{"id":560,"date":"2008-08-25T13:36:22","date_gmt":"2008-08-25T21:36:22","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/?p=560"},"modified":"2010-07-04T09:58:31","modified_gmt":"2010-07-04T17:58:31","slug":"fresh-sf-futures","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/2008\/08\/25\/fresh-sf-futures\/","title":{"rendered":"Fresh SF Futures I"},"content":{"rendered":"

[Note that I posted a revised and expanded version of this post as \"New SF Futures II<\/a>\" in July, 2010.]<\/code><\/p>\n

For the last three weeks I\u2019ve been hung up revising my new novel and two of my old ones, but I hope soon to get back to thinking about a new novel.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

The other day I was looking at the Tor.com SF website, scanning through an interesting and well-written post by Jo Walton, \u201cThe Singularity Problem and Non-Problem<\/a>,\u201d\u009d [I also scanned through the many comments on the post] and I picked up the idea that some SF readers (and writers) are unhappy with the notion that SF\u2019s content should change <\/em>over the years.<\/p>\n

Walton herself speaks fondly of \u201cthe kind of SF that I like best, the kind with aliens and spaceships and planets and more tech than we have but not unimaginable incomprehensible tech…\u201d\u009d And some of the commenters take this a bit further, even questioning whether true artificial intelligence is even possible.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Change is of course something that happens to any living art form\u2014think of painting or popular music or literary novels or even TV sit-coms. Yes, it\u2019s sad to see Golden Ages slip away, but it\u2019s sadder still to keep doing the same thing. Inevitably the old material goes stale and the fire goes away. I\u2019m not saying it\u2019s become impossible <\/em>to write fresh novels about aliens and spaceships and planets. But maybe it\u2019s become a task as difficult and quixotic as writing a fresh doo-wop song.<\/p>\n

But why not a new kind of song? And why not <\/em>a new kind of SF novel? This is, after all, the twenty-first century.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

If you think about it, it\u2019s quite unreasonable to regard, say, the physics and sociology of classic space opera as \u201crules\u201d\u009d about science-fictional futures. These are all things that writers made up in, like, the 1930s, and which later writers polished and refined. The \u201crules\u201d\u009d have no Higher Truth and they\u2019re unlikely to apply to any actual future. They\u2019re only stories that people made up for fun, and there\u2019s absolutely no reason why we can\u2019t keep changing the rules.<\/p>\n

I\u2019m certainly not a whole-hog, card-carrying Singulatarian\u2014as I discussed in a pair of blog posts in March, 2008<\/a>, I don\u2019t see virtual reality as ever eclipsing our ambient quantum-computing \u201creal\u201d\u009d reality. This said, I do strongly feel that, down the line, intelligence will be ubiquitous\u2014that\u2019s the main theme of my novels Postsingular <\/a><\/em>and Hylozoic<\/em>.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

What\u2019s interesting to me is not the beating or eating of dead horses, but rather the search for genuinely new science-fictional scenarios. For me, SF is the fun-loving hipster sister of Big Science. SF finds the vibby spots first. Sometimes the spots are gone in the morning, but sometimes there\u2019s time for Big Science to trundle in the Measuring Machines and Theory Generators and capitalize on what we fey writer types have unearthed.<\/p>\n

Here\u2019s a more or less random list of some themes that I currently find appealing. Feel free to post comments with your own suggestions for (underused) SF themes!<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Magic Doors<\/b><\/p>\n

I\u2019ve always liked the idea of magic doors to other worlds, also known as Einstein-Rosen bridges. I wrote about them in The Sex Sphere, <\/em>for instance, and I thought about them again this summer in Dick Termes\u2019s studio<\/a>. I like that idea, I like to think of a character with spheres\/doors swarming around him or her like fireflies. Like old memories. As it happens, Dick just sent me an email encouraging me to think of his spherical paintings in this way:<\/p>\n

\u201cTo be living in a world where these spheres float in. Spheres like my work where you can see from outside what is really an inside view. With some effort you can enter these spheres and get on the inside which takes you to those real worlds. Some are real worlds some could be subconscious worlds etc. So, you could go from one world to the next by finding these spheres to enter. You would be able to look at the outside of the inside scene before entering…\u201d\u009d <\/p><\/blockquote>\n

<\/p>\n

Dreams and Memories<\/b><\/p>\n

We\u2019ve seen plenty of virtual reality tales in which people mistake an illusion for a reality. But I think there\u2019s still some interesting things to be done with ordinary dreams. Waking up inside them? Finding out that they\u2019re really happening in a higher dimension?<\/p>\n

In the mental front, we might also consider viewing memories as in some sense real. Maybe memory is a form of time-travel, and you really can flip back into the past or, more oddly, bring people from your past into your present.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

The Afterworld<\/b><\/p>\n

I\u2019ve always thought there should be more SF that speculates about what happens to people after they die. This can shade into fantasy, of course, but giving it an SF slant would be interesting. Certainly it\u2019s nice to speculate that there\u2019s some kind of underworld…rather than nothing.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Quantum Computational Viruses<\/b><\/p>\n

The current trend is to view any bit of matter as carrying out a so-called quantum computation. These computations can be as rich and complex as anything in our brains or in our PCs. One angle, which I explored a bit in Postsingular <\/em>and Hylozoic<\/em>, is that ordinary objects could \u201cwake up.\u201d\u009d Another angle worth pursuing is that something like a computer virus might infect matter, perhaps changing the laws of physics to make our world more congenial to some other kinds of beings.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

New Senses<\/b><\/p>\n

How about some new senses\u2014other than, say, telepathy or radio-wave-sensitivity? Things we might notice more acutely: viscosity, temperature, pressure, electrical charge, neutrinos, Higgs bosons, sterile neutrinos, quarks, \u201cghosts.\u201d\u009d<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

The Holographic Universe<\/b><\/p>\n

Some physicists say that our 4D space is a kind of illusion built up from a two-dimensional pattern…somewhere. Is it maybe a comic strip? Let\u2019s go meet the artist!<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Why?<\/b><\/p>\n

Why are we here? What\u2019s it all for? What\u2019s the meaning of life? Why does anything exist at all? Why is there something instead of nothing? Surely SF can come up with an answer.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

The Subdimensions<\/b><\/p>\n

For too long we\u2019ve let the quantum mechanics tell us that there\u2019s nothing smaller than the Planck length. Let\u2019s view this tiny size scale as a membrane, a frontier, but not a wall. We can in fact go below it…into the land of the subdimensions. Possibly the subdimensional world is a kind of mirror version of ours. Certainly aliens can visit us from there…no need for all those star ships. Just focus on a speck of dust.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

An Infinite Flat Earth<\/b><\/p>\n

What if Earth were an endless flat plane, and you could walk (or fly your electric glider) forever in a straight line and never come back to where you started? The cockroach zone! The kingdom of the two-headed men! One night there\u2019ll be a rumble and, wow, our little planet will have unrolled, ready for you to start out on the ultimate On the Road <\/em>adventure.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

[Note that I posted a revised and expanded version of this post as “New SF Futures II” in July, 2010.] For the last three weeks I\u2019ve been hung up revising my new novel and two of my old ones, but I hope soon to get back to thinking about a new novel. The other day […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-560","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/560","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=560"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/560\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2403,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/560\/revisions\/2403"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=560"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=560"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=560"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}