Sci Fi Visons : Gloom vs Optimism

Some brilliant anthologies for your shopping list! These include one about war and one that’s free, one about Star Wars and one by me! 

Your best deal is a free download (thanks to corporate sponsorship) of Future Visions: Original Stories Inspired by Microsoft featuring tales that explore possible impacts of future technology, such as quantum computing, machine learning and other trends gathered from cutting edge research. (Authors were invited to talk to mavens at at Microsoft Labs, but free to tap all kinds of sources. Just released!

With contributions from top science fiction authors, including Greg Bear, Elizabeth Bear, Nancy Kress, Robert J. Sawyer, Ann Leckie, Seanan McGuire, Jack McDevitt and  — there's also one of my own best recent scribblings -- about the science of prediction. A topic which has long fascinated me.

War Stories of the Future is another sponsored anthology, this time from the Atlantic Council’s contest for fictional portrayals of how future combat might be transformed by rapidly changing technology. This volume is edited by August Cole, whose novel with Peter Singer, Ghost Fleet: A Novel of the Next World War, is now a best-seller. "The collection features stories from best-selling science-fiction writer David Brin (the nature of heroes and warriors) and Linda Nagata (linked ground combat overseen from afar), as well as entries by Ken Liu, Madeleine Ashby, Matthew Burrows and August Cole." I also helped judge the tales that were winners of a special contest exploring the future of defense and security.

Then there’s the the recent re-launch of Star Wars on Trial: The Force Awakens Edition. Your big chance - if you missed the earlier editions - to experience full-on combat between folks who are critical of the quantum-shallow Lucas universe and those unthinking zombies who actually swallow the faux-eastern “wisdom”-claptrap of that awful little green pixie-ovenmitt Yoda...

… but no, we’ll save that rant for this truly fun and pyrotechnic and intellectually stimulating volume!  

Oh, you can also vote on the various charges, like a jury. Innocent... or guilty as charged? And sure, we know many will vote acquittal out of reflex, without reading the arguments. But you won’t! There's also a book giveaway on Goodreads.

All three of these great volumes are coming out this  very month!  But want more?  Well, I saved the best for last. Coming in late winter — will be my long-awaited third short story collection Insistence of Vision, from Studio Digital and The Story Plant.  With a beautiful Patrick Farley cover and some of the best tales I ever wrote… and which you are very unlikely to have read, like “Chrysalis,” “The Logs,” “Transition Generation,” “Mars Opposition,” and “Insistence of Vision.”  Pre-order on Amazon.

== Gloom vs Optimism ==

See a cool story (from The Oatmeal) of courage and dedication that winds up having meaning to all of us… especially science fiction fans, pondering the sour excess of pessimism and reflex dystopianism that has taken over so much of our mythology.  You’ll understand when you learn who the hero of this story turns out to be.

Many of us have been trying to combat the gloom merchants, whose lesson is too-seldom “avoid this mistake” and too-often “give up hope.” I’ve addressed the surprising and infuriationg underlying reason why so many authors and film directors habitually preach hopelessness.  Neal Stephenson’s Hieroglyph Project with Arizona State’s Center for Science and Imagination is another effort to beckon sci fi back to a guardedly and caustiously optimistic, can-do spirit.

New Utopians: This article in the New Republic adds to the rebellion: Jeet Heer writes, “The prophets of doom are unusually loud in our time, and almost every vision of the future, whether by sober ecologists or wild-eyed science fiction writers, carries with it the stench of despair. The collapse of civilization has become its own narrative cliché.” It then goes on to profile my dear and respected colleague Kim Stanley Robinson, rightfully, as a central figure in the counter-attack of problem-solving tales of (tentative) utopia. (Though many reasers of Robinson's most recent novel, Aurora, would deem it a shift to the dour side.

 Sure, this essay leaves out the rest of us hope-peddlers and can-do pushers, and it implicitly assumes that socialism is the sole route to redemption. “Robinson’s attempt to keep the flame of Utopia alive in a despairing era has made him a lonely figure.”  Um, hello?  

In another move away from dystopian visions, a relatively new subgenre - Solarpunk - promises to offer more sustainable, optimistic  -- even inspirational -- visions of the near-future, one you might even want to live in. On the Hieroglyph website, Adam Flynn writes that "Solarpunk is a future with a human face and dirt behind its ears."

Getting down to specifics, this article from Big Think argues that: “All Space Colonies Will Begin as Dictatorships…” because the rough and tumble of democracy won’t work where one shattered window can kill everyone. Well… um… duh? Except the analogy of “dictatorship” is silly and harmful. A better parallel is the captaincy of a ship. On a ship, with death just meters away, there must be a captain whose orders are swiftly obeyed.

Yet that is not a 'dictatorship,' because the owners of the ship have sovereignty over who gets to be captain! The owners dictate policy, such as deciding the next destination, while the captain is a “dictator” regarding implementation. That is, unless and untill the owners (who might be a democracy of people aboard either a sea or space vessel or a Mars colony) decide to fire her and pick someone else.

We live in an era of such simplistic metaphors that few people grasp this distinction. That even under conditions that are stressful and dangerous, we can still be citizens and sovereign adults who – ultimately – share responsibility for the course we set.