The “utopian anarchy” that unites most science fictional wish-fantasies

We're heading out the door to San Diego's extravaganza -- even bigger than our famous Zoo -- Comicon International, with overseas guests in tow. And so, in keeping with the elevated theme of adventure and unlimited possibilities, let's set aside the political shenanigans America's civil war and briefly assume that our Great Experiment in a better kind of society continues -- a civilization that grows better as it grows more diverse and interesting and fair.

Ah, but how to get there? Does science fiction show a way?

== A future of freedom ==

Some of you have been following the debate between Elon Musk and Cory Doctorow et. al., over the meaning and ethos that underly the “Culture” series of novels by Iain M. Banks. Musk has called himself a “utopian anarchist” in a way best described by those novels.  (Elon named several of his SpaceX vessels after ships in Iain’s science fictional cosmos.) Doctorow counters with an assertion that Banks was a vigorous proponent of labor unions.

Having known all three of these brilliant gentlemen, let me avow that each has been beneficial to humanity, helping open our eyes to - variously - dangerous problems, daring opportunities and/or visionary goals. I hope all of them continue to influence us to rise into a thoughtful and bold and broadminded civilization. (And I will draw in other SF'nal utopians below, like Ursula LeGuin.)

This essay in the Guardian takes sides and is, I believe, myopically petty, especially about Elon Musk’s utopian anarchism. In fact, Elon is right that science fiction offers us the unique perspective of deep time, helping us squint far ahead to see a strangely common theme.

Three paths to very similar utopias

Libertarians often speak of a future when there will be very few limits on individual autonomy, when sovereign adults are free to form coalitions and make deals to advance both shared and personal goals, without being unduly hampered either by cloying restrictions or by cheaters.

Most folks aren’t aware that this is also — exactly, in every particular — the long range goal of Marxism! Karl Marx did not dwell on it, or supply much detail; he assumed a final withering-away of the socialist, transition state — into coercion-free individualism — would proceed out of elevated proletarian self-interest. 

Flipping that order of events, libertarians assume that individual liberation in market-driven paradise will require first dismantling the nation state.  Equality and freedom will follow.

A fascinating hybrid is the culture of Planet Annares, in The Dispossessed, by my former teacher, the late Ursula K. LeGuin. Although she was definitely a person of the left, she rejected the domineering 'socialist-transition' states she saw behaving so badly, in Leninist and Maoist realms. Her prescription seems akin -- in many ways -- more to the libertarian path: dismantle authority first. Standing on her shoulders (so to speak) is Kim Stanley Robinson, whose novels dissect many of the tradeoffs along the way to utopian freedom.

But let's get back to that simple comparison of libertarian and marxist end goals.

In sharing a perfectly overlapping, ultimate utopia of empowered individualism, these two movements differ from almost every other belief system of our long past, nearly all of which assumed that hierarchy will prevail. A perfect pyramid of Confucian noblesse oblige, for example. Or the post-apocalypse reign of Jesus. Priests for 6000 years were well paid to spread such mythologies, and Joseph Campbell extolled the pattern as fundamental to human psyches. Even today, Hollywood obsesses on wizards, kings, Jedi and demigod superheroes. (Ah, Comicon, here we go.)

Set against that most-common context, aren’t the utopian marxists and libertarians more rambunctiously similar than they are different? Elsewhere I go into detail about this strange overlap of ultimate goals… 

…and how the two movements differ profoundly over the path to get there! How to achieve that apotheosis of individual liberty from all want or coercion.  Indeed, I show that neither methodology can possibly work!  

But there is a third approach that demonstrably can take us close to that aim of utopian anarchy. 

== The Great Attractor Trap ==

For starters, it is vital to consider the human past. Across all of those long, dark eras, which failure modes generally thwarted progress?

Let’s all blame Charles Darwin. In every society that developed metals and agriculture, human males were relentlessly rewarded - reproductively - for cheating. We’re all descended from the harems of strong, ruthless guys who used metal implements to coerce others into serving them. And we carry seeds of similar behavior; a fraction of us will seek dark corners of any type of society, using any rationalization and exploit any opportunity to gain advantage and repress competitors. 

Oh, the surface incantations vary. The old USSR was run by a cabal of coercive harem-keepers no less brutal than the czars, only with different surface theology. The current occupants of the Kremlin simply tossed aside their hammer-sickle pins and returned to czarist  catechisms. (See Vladimir Sorokin’s terrifying novel “The Day of the Oprichnik.”)

No, this is less about left-vs-right than finding a sweet-spot optimization that eluded most of our ancestors. We who finally listened to John Locke and Pericles and Adam Smith have benefited from one trick -- never allowing power and authority to concentrate into toxic pools, but spreading it widely enough dispersed to keep cheating below a dull roar.

