October 19, 2019

I return with a challenge! (Across the Sundering Seas #26)

Hello, dear readers,

It has been a while! I last wrote you in early August. A few things have happened between then and now that have kept me from writing… but I’m back, and hopefully will be steady through at least the end of the year. Thanks for your patience in the interval!

(“At least the end of the year,” I say, because I’m debating the form I want my writing to take in 2020. More on that in a future issue, as I get it sussed out.)

Next week I will probably have a collection of links for you: I have quite a collection of them gathering. Today, though, something very much in the spirit of this newsletter’s name.

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My friend Stephen and I have recently been thinking out loud about what it would look like if we actually worked out how to build a non-technocratic future. This has been a bit of a meandering discussion at times, though in the episode I’ll be publishing on this coming Wednesday, we really found a fascinating lens to think about what tradeoffs we should make around our technologies in aiming for more convivial ways of life.

Part and parcel of that, we both think, is a need for imaginative works that help us make choices in that direction. “People are storytellers” has become something of a truism these days; and really it’s probably better to say something like “people are story-creatures.” Not all of us want to invent stories, but basically all of us respond to story. We are narrative beings. We experience the world as a narrative, whether because of a fluke in our relationship to physics or because of something rather deeper. (If you’ve been reading me for any length of time, you know I don’t think it’s a fluke. But for our purposes here it doesn’t actually matter very much.)

One net of our narrative-creatureliness is that if we are going to get from here to conviviality, we need—we need very much—to tell stories not only of the costs of technocracy, but also of how people might make their way out of a technocracy, and of what life might look like in a world not at the mercies of technological masters. Stephen