Cory Doctorow's introduction to his recent SF short short story "Printcrime" explains that it stems out of a talk attended by a friend at which a British recording industry exec talked of the "industry's great and hysterical spasm." It's assumed by this that he means the gradual chipping away of DRM by consumer dissatisfaction and lagging sales, and the inevitable formation of a new form of intellectual property law/media copyright. The recording exec claimed that this "great and hysterical spasm" of the recording industry would become the template for virtually every other industry that deals in trademarks or patents once the development of rapid prototypers (wanna know how to build one?) and 3D printers becomes viable. For those who don't want to click through the links, these are machines, in existence now and being developed for personal use, that "print" actual objects. That's right, just like the replicators on Star Trek.
Doctorow, really one of the most interesting SF authors--among other things--working today, finds the connection between music copyright and 3D printers incredibly strange. In one of his characteristically witty historical analogies, he says that to worry about the future of trademark and patent law in the face of object-on-demand technology is "as if the railroad were looming on the horizon, and the most visionary thing the futurists of the day can think of to say about it is that these iron horses will have a disastrous effect on the hardworking manufacturers of oat-bags for horses."
Perhaps this is a problem today with SF and futuristic thought in general. Politicians began using phrases like the "information superhighway" (Al Gore's pre-global warming pet project/marketing campaign) ten years ago. When SF concepts and the discourse of speculative thought enter the political and popular domain outside of any traditional generic conventions, what is there for SF to do? When advertisements for new technologies have the strange ability to prefigure or even simulate our interaction with these as yet unreleased tools, how can SF react with counter prefigurations of future technologies? And how does any futurist deal with objects whose complexity can only be explained by teams of tech people?
Steampunk, a subgenre of SF that deals with Victorian-era technologies, seems to serve as a valve for some of these frustrations in many interesting ways, especially the challenge of dealing with overdetermined technological complexity. Steampunk Magazine is one online magazine working with this stuff. It looks back to a moment when technological objects were still intelligible as objects, when their development and evolution could be seen as moving in many different directions, when one didn't have to read through an entire wiki in order to build a tool that made more objects.
(P.S., the lolbladerunner was done by Jamais Cascio)
3 comments:
Hey Grant!
When you say "When advertisements for new technologies have the strange ability to prefigure or even simulate our interaction with these as yet unreleased tools, how can SF react with counter prefigurations of future technologies? And how does any futurist deal with objects whose complexity can only be explained by teams of tech people?" I got reminded of the futurist movement in painting, led by Marinetti. His writings have just been published in full, and I was looking through them and got just this sense of frustration sitting behind all the optimism of his sentences. That means: one could say that futurist art is almost SF, because he shares a frustration with the total penetration of technology into thinking such that one cannot create counter-prefigurations. At the same time, this is precisely what makes something that pretends to be SF not SF... and so Marinetti is as far away from being a SF artist as you can get. What I'm getting at is that the art of futurism--with all its political overdetermination (it is, like Jünger's Storm and Steel and other writings a symptom of a society making its way towards fascism)--can perhaps be seen to be precisely the paradigm of the art that this frustration you depict here would create if it could not counter-prefigure. Maybe.
Mike!
I just saw your comment, sorry for the delay.
The whole futurism movement is REALLY interesting in relation to SF. I would say though that Marinetti was in fact creating a very specific type of counter-prefiguration. He writes in a very hallucinatory way about a sort of technological totality (at least in the Futurist Manifesto). And his project is a reaction to this. It is an aestheticization of the experience of this totality.
And if Gibson's Neuromancer really ever did anything interesting, it was on this level. I think most would agree that his biggest contribution to SF wasn't really in prefiguring our current communication technologies, but in his marriage of speculation and style. Cyberpunk is made by lines like "Ratz was tending bar, his prosthetic arm jerking monotonously as he filled a tray of glasses with draft Kirin. He saw Case and smiled, his teeth a webwork of East European steel and brown decay."
I'm not saying Marinetti and Gibson's politics or aesthetics are in any way similar, its just interesting to think about in terms of a total penetration of technology, as you put it, and a reaction in terms of style--a project of technological counter-prefigurations that they do share.
But 20 or so years removed from Neuromancer, what happens to the ability to think technology differently? Gibson's novels (ever since Pattern Recognition) are now set in the present. Whether this points to a great atrophy in speculative thought/style or something completely new, I can't follow just yet.
I cut-and-pasted the same bit that Mike did, but since he already did so, I'm going to reply a bit more indirectly.
Stanislaw Lem, in some of his essays on SF, insists that the project for real science fiction is to predict future social and cultural arrangements. He complains that much of contemporary SF just plays around with imagined technologies in order to tell stories.
You describe the assumption of Lem's imaginative, extrapolative mode by the larger culture. I think that's right. We know how the logic of late capitalism inevitably opens up new territories for exploitation. I'd argue, as you suggest, that the very success of extrapolative science fiction as a mode has made the future available for colonization and harvest.
That said, I think Lem's mode of science fiction isn't the only one. Certainly the mechanism of extrapolation is an important one--he and Gibson both use it as a way of interrogating the present--but it's far from the only one. Science fiction also has a role in staging plausible alterities. The extrapolative method, particularly detached from Lem's insistence on the real, is quite powerful as an algorithm for generating other situations that relate to the present.
Unlike related modes (the pastoral, the Western) then, SF has both license to vary the constraints governing social existence and a method for considering a world differently constrained more rigorously. The twin dangers of imagination--projection and utopia-zation--can be held in abeyance in ways that are productive.
I'm not putting this quite well, because I started writing with a different idea than I ended with, but it's the beginnings of an answer to your question.
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