FutureTense

PatriciaWrede’s guide to world building. Comprehensive if exhausting.

I’ve never been happy with Roget’s Thesaurus. It doesn’t work the way my brain does for writing. I almost never use one of th options they offer me,yet almost all of the thesaurii use Roget’s as a format. I can’t afford to tear out any more hair. What’s a writer to do?

The thesaurus in Microsoft Word is beyond useless to frustrating. I can send my creative self into severe constipation just by pressing Shift-F7. But there are e-format resources that will work for you.

In electronic format, Wordnet can’t be beat. I’ve been using version 1.7.1. which has a very basic user interface. Who cares. It almost always helps me to find the word I really meant to use. Version 2.0 has just been released and I can’t wait to check it out. Best of all, it’s Open Source software and free.

Sometimes print is the only way to go. I often find the word or concept I needed while browsing for the word I thought I wanted. For those times, I like Reader’s Digest “Family Word Finder” and the Random House “Thesaurus, College Edition.” Both of them have been useful for me.

SF that features a realistic future is on the endangered species list and I’m pissed.

A realistic future, according to some, is one in which our tools–robotic machines, nanotech, genetically engineered products–first become our peers, then replace us in the dominant life-form chain. For many imagineers, that replacement is total, destructive and permanent: our machines go beyond replacing humanity and eliminate us.

Writers claim readers don’t want read depressing stories. First, they’re wrong: dystopian writing has always been popular in SF. But overall they’re probably right. I don’t want to read depressing story after depressing story. But I think they’re confused. A story where humans are threatened when our creations exceed the boundaries established by their creators are not necessarily depressing. When humans passively submit to a fate that may, in fact, not be inevitable–that’s depressing. Jack Williamson’s wonderful, cautionary tale “With Folded Hands” will kick you in the head, if you haven’t already read it.

Maybe that’s what people mean when they think real future SF would be too depressing for the poor widdle weader to handle. But Mr. Williamson’s tale is cautionary–it is intended to stir the reader in order to prevent an undesirable future from ever occurring. Just because Mr. Williamson’s story is deeply affecting–depressing, if you will–doesn’t mean that every story which deals with an undesirable, realistic future has to be depressing. Most writers of short SF today would be darn lucky to affect their reader enough to depress them, in my opinion.

A depressing story that limns and ennobles the human spirit is properly called tragedy. The real enemy of SF is not that stories of the future that are somehow forced to be “depressing” because the future is might be dangerous, but boring stories. I reject out of hand the thesis that a dangerous future is required by some unstated natural law to be depressing. And it certainly won’t be boring.

SF has a fat history of “aliens kick our butts yet we somehow persevere” stories. Sometimes the technological divide we manage to surmount is unbelievably against us, as in the hit movie “Independence Day.” Why is it that the same group that sees excitement, challenge and ultimate victory against superior alien forces devolves into a pool of quivering jelly when that threat is to nanotech, biotech or robotic? Why, when a desire for nostalgia settled on the field, did we lose sight of a rich history of confronting the frightening other?

My first thought was there’s a difference between then and now. Now we will actually have to live with that “other,” the nanotech, the AI. It’s not some remote, imagined fiend that doesn’t really count because it doesn’t–or won’t–exist. But when I think about the extent that SF (or any literature) is about the time and culture in which it is written, those stories in which humans confronted powerful aliens are really about the Cold War: China, Russia, the A bomb, the H bomb, our own internal struggles with Communists and the Un-American Activities Commission, and the possibility that we would end all life as we know it. All very real for their time, neither more nor less threatening than being attacked by rogue androids.

Why did the SF writers of the 1950’s and 1950’s respond with vigor and imagination while current SF turns its back on the future? Sadly, I’m left without a theory.

The idea that we will be rendered obsolete doesn’t depress me. It would except that event is still far enough in the future, dimly seen, that I don’t care much. What depresses me is the response of the science fiction writing community. “The future is going to be miserable. We’re going to lie down and let it roll over us. For as long as we can, we’re going to dwell in a righteous past that we’ve created out of our own fertile imaginations and ignore that inimical future until its too late to do anything about it. Then we’ll moan about how unjust the universe is.”

That might be OK for some. For myself, I’d rather go down fighting. And maybe, just maybe, the reason why there are so few readers of short SF left is because everyone who left the auditorium already feels the same way. Short fantasy has never been very successful. When I want to escape the world and glide under the warm comforter of nostalgia, I want to spend a lot of time there. Thus, BFF–the Big, Fat Fantasy. Maybe you can’t adequately satisfy someone who reads for comfort in the short format. And maybe its time we stopped trying.

Best regards,
Alan Lattimore