Here in the 2020s, Earth is concluding our first century of politics shaped by comparing our lived experience with thousands of other worlds. This intellectual technology may be the least recognized defining feature of our modern life.
Innumerable imaginary presents, pasts, and futures, ubiquitous in our experience from early childhood, arm us with examples of success and failure, tyranny and liberty, prosperity and apocalypse, revolution and remaking vastly beyond the historical cases which were the sole food for thought that political minds of past generations (Hobbes, Locke, Machiavelli, Montesquieu) had to sustain them. Politicians, companies, grassroots groups, and community shapers, whether advocates for change or for the status quo, find their proposals held up for comparison, not just against what is and what one or a few rivals propose, but a spectrum of hypotheticals proposed by a population expert from childhood in judging world against world and future against future, challenged by the very play of storytelling to practice the art of predicting the consequences of a world-transforming change. The maxim that one should never create a political power without imagining what your opponents will use it for when they hold power rarely needs to be repeated, since crowds attendant at a rally or neighbors attending a Town Hall already know, and often share with each other, iconic names and terms which serve as shorthand for sophisticated arguments that social change A contains threat B: Alphas and Betas, Room 101, Princess Leia as resistance leader, open the pod bay doors please, HAL.
Science fiction means we fight our moral battles in advance. No new technology, or even social experiment, appears without the company of a hundred prompt extrapolations of what its rollout (individual and mass) could do to us for good and ill, and most technologies are preceded by such stories. Cloning already had its Brave New World, CRISPR its Gattaca, Virtual Reality its Matrix, and robotics its Three Laws, well before the first news stories announcing the realities of these technologies, which were therefore met by immediate debate of their potential second- and third-order consequences. Fiction is not prophecy and rarely anticipates the exact consequences of a change, nor could or should it, since its function is to shape that change by complicating and broadening the conversation which in turn helps determine those consequences, like the time traveler from the future whose very presence makes it impossible not to change the future they came from. Had the 1700s written more science fiction, its authors would not have successfully guessed the effects of modern steel, mechanized weaving, lead-whitened bread flour, or Franklin’s lightning rod, but imagine how much more thought and attention would have attended their rollouts and how much faster the real effects could have been noticed, regulated, and improved, had their arrivals been accompanied by thousands of stories about aristocrats dueling with unbreakable steel toothpicks, fashions using a mile of fabric in one gown, leaded bread causing an epidemic of girls demanding celibacy vows, or cities that never burned accumulating centuries of architecture in a pile with the modern wings reached by a hundred flights of stairs. Such stories, simply by existing, prove persuasively that such innovations can and will transform our world, leaving the watch for how as an exercise to the reader. As more and more disruptive technologies hit us day by day, that reader’s task could not be more important—the reader who is, by now, our whole shared world.
The true political power of how fiction expands expectations is rarely recognized. The global dissemination of American police dramas has caused people in nations around the globe to demand their right to silence, a lawyer’s presence, and one phone call upon arrest, and police granting people those rights even in countries with no such laws, due to the power of shared expectation, and the willingness of people to act upon and thus create a slightly better world than we live in. Speculative resistance—a term coined by political scientist and science fiction author Malka Older—is the act of challenging status quo situations and status quo solutions by describing radically different alternatives, broadening the spectrum of possibility. When people are given options A or B, if someone raises a hand and describes Q, it becomes easier to ask for C and D. As an antidote to my way or the highway, speculative resistance can be as simple as thought experiment (what if governments paid for houses but people personally purchased roads instead of vice versa?), but the more robust treatments in full-on fiction are much more powerful, since characters and narratives increase enthusiasm and dissemination (this heroine is so cool, you gotta read this!). Stories describe how such alternatives might practically function, be achieved, change, go wrong, be threatened, be repaired, and be defended—models of action.
Hopepunk—a movement I have been happy to see my own Terra Ignota join—is one form of this, a movement positing that describing positive possibilities, “futures worth having” as Jo Walton put it, is an act of resistance in a present in which despair so often paralyzes activism—often intentionally-cultivated despair. Younger people coming to political maturity post-2000 have mainly been presented with futures A and B, where A is climate apocalypse and B totalitarian dystopia. Studies show people often transition straight from climate crisis denial to climate crisis despair, since it’s not real and it’s too late both offer the solution: do nothing. Hopepunk, and its kindred Solarpunk, Ecopunk, etc. use punk to advance the claim that even describing a worthwhile future—once the default celebrated by Golden Age SF covers and World’s Fair “Cities of Tomorrow”—is an act of resistance in a present saturated by dystopian and (post-)apocalyptic fiction, and by a twenty-first century news ecosystem, in which bad news is re-shared a hundred times more than good news, and pessimistic and cynical affects are often praised as savvy, hopeful or earnest ones dismissed as naïve.
I bring up Hopepunk not to make an argument for its special importance, but to point out that, for speculative fiction to have movements at all (Hopepunk), and vogues of interest (Cyberpunk), there has to be a community to have such movements: there has to be the conversation of science fiction and fantasy.