It’s nuts to shout “cheating” when fellows like Elon form clever alliances that deliver better goods and services. Only one society ever found the trick to truly unleash human inventiveness through competitive enterprise, and it’s the same one that got rich enough to finally tackle old injustices of poverty, prejudice and environmental neglect. Those who disparage the word “competition” would kill the goose that lays golden eggs.

But we also need context on the other side. Again, look back at 6000 years of dubious “civilization” in which those with power used it to crush any competitor who might rise from below. In 99% of human cultures, vast reservoirs of talent were repressed — vigorously and actively — under fabulated excuses based on race, gender, or what caste you were born into. Markets and institutions were warped to benefit the mighty, and priests taught that it was good for the lords’ sons to inherit your sons and daughters.

Any society that doesn’t confront this age-old attractor condition — the great human failure mode — will not take us to that glimmering goal of genuine utopian anarchy.  Even Ayn Rand declared cheating to be a basic problem! She maintained that some state structure would remain needed, to counter it. (Alas, her prescription then plunges into incantatory silliness that I dissect here.)

In the long debate between Hobbes and Rousseau, it remains Locke — followed by Hume and Smith — who comes out as wise. Human societies must find a balance between curbing our cheater-devils and liberating our better angels. Unleashing the greatest creative force in the universe - competition - but regulated (as in sports) to prevent the cheating that would ruin it all. This is ruining it all.

And what works best is to keep erring, progressively, toward freedom.

== Utopian Anarchism ==

Which brings us full circle back to the Musk-Doctorow argument over the Culture novels of Iain M. Banks.

In Iain’s projected future, organic and enhanced bio-humans experience lives of near total freedom, including the ability (projected earlier, in John Varley’s cosmos) to change sexes at-whim. Personal choice and the right to “pursue happiness” are maximized and just about the only thing that’s forbidden is to interfere with others’ right to do the same.  It sure looks like “utopian anarchy”…

…till you realize that there remains a regulatory framework, a guiding hand that is lighter in daily practice, but ultimately far more powerful than Ayn Rand’s “few courthouses.” That hand is wielded by the all-powerful AI entities who actually rule the Culture. Mostly-benevolently, but sometimes with plot-propelling weirdness or agendas of their own.

Ironies abound, here, and I am not leading you to a particular conclusion. 

Sure, Banks wove tales of a future that has inspired brilliant innovators — like Elon — to help propel us starward. Whatever the terminology, I share a dream of humanity achieving levels where state authority (or any kind) can safely “wither away”… to use a phrase coined by Karl Marx. And yes, I have spoken of this at many libertarian events and conferences.

But we are not yet the kind of beings who can reliably put reason ahead of tribal emotions, or act always in enlightened self-interest. Even among our brilliant, fact-centered professions, I’d say we do that at-best on a 30% level.  And half of Americans have been talked into waging open war upon all fact-centered professions! 

Under such conditions, you can see why those who want to re-impose hierarchy — like the Chinese Communist Party — rationalize that it’s the only solution.

They are wrong. Their approach -- under all the high-tech gloss -- is exactly the one that froze and lobotomized most human societies. If it prevails, we will never have the stars.

== A difficult, achievable path ==

Oh, if we look around today it's clear that Hobbes still has a several point advantage over Rousseau. And those of us who still believe in the passionately-moderate, militantly reasonable revolution of Locke — and Adam Smith and the American Founders — have an upward path to slog. A Great Experiment to save. 

And — alas for those eagerly propounding quick-fixes — this will entail using many of the tools we already have. 

Despite setbacks, like phase 8 of the American Civil War, we are on that upward path!  Ironically, Elon and Iain and Corey and Ursula and KS Robinson were all lights along the way.

But to go much farther, we truly will need to include externalities in our market prices. And elevate all children to a level of opportunity where talent stops being wasted and all competition is joyfully flat-open-fair. And ensure that disparities of power no longer entice many to prefer cheating over innovation.

Until we’ve done all that, and taught wiser generations how to apply their sovereign individuality with truly enlightened self-interest, then we’ll still need some Lockean structure. We’ll still need to fight for a civilization that — despite a myriad flows — has been more generously helpful of our long range goals than any other.

Passings: Frederik Pohl, Bruce Murray and Iain Banks

Last month, I lamented - as a science fiction writer and friend - the loss (amid his most productive and creative years) of the brilliant British author Iain Banks -- who wrote books such as Consider Phlebas and The Player of Games in his best-selling Culture Universe.

