms of bigotry. In reality, it only imagined a world where bigotry didn’t exist among humans. It moved those prejudices to a higher level. White people no longer looked down on black people, but humans might be paranoid about Vulcans, particularly when those pointy-earred Romulans are around. The Americans and Russians might not be threatening each other with nuclear annihilation anymore, but the Klingons and the Federation are doing roughly the same thing. Human nature hasn’t evolved that much. It just got promoted to the interstellar level. Fast forward to The Next Generation, and Gene Roddenberry says he wants to abolish not just racism and war, but all interpersonal conflict as well. This caused the writers to revolt, as that would make writing any kind of story impossible. Stories require conflict, and conflict doesn’t happen in Utopia. The future will likely appear to be some kind of Utopia to us, so telling stories about the future will be increasingly difficult.

Now, science fiction has generally dealt with this problem in one of four ways. The first way is to introduce hostile alien races, just like Star Trek did above. Yeah, maybe we’ve moved past war and tyranny, but who says the Klingons have? The issue is that technological progress and political liberalization are not unrelated to each other. The scientific revolution on Earth occurred in the very specific political atmosphere of the Scottish/Dutch Enlightenment, where a free and open society allowed for technical innovation and creativity. Any alien species with more advanced technology has likely learned that there are better ways of getting what they want than war and conquest, like trade or even growing resources in a lab. That’s probably why if aliens exist, Earth hasn’t been invaded: any alien race advanced enough to subjugate us is advanced enough to produce what they would take from us on their own. Furthermore, the most economically advanced countries on earth have given up on colonialism, normally because colonies cost more money than they produce. What does that say about space colonialism, and wouldn’t more advanced races be even more repelled at that prospect?

The second is to imagine the future world under some kind of technocratic tyranny. The Empire in Star Wars is the primary example, though Oceania 1984 is another. The issue once again is that technological progress and political liberalization are not unrelated to each other. The real world example of real existing communism shows us that totalitarian societies shouldn’t be associated with technological progress. They should be associated with technological backwardness. The United States outstripped the Soviet Union rather severely on a technological basis, both militarily and in many other areas. In the real world, the Empire would quickly find itself falling behind other, freer and more open polities that attracted talented people who innovated and allowed to make their own decisions about what to do with their talents. Top-down economic planning, the type the Empire would likely engage in, never works, as it requires too much information for any one person or any one group of people to be able to calculate.

The third thing science fiction stories do is introduce a disaster that creates conflict. The best example is Fallout, which introduces nuclear war as a way to wipe the board clean and reintroduce scarcity into the world. Another good example is Lost in Space, where the Robinson family has to colonize space due to overpopulation on Earth. Star Trek had to resort to this trick in Discovery by introducing the Burn, destroying Starfleet and shattering the Federation. What is the chance of such a disaster destroying Utopia? Nuclear war could happen, but we’ve avoided it so far despite some very antagonistic rivals such as the USA/USSR and India/Pakistan. Maybe it’s because everyone understands the stakes are too high and thus avoids it even in the face of the greatest of ideological rivalries. If anything, nuclear weapons actually seem to promote peace as they prevent great powers from attacking each other directly. Overpopulation appears to be solving itself, as birth rates are flatlining across the world. Global warming is being solved as solar power is finally becoming financially feasible, and cold fusion is getting off its feet. COVID was terrifying, but it proved humanity can survive a plague and come out of it without the world totally collapsing.

The final way is to point the finger at big corporations and argue that their greed, which is eternal, shall bring about some disaster. The Weyland-Yutani corporation wants to bring an acid-for-blood killer alien to Earth for …some reason no one can explain. The Brawndo corporation in Ideocracy will starve humanity by replacing water with Brawndo and killing the crops. Umbrella Corporation releases a virus that creates a zombie apocalypse. You get the idea. The problem here, as I’ve explained before, is the Underpants Gnome problem identified by South Park. Corporations exist to make money, and while they can definitely do some unethical stuff in pursuit of the almighty dollar, you really can’t turn a profit if all your customers are dead, can you? How do any of these evil corporations plan to make a dime off their evil plans? This is why greed is a great motivation for short-term crime, but a poor motivation for someone trying to take over the world. Most corporations make their money by providing goods and services that make the world better; we just have a problem with how they treat their employees and occasionally their customers when they do so. They don’t really have any incentive to prevent a better world from existing. A better world is full of customers with spending money.

Nope, the central problem with science fiction is that as time goes on and technology improves, the world gets better and conflict decreases. This is obviously good for humanity, but it presents a problem for writers, forcing us to invent a lot of gimmicks and deus ex machina tricks to keep an increasingly perfect, increasingly boring universe interesting. I think the problem here is that we aren’t really facing what humanity’s real problem is going to be in the future. I mentioned earlier that Star Trek resorted to the “disaster” trick by introducing the Burn. It’s interesting because, arguably, Star Trek already acknowledged the real problem with a world with infinite material progress in an earlier iteration, and I think that is what we really need to explore. That’s what I’ll be talking about next week.