On the social side of speculative fiction, we are used to looking to Plato’s Republic and then More’s Utopia as the pioneers of fiction asking us to contrast our social mores and institutions with imagined ones. After More utopian writing saw a vogue in the sixteenth and especially seventeenth centuries, primarily in the form of religious writers describing how their ideal niche variant of Calvinism etc. could create a perfect city on an island, or a mountain, or the Moon. Such works were indeed powerful, generally wielding the arts of satire and the calling out of hypocrisy, but are also fundamentally different from what started pouring out by the thousands as science fiction and the fantastic became named and self-aware genres with the pulp revolution of the 1920s. Pulp’s taste for adventure fiction, for a crisis for our hero to endure or solve, encouraged speculation, not about what might be perfect forever, but what could go wrong, wronger, and wrongest, and what action might be taken in response. There is no agent of change in More’s Utopia or Plato’s Republic, no argument about how human action can channel rising tides. However absurd the solutions to pulp fiction’s problems (often a fist fight or handgun), action stories raised questions about action. They also raised community.
Debates over whether Frankenstein or something else marks the birth of science fiction tend to narrow down, either to efforts to define the furniture of science fiction (must it feature technology? must it explore the limits of the human? must it exclude the paranormal?), or about credit, who gets a portrait in the park and hall of fame with “First X” and a date. But just as a student asking “When did the computer age begin?” will be deeply misled by an answer citing Charles Babbage’s 1822 difference engine, if we think of science fiction as an intellectual technology whose mass-rollout has transformed the world in which we live and think, from one whose judgments and actions are informed by dozens of real and historical alternatives to thousands of speculative ones, Frankenstein (1818) is our difference engine, a century away from our Bell Labs.
The 1920s pulp magazines gave science fiction a name, an identity, an entry in encyclopedias, and a community of dedicated readers and writers who saw themselves as producing something distinct and specific (in a way Jules Verne and H .G. Wells, whose novels were published and shelved simply as novels, never did). It sparked a conversation. One story about robots would be read, and new stories about robots written in direct response, extrapolating further, the same way we might sit in a room chewing on a thought experiment and throw out suggestions for the next step and the next. Particularly in Astounding Science Fiction when John W. Campbell took it over in 1937, a letters column in the back published reader responses, whose contributors Campbell actively encouraged to write their own responding stories. Kids bringing new issues in to school would speculate with one another treating the stories and the letter columns as peers in the debate, which thrived in text and voice, and across space and generations. Light-hearted conversations about space rangers and blue aliens formed fertile ground for serious conversations about artificial intelligence or weapons of mass destruction, in which readers developed the skills of discussion and habits of thought which made SF the world-shaping intellectual technology it is today.
Many of the SF works people name first as having political power did not originate within imprint SF (that is within the books and magazines published and labeled as science fiction), but were written by mainstream writers dipping atypically for their own work into using SF’s tools. But if Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four responded to Huxley and Zamyatin, Atwood’s Handmaid’s Tale to Orwell, Suzanne Collins’s Hunger Games to them in turn, there was a reading community which received these works, discussed them, quoted them, adapted them into films, artworks, TV commercials, protest posters, and fan-works. And this was the same reading community, which used the same tools of debate, speculation, coming into school to chat about what you would do in such a world, or how X might change it, which also watched Lucky Starr Space Ranger, Have Space Suit—Will Travel, and Bladerunner. A world with a personal computer in each home would have been powerful, but not nearly so powerful as ours, in which those computers talk to one another through an internet whose community-forming power has reshaped politics and planet—just so, Frankenstein and even War of the Worlds were powerful, but it was not the same power as when a rally speaker quotes Orwell, Tolkien, or Star Wars knowing the whole crowd will know those shibboleths, and catch fire. "There will come a day when the courage of men fails, but it is not this day”—nothing from Frankenstein could be shouted across a crowd in 1820, or even 1920, and see the same.
This conversation is also a global one, and becoming more so. Until recently, it has been a strangely one-way conversation, in which innumerable works of Anglophone speculative fiction are translated and spread around the world, and responses are written in dozens of languages but almost never translated into English. The few exceptions were, earliest, French literature, and a few prize-winning exceptions like Umberto Eco; but recently, from the 1990s on, a slice of Japanese speculative fiction managed to ride the vogue of anime and manga and become the first pop culture translated en masse into English in 200 years. Recent proactive efforts, and moments such as Tor’s success with The Three Body Problem’s 2015 Hugo win, have also started bringing the global conversation into English—efforts actively organized by SF authors and editors who specifically believe in the value of that conversation, and work actively (often despite financial risks) to make it happen (much as in the 1960s-70s Osamu Tezuka took big financial risks to get anime/manga translated into English, with the specific activist goal of advocating for pacifism, environmentalism, and techno-utopian international collaboration).
Science fiction is part of our world, and is much more than the presence of stories with the furniture (robots, aliens, rocket ships, cyborgs) of the genre. It is the way we respond to changes and technology. It is a palette of reactions and discussions palpable in classrooms, headlines, and news rooms every hour, every day. It is one of the biggest differences between politics now, communities now, movements now, change now, thought now, and how Earth worked two hundred years ago. It is an intellectual technology, and nothing can roll back, unmake, or take away an intellectual technology once it disseminates—well, nothing but the things SF warns us might achieve just that (Orwell, Canticle for Leibowitz, Mad Max). But, of course, if B happens we could try C or D … or Q …