What Science Fiction Tells Us About Our Future

If sci-fi paints pictures of how our tomorrows might unfold, what are some of the best novels of the past few years telling us?

As a society, we’re not very good at looking into the future and preparing for what it might throw at us. Covid-19 has made that painfully clear.

One of the ways that we have a conversation with the future, and try to understand it, is through science fiction.

Of course sci-fi is often about today’s preoccupations, but it can be a useful guide to the future. Writing fiction unlocks the authors’ imaginations and allows them to create visionary worlds that extrapolate today into tomorrow.

And there may be a feedback loop, because these visions and stories help frame invention and innovation in the present. Just think of all those heroic mid-20th Century American visions of the future: bursting with positivity; full of rockets and robots, freeways and walkways. And, just think of all those geeks who devoured those sci-fi visions and then went on to be engineers, entrepreneurs and investors deciding what would get built.

If sci-fi paints pictures of how we think our tomorrows could unfold that might, in turn, shape our future, what are some of the best sci-fi books of the past few years telling us?

Six of the Best Reads

I’ve spent lock-down revisiting half a dozen of the sci-fi novels that I’ve most enjoyed to see what we might glean about our future. I’ve chosen these six because they’re both thought provoking and well written. They’re not too heavy on the technology, and I think they will keep you engrossed when you’re stuck at home.

In the midst of the Covid crisis, where else to start, but ‘Station Eleven’, by Emily St John Mandel (2014). This is the story of the Georgia flu that rapidly wipes out 99% of the world’s population, of the resilience of the survivors, and their continued desire for culture and meaning — whether from comic books or Shakespeare plays. A travelling troupe, reminiscent of a band of Medieval players, moves between scattered settlements putting on performances because “Survival is insufficient”. This beautifully written book was prescient about pandemics, but also a warning that we must not lose our culture, especially printed works.

Another book in which disease has helped shape the future is ‘The ‘Wind up Girl’ by Paolo Bacigalupi (2009), where gene-tinkering by agri-business has devastated the world’s farming. “We are nature. Our every tinkering is nature, our every biological striving. We are what we are, and the world is ours. We are its gods”. The vivid depiction a post-climate crisis Bangkok is a stark warning of the potential payback for environmental arrogance. The story is of the relationship between a factory manager and an-engineered Wind Up Girl, Emiko, in a world where bio-terrorism is a tool for corporate profits. It is marred by terrible sexual politics. Emiko, the only female character, is a sex slave, abused, physically and psychologically throughout the book.

The vivid depiction a post-climate crisis Bangkok is a stark warning of the potential payback for environmental arrogance.

As an antidote to this I re-read ‘The Power’ by Naomi Alderman (2016), a novel that crackles with energy, portraying a world where females become dominant. A single change, teenage girls gaining amazing physical power, turns the whole world upside down, and it is men, not women, who have to live in constant fear for their physical safety. The novel is partly about rape culture today, but also asks how different the behaviours would actually be in a world where women were in charge. “Gender is a shell game. What is a man? Whatever a woman isn’t. What is a woman? Whatever a man is not. Tap on it and it’s hollow. Look under the shells: it’s not there.”

Gender identies are also challenged in Ancillary Justice, by Ann Leckie, (2013), an intergalactic space opera, where ungendered Artifical Intelligences (AIs), use human bodies as ‘ancillaries’. The protagonist, Breq, is an ancillary — a human body that has been ‘slaved’ to the artificial intelligence of a giant spaceship — bent on revenge. The novel explores notions of self and of justice in a universe of machine intelligence and warring species. “Or is anyone’s identity a matter of fragments held together by convenient or useful narrative, that in ordinary circumstances never reveals itself as a fiction? Or is it really a fiction?”

‘Nexus’, by Ramez Naan (2012), also explores AI and post-human enhancement, asking what are the limits to being human? (“Mankind gets an upgrade”) Nexus is a nano-drug that connects human minds, and the book is a pacey, druggy, and action-packed account of the struggle to control and shape the technology between the security services, criminals, Buddhist monks and an AI in a human body. The book is ultimately optimistic about the human hive-mind. “We think of ourselves as individuals, but all that we have accomplished, and all that we will accomplish, is the result of groups of humans cooperating. Those groups are organisms in their own rights. We are their components”.

What are the limits to being human?

The use of robotic, human, or cyberspace vectors to project the self is a theme in William Gibson’s ‘Peripheral’ (2014) where the characters seem to prefer to be anywhere, rather than where their physical self resides. The novel toggles between two futures. A trailer-park near future and a far-future depicting a post-climate-change London, home to a Victoriana theme-park and nanotech-powered, carbon-gobbling, buildings, ruled by theKlept, a criminal oligarchy. This world, in which 80% of the human population have died-off, is a result a slow-burn apocalypse ‘The Jackpot’. This involved: “No comets crashing, nothing you could really call a nuclear war. Just everything else, tangled in the changing climate: droughts, water shortages, crop failures, honeybees gone like they almost were now, collapse of other keystone species, every last alpha predator gone, antibiotics doing even less than they already did, diseases that were never quite the one big pandemic but big enough to be historic events in themselves”.

Dystopian Futures

The future painted by these novels is of devastating pandemics, a runaway climate crisis, and rule by grasping elites, where enhanced post-humans, with evolving concepts of gender, prefer to live disembodied lives, enabled by, and battling with, artificial intelligence.

There are positive fragments, but most of the novels paint a bleak picture of our collective future. This dystopian cyberpunk vision has characterised much of the genre in recent years. If humankind coalesces action around stories of the possible, do we need some positive, normative futures? And is anyone writing them in a convincing way?

I challenged William Gibson on this recently, when he was in Bristol, and asked him whether science fiction authors ought to be portraying more positive future worlds. He gave a dry chuckle and said that others could do that if they wanted, but that he would continue to write the world as he sees it, with an extremely high F***edness Quotient.

Do these sci-fi authors have dystopian visions because of growing environmental consciousness of what our species is doing to a finite planet? Or because every society fears what new technologies will mean for that which it holds dear? Or is it because they come from countries that have already reached their high-water mark and where, for the first time in centuries, we feel like the next generation will be worse off than ours?

After re-reading these six books, and a lot of other contemporary sci-fi, I’m left asking: will these bleak descriptions become self-fulfilling prophesies, and isn’t it time for some more positive sci-fi visions of the future?