OF THE many flavours of science fiction, the one author Kim Stanley Robinson has least time for is cyberpunk. During an interview with 91av in 2017, he said that it “claimed to be the great expression of American science fiction”, but was “basically saying finance always wins. All you can do is go onto the mean streets, find your corner, pretend you’re in a film noir and give up. I thought it was capitulationist.”
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If you believe that sci-fi stories have the power to shape the future, this capitulation has consequences. Many have spoken of the prescience of science-fiction authors Neal Stephenson and William Gibson. But if you take Robinson’s perspective, maybe their stories helped condition us to accept the current hyper-capitalist landscape: the “out for number one” zeitgeist that sees billionaires prepare doomsday bunkers and “plan B” planets against the reality of climate change, while populist leaders strain to keep out climate refugees.
I know when I read Gibson’s Neuromancer as an impressionable young thing, I was transfixed by the cold romance of brute-forcing your own way around an irreparably broken system. Young idiots tend to be libertarian and I was no exception. It didn’t occur to me that maybe I shouldn’t buy into this particular world view.
But now that we are here, the best we can do is ask: how do we get out of this mess? Remarkably few authors do ask this, but there are some.
Robinson is enthusiastic about a crop of writers working on a genre that could be described as “adaptation lit”. Instead of escaping a ruined Earth for “back-up” planets, these authors show the work that needs to be done to pull us out of dystopia and into a new acceptance of our power and responsibility as a species.
L. X. Beckett’s work has been compared to Neuromancer, but they share more DNA with Robinson than with Gibson. They are something of a scout, fashioning life rafts out of our existing technologies, even the ones we love to hate. One of these, in their new book , is social media.
In their vision of the near future, life is as oppressively under surveillance as it was in Dave Eggers’s The Circle, but our inherent conformity has been harnessed to help humanity bootstrap itself out of disaster.
With a reputation economy measured in “strikes” and “strokes”, the gig economy has been retuned to reward volunteer tasks that, bit by bit, are returning the world to order from the chaos of what the book refers to as “The Setback”.
Beckett’s world-building skills are formidable and their story is compelling. But it isn’t fun. Even if you recognise the necessity of retuning human nature, the measures that assure compliance here feel oppressive.
Social media keeps individuals fixed in a circle of hell woven together by Twitter mentions. Anyone can request anyone else’s full history of media utterances and appearances. Assistants like Siri have metastasised into inescapable “sidekicks” that monitor everything from your calorie intake to your social reputation, perpetually nudging you to stay in line.
Is there a better way to achieve the same ends? We need ideas on how to steer ourselves into a world we can actually live in. With luck, a book is now being written somewhere that will paint a picture of ecological redemption that is less dependent on hive-mind fascism.
Tor Books
