The shrinking literary future
October 2nd, 02007 by Alexander Rose 
I have been noticing a funny phenomenon recently in the work of my favorite science fiction authors. Their futures seem to be shrinking.
I thought it may have just been a coincidence that two of my all time favorites, William Gibson and Neal Stephenson, have both been writing less and less about the far future, and more and more about the near present (or even past in Stephenson’s case). But since meeting Vernor Vinge at one of our lectures, I have been reading his amazing work and noticing the same trend. I started with his most recent book Rainbows End (set in 02025), and recently started reading A Fire Upon the Deep published in 01991, which is set over 50,000 years into the future.
Each of these authors cut their teeth decades ago imagining transcendent future technologies. They invented, or at least popularized concepts of things like cyberspace, the web, virtual reality, and the singularity. It seems that the technological developments of the last 10-20 years have caught up so rapidly that extrapolating on its current possibilities is either more interesting, or simply more imaginable, than postulating on what it might become.
I still love all their work, I just wonder what it is that may be causing the future to shrink?
October 3rd, 2007 at 12:33 pm
Boing Boing Boing did a podcast interview with William Gibson in August where they asked Gibson, “What it means to be a science fiction writer writing about the recent past.” The question starts off an interesting discussion and it’s worth a listen: http://odeo.com/show/16091713/view
October 3rd, 2007 at 4:08 pm
I have also been a bit frustrated recently as I have been finding the same. Stephen Baxter has also done a similar trick by writing about ancient Britain. (I much prefer the Coalescent series with a VERY long now).
Could it be that publishers are putting pressure on Sci-fi writers to get a more populist reader base? Could it be a response to 9/11 in which writers are lost when dreaming about a future? Or could it just be that they are all getting older and their vision of the future is catching up with them?
I disagree that events are happening so fast now that the future is harder to envision, things must have felt to be terribly fast moving when H G Wells wrote his Sci-fi works at the end of the 19th Century. (A time when the likes of William Morris complained of technology moving too fast and a need to preserve old ways (such as textile dying by hand and hand made furniture). If we just take 1897 as a random example we can see a great deal of groundbreaking technology including the coining of the word computer, USA’s first underground Metro, and the discovery of an electron.
October 6th, 2007 at 3:20 pm
Just as the Unseen Dark Matter is making the universe we live in slow down and eventually shrink, so too the Dark Administration we are living under now, going to start shrinking our liberties and freedoms. So we move from an ever expanding universe, to a shorter term to exist on this political system. We are reverting to the methods of George Orwell, and are looking only 100 or less years into the future.
1884 - to 1984, .. from 2007 to 2025.
October 7th, 2007 at 8:01 pm
Once you accept the idea of the Singularity, as Vernor Vinge has, it sharply limits your options. If you envision it occurring on schedule, you can’t write much farther in the future than about the mid 21st century because, by hypothesis, we’ll have passed the Singularity and our predictive models will have broken. Vinge worked around the problem in A Fire Upon the Deep by postulating the zones of thought, a way of ensuring the Singularity could not occur. In the Peace War and Marooned in Real Time (both of which are great fun, BTW), he managed to delay it for a few hundred years through the impact of some historical events that are the subject of the book. The other option is to get close to the Singularity and have something go Very Wrong, in which case you can write a post-apocalyptic novel.
So, in the end, I think asking why time horizons in fiction have been shrinking may be another side of the question of why so many authors have come to accept the idea of the Singularity. In other words, what has changed so that so many authors feel the curve of technological progress over time is exponential rather than linear, or something that will eventually level off, or even something that will peak and begin to decline?
October 11th, 2007 at 1:21 pm
I just started reading Gibson this year (I’ve read 4 titles so far - not the new one yet), and am therefore reading books set in a future that is now past. It’s a strange but still very enjoyable sort of disorientation.
October 17th, 2007 at 4:00 pm
_Accelerando_, by Charles Stross, plugs into your 2006 edition near-future concept matrix, and uses it to yank you through an event horizon. Grand Fun.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accelerando_(book)
October 31st, 2007 at 10:25 am
Well, speaking as an amateur writer — writers write the stories that enthrall them and demand to be written. So there must be things going on in the world, that are catching the imagination of these writers and demanding to be explored and turned into stories with a near-future perspective, rather than a remote-future perspective.
A lot of this has to do with psychology/mindset of the world and how fast things are/are not changing. I do think that 9/11 was a mentality watershed event for people in the US (and possibly the world at large)….it was a big noisy Black Swan (in the Taleb sense). Yeah, people may know intellectually that ‘the world can change in the blink of an eye” but that’s a different thing than actually seeing it happen and feeling the effects.
Also, science fiction has gone mainstream in a big way. For example, lots of TV and movies which are described as mainstream entertainment, are technically sci-fi. And 95% of this stuff is near-term, this world-this planet sci-fi — not “in a galaxy far far away.”
Even things like the Borne Ultimatum, the latest Die Hard movie, the TV show 24, etc. are portraying technology in a near-future way (the tech in the story doesn’t really perform in the magical way that the show uses it — but the tech “feels” feasible to the audience — it doesn’t seem impossible).
I’d also say that a lot of the “magic” and “supernatural” themed shows are also actually close cousins to sci-fi — er the famous Clarke quote — magic and science look very similar to the casual observer. Thus the shows Pushing Daisies, Journeyman, etc. are IMO a flavor of sci-fi. Even “Supernatural” — the “demons” are just a hostile invading alien race, and the Winchesters fight them with half-understood spells and exorcisms (just like most of us push buttons and manipulate techno-tools that we don’t really understand how they work).
So it’s not just about these three authors. There is something happening in the broader culture, in the US at least, that’s driving a mainstreaming of near-future sci-fi. Maybe it’s like the saying (Gibson?) “The future’s already here…it’s just not evenly distributed yet.” That’s a near-future sci-fi perspective…and writers are intrigued by taking that limited-distribution future and playing it out in various story arcs.