This month it is a double whammy, with the passing of my colleagues Frederik Pohl and Bruce Murray.

== Bruce Murray, Planetary scientist ==

Bruce Murray was not only a titan of planetary science and technological innovation, but also one of the most agile members of an agile generation. Under his leadership, Jet Propulsion Lab teams extended humanity's reach and vision to distant worlds. More important, he kept the lab alive and vital at a time when every political wind seemed bent on destroying the American mission of deep-space exploration.

A brilliant scientist, he also served his civilization in realms of policy, and even art. He authored 130 scientific papers, as well as books such as Journey into Space: The First Three Decades of Space Exploration. Bruce was among the first to grasp the potential of the World Wide Web to improve human conversation and his early "hyperforum" experiments (I was a founding member) still have not been matched. Above all, his legacy is found in generations of students and others who benefited from his guidance and example. The lesson that I draw from his life is that we are capable of being "many."

Bruce Murray was the truest citizen of our renaissance.

==Frederik Pohl, Science Fiction great ==

Science Fiction Grand Master Fred Pohl passed away on September 2, at age 93.

Beyond a personal sense of loss of a friend and colleague, I must note how tremendous was Fred's influence on our field. He spent his long career both creating new worlds and helping others to do the same.  Both as a prolifically creative author and as an agent/editor who coaxed other authorial visions into life, Fred Pohl may be responsible for more new "universes" coming into being than any other mortal... a point we'll return to, later.

Sure, they were all universes of the imagination -- many of them so ephemeral that they only endured in human thought for the duration of a single monthly issue of Galaxy or If. Others, like The Space Merchants  and Jem and Man Plus may actually divert the path of human destiny, as we modify our policies and creative ambitions, diverting them a little, because of warnings and thought-experiments erected by Frederik Pohl.

I called Fred the "essential" science fiction author. In much the same way that the other "pole" of science fiction -- Poul Anderson -- was the greatest natural storyteller I ever knew, Fred Pohl was the SF writer who cared most about the gedankenexperiment or what-if thought experiment. Fred would start with a question: "what if ____?" and fill in some fascinating possibility. Only then the magic would ensue as he fleshed out a vivid world of possible consequences from that one whatif -- consequences that might be good, bad, and weird, but always strikingly plausible.

Fred won the Hugo Award six times including the 1978 Hugo for Best Novel - "Gateway" - (the first Hugo I ever voted for). He tied for 1973 Best Short Story Hugo for "The Meeting;" and the 1986 Best Short Story Hugo for "Fermi and Frost." Both can be found in his excellent anthology, Platinum Pohl.

Wolfbane was one of the earliest SF novels I read, and at the time it certainly seemed the creepiest!  In contrast, some of his other works with Cyril M. Kornbluth, such as Gladiator at Law, though fun adventures, also helped spur  my lifelong habit of doubting all ends of the silly, nonsensical, so-called "left-right political axis."  Provoking people to rethink their own assumptions -- now that's writing.

One nearly forgotten Pohl book ought to tower high on any shrine of modern techno-visionary prophecy.  The Age of the Pussyfoot was one of the only science fiction stories of the fifties through seventies that envisioned computers becoming common household tools, owned and used, avidly, by nearly everybody.  In fact, to my knowledge it is just about the only work of prophetic fiction to foresee citizens carrying about portable, computerized assistants that would fulfill all the functions we now see gathering together in our futuristic cell phones. And you can bet I salivate for the even-better versions he foresaw.  Pohl's "joymaker" device is as marvelous an on-target prediction as Jules Verne predicting submarines or trips to the Moon.

In The Cool War, Frederik Pohl showed a chillingly plausible failure mode for human civilization, one in which our nations and factions do not dare to wage open conflict, and so they settle upon tit-for-tat patterns of reciprocal sabotage, ruining each other's infrastructures and economies, propelling our shared planet on a gradual death-spiral of lowered expectations and degraded hopes.  It is a cautionary tale that I cite often, and recommended reading for those at the top of our social order.

I could go on and on, but let me just make a central point about a man who I am proud to call a colleague, in what may be the highest of all human professions....

Wait a minute. Brin said what? Oh, sure, readers of this book probably like science fiction. But isn't that taking things a bit too far, calling sci fi writing the highest profession? Well, in a profound irony that ought to amuse -- or perhaps grate -- the many atheists and agnostics who write SF, let me suggest that no other calling, not even that of monk or priest, has a greater claim to sacred status.

After all, what was purportedly God's greatest act, other than creating the universe? And what do science fiction authors do, almost every day, but erect new worlds, and characters to inhabit them?

