Jax Book Nook

Last week, I talked about how the problem with Science Fiction is that society is on an upward trajectory and mankind’s material conditions are gradually improving, to the point where very quickly things like war and poverty are likely to be things of the past. This is very good for mankind, but it’s very bad from a storytelling perspective for the simple reason that stories are driven by conflict. Utopias tend to produce low stakes. Science fiction relies on a few well-known tropes to reintroduce conflict into a world where economic scarcity and conflict are disappearing like introducing hostile alien races, evil profit-seeking corporations, and/or sudden disasters like nuclear wars or a mysterious plague. However, normal human experience and a few moments of thought make it unlikely any of these things will stop human progress because none of them has yet.

So, what should science fiction be about? I would argue that we can find the answer from an old Star Trek Voyager episode. In the Star Trek universe, the Q are a race of omnipotent, immortal beings who can make anything happen just by snapping their fingers. They have literally infinite power, and they suffer no pain or disease. So immense is their power, nothing could possibly challenge them. This is why it’s so surprising when Voyager stumbles onto a Q who wants to kill himself. This Q, whom we’ll call Q2, was imprisoned by Q1, a recurring character in Star Trek who spent a lot of time bugging Jean Luc Picard and Catherine Janeway just for fun. Q1 tries to prevent Q2 from killing himself on orders from the Q Continuum because they don’t want the memory of a Q ending its own existence. That might hint that something is wrong with the Q.

Q2 makes an asylum claim with Voyager, claiming the right to commit suicide. They grant him asylum and adjudicate his case, but they have a problem understanding why Q2 wants to kill himself. To help them understand, Q2 creates a scene of a gas station on a desert road and tells Captain Janeway and the other Voyager crewmembers that this is the Q Continuum. There’s an old man reading a dusty tome called “the old” and a young woman reading a magazine called “the new.” There’s a pinball machine. Q2 explains that he’s read the old tome and the magazine, played the pinball machine, walked down the dusty road so far he’s come back the other side, etc. There’s nothing left for him to do, and now it is time to go. That’s the universe for an immortal being of infinite power: trite, cliched, and boring. He’s seen it all and done it all. Taking this explanation in, Janeway grants Q2 asylum, and he promptly kills himself.

Why is this story relevant? In an earlier iteration of Star Trek, Q1 tells Commander Riker that one day, humanity will evolve to the level of the Q, and may even surpass it. That means one day humanity will look at the universe like that, and we’ll have to decide whether our lives are worth living in a universe that utterly bores us because it has lost all of its mystery. The problem of scarcity and conflict will be replaced by the loss of meaning.

In fact, it’s already happening. Homicide rates have dropped steadily throughout history, only to be surpassed by suicide rates. We hear a lot about gun deaths in America, but very little about how most gun deaths are actually suicides. If someone is going to kill you, chances are, it will be you. Economic scarcity is quickly becoming a thing of the past, but birthrates are cratering. We live in the freest, most prosperous version of the world that has ever existed, and increasingly, we don’t want to bring kids into it.

The real problem in the future will be that man has solved the problems of survival that haunted him in the past only to find that he’s made life boring and pointless by doing so. The quest for meaning will replace the question for higher living standards once mankind has escaped poverty. That’s the question science fiction actually needs to address because that’s the question mankind will actually face. Why shouldn’t we kill ourselves? Why bother breeding? People in first-world countries are already having problems coming up with answers to those questions.

I’ve tried to write science fiction with that theme in mind. Live in the Dream, the book I am unsuccessfully pitching to literary agents, imagines a dreary future in which humanity never really evolved beyond economic self-interest. Not dystopian, but broken and lazy. Hailey Phillips, a story I’m workshopping, imagines a future where a content and economically prosperous humanity bargains away its right to explore the galaxy to avoid alien invasion. Another story I am currently drafting, set in the near future, centers on the most selfish person you’ve ever heard of, spending his entire life playing a very advanced MMORPG.

Right now, there are still pockets of poverty in the world, and there are plenty of wars and tyrants to go around, but a century or two hence, first-world problems won’t just be first-world problems; they will be everyone’s problems. Science fiction needs to consider those problems before then and offer real solutions.