If a Father is proud of children who precociously try to pick up the parent's tools and apprentice in His craft, then whose play is more likely to rouse a smile from the Big Creator?

Oh, sure, Fred Pohl could not parse Maxwell's Equations very well and when he said "let there be light!" the incantation only flashed briefly, inside the heads of a few hundred thousand readers -- a blaring supernova here, a slicing laser flash there, or else a brilliant insight into some small part of the human soul.  Sure, that's small potatoes, on the cosmic scale of things. On the other hand, it is a step.  And no human ever did it better.

I suppose that is why I urged the great asteroid-hunter, Dr. Eleanor Helin, to pick a couple of her discoveries and name them after two of the greatest... those two "poles" of sci fi... Frederik Pohl (12284 Pohl) and Poul Anderson (7758 PoulAnderson).  They are out there now... glittering hunks of rock and metal and precious frozen vapors.  Just waiting for our heirs to go out and - perhaps - mine those riches and turn them into wondrous things.  And when they do, I am sure they'll hold another festschrifft in honor of the dreamers who helped to make it all so. Dreamers like Fred.

Fred is survived by his wife, Dr. Elizabeth Anne Hull, who is a past president of the Science Fiction Research Association and a noted scholar in the field (she recently edited a Gateways anthology to honor Fred for his 90th birthday, with stories by Bear, Brin, Benford, Bova, Haldeman, Gaiman, Niven, Vinge, Wolfe, and Doctorow). His grandchildren include Canadian writer Emily Pohl-Weary and chef Tobias Pohl-Weary.

He will long be remembered.

Science Fiction: A lament - then Optimism and the Next Generation

== First: Sad News ==

Though expected, the passing of author Iain Banks came as a shock and a blow.  I first met Iain in London, where I lived in the mid-1980s, when we were both brash young newcomers.  I've always respected his literary fiction, but even more deeply admired his science fiction, especially the last two decades.  

His Culture Universe was among the few to confront straight-on the myriad hopes, dangers and raw possibilities that might be faced by a humanity-that-succeeds.  By a posterity that manages to eke past our present stupidities in order to scale heights that we (their ancestors) can barely conceive. A destiny that we wish for our descendants even as too many nowadays proclaim it can never happen.

It's trivial to provide protagonists with pulse-pounding jeopardy and action, if you first toss them into a cookie cutter dystopia or post-apocalyptic hell.  But Iain Banks rejected that easy path. In richly textured (sometimes voluptuous) prose and across a vast range of plots and predicaments, Iain asked a profound question.... 

Won't those descendants - even rich with success - have interesting problems, anyway?  Won't they still have to fight for things that truly matter? Won't some of them still seek the dangerous edge?

That is exploration, the true heart-essence of science fiction.  And Iain Banks did it peerlessly well.

== Now pause for a little dangerous science ==

Tens of thousands have signed up as preliminary candidates for the Mars One Project, aimed toward sending a high risk and one-way "first colony" to the Red Planet.  This NBC story gives an overview by profiling three applicants -- an 18 year old college student, a 71 year old retiree… and yours truly.   You can also view our 1 minute video sales pitches. In a year, the public may get a chance to help vote for the final team.

In a fascinating podcast, author (and recent Nebula Award winner) Kim Stanley Robinson talks about the politics of science fiction, how robots have historically represented wage workers -- and why we need to right Earth before we head to Mars.

== Science fiction moving onward ==

Tune in as the inimitably unique Harlan Ellison, does readings of two science fiction yarns, first bringing to fire and life "Using it and losing it," by Jonathan Lethem... then narrating my own little intergalactic tale of stark fate and long range destiny -- "Bubbles."  But of course the star of the performance is Harlan's peerless showmanship.

An amazing 1982 video of Isaac Asimov, Harlan Ellison and Gene Wolfe, discussing writing, books, and debating use of the labels, Science Fiction vs. Speculative Fiction …

Looking back....Read In Praise of Pulp on Worlds Without End -- a reminiscence of E.E. "Doc" Smith, Isaac Asimov, Edgar Rice Burroughs, their wondrous stories and unforgettable covers.

Watch a vivid History Channel show "Star Trek: Secrets of the Universe." I was one of the main blather-pundit fellows illuminating both scientific and dramatic themes of the wonderful Star Trek cosmos."

== The Next Generation of Science Fiction ==

The World Science Fiction Convention in San Antonio TX - LoneStarCon 3 - will host Teaching Science Fiction, a workshop for teachers, librarians, and parents on how to use science fiction as a teaching tool (Monday, Sept 2). The workshop provides a half-day seminar on developing a class on science fiction for primary or secondary students. The target audience for this course is educators interested in designing a class on SF, or who want to incorporate SF readings into existing classes. No prior knowledge of the genre is assumed, and general audiences are welcomed.  (Help spread the word to mid-Texas teachers and librarians and others!)

See online resources for Teaching Science Fiction and Using Science Fiction to Teach Science.

Support the Clarion Write-a-thon -- to raise money for the Clarion Science Fiction and Fantasy Writer's Workshop at UCSD.  Instead of miles walked or run...you can pledge to writers per words written, all for a good cause -- teaching the next generation of writers. You can even pledge money for ME to write...chapters of my next uplift novel?

==Forward-Looking Science Fiction==

Earlier I wrote about how Iain Banks represented the rare optimistic wing of science fiction, showing repeatedly that you can have more and better adventure and ideas without always assuming the worst. This matter has been getting attention also from Neal Stephenson's Project Hieroglyph that aims at encouraging a re-engagement of science fiction with positive thinking... though not always positive or happy endings.  The distinction is simple: dark stories that actually engage the reader or viewer with a unique or interesting failure mode are helpful, if they become "self-preventing prophecies," stories that shock us into thinking, that gird us to prevent the scenario portrayed. Listen to a recent podcast of Neal Stephenson on Science Fiction, on Slate.

Greg Bear, Vernor Vinge and I are also part of this movement, and there was positive news lately when Kim Stanley Robinson's novel "2312" won the Nebula Award with a tale of wonder and mixed hope.

Elsewhere I go into what I believe is the fundamental reason that so many authors and producers and directors go straight for the most dismal, civilization-hating and dystopia spreading messages they can find, too often portraying society and its institutions as useless and our fellow citizens as hopelessly foolish sheep. Not in order to skewer a failure mode and warn us, but out of simple plot-laziness.

"The Idiot Plot" shows why even the notion of civilization is treated with contempt, especially by Hollywood. You have to keep your heroes in jeopardy! But that need as evolved into a cheat... the blanket assumption that you can only create close-hero jeopardy by assuming the worst.

Alas.

==Brin-erisms==

What sentence would sound like gibberish, 10 years ago? On this reddit thread a top vote getter was: "I store my contacts in the cloud." Pithy and concise! Another: "Galaxy Nexus: Android Ice Cream Sandwich guinea pig."

My own contribution -- “Why jiltz poor wire-heads whose only tort is self-perving?  Sure they're vice lice, but where's the fraction in evolution in action? I say let 'em un-breed themselves, and stop forcing therapy drugs on the pleasure-centered!”  -- Oops!  That's from the year 2038!  (From my novel EARTH (1989). SOme idea... offset a bit.

My novel The Postman is part of a baker's dozen of Post-Apocalyptic tales that -- according to io9 -- "teach useful lessons." See a Reading Group discussion guide to The Postman on my website.

Now folks can start tracking predictions from Existence at http://earthbydavidbrin.pbworks.com/

The Italian-language sci fi blog Nocturnia interviewed me about writing, science, literature and all of that.

I am interviewed in the San Diego Union Tribune and its online site about SETI... the Search for ExtraTerrestrial Intelligence.

==Random Science Fiction and Science==

If you do home auto repairs, then you know the Haynes Manual for your make and year and model.  Now see Haynes Manuals that aren't for cars... but for wonderful spaceships of the future! Lovingly detailed, these are all for Space Force and alien ships from the 1950s Dan Dare comic books.  Vivid and remarkable.Was the era of ice ages ended by an asteroidal impact on Earth?

Researchers have found evidence of 10 Million tons of impact spherules that were deposited across four continents 12,800 years ago. (The same impact that is said to have ended the Clovis culture and extinguished many species of large mammal in North America.

A fun 6 minute homage to Jean-Luc Goddard's Alphaville. 

My former student, Ron Drummond, performs an insightful and dramatic 40 minute reading of the semi-nonfiction/sf'nal "The First Woman on Mars."  Informative and vivid.

An expectant couple from North Carolina are currently in Hawaii awaiting the birth of their baby. When the time comes, they will have a so-called dolphin-assisted birth.  I have studied cetaceans for decades, visiting research centers and meeting them at sea, and this notions is one of the most crackpot I've seen.

Space Diving… it's been portrayed in sci fi stories.  Is it about to become real?  

Artificial Intelligence researcher Roman Yampolsky is crowd funding a book about Artificial Superintelligence risks and safety which recommends that precautions be taken, like keeping prospective super-AIs physically isolated, with unlimited inputs from the Internet but highly restricted output connections. I take a somewhat different tack in Existence.

Finally, nothing is more fun than wallowing is voluptuous conspiracy theories on a Sunday morning.  Save these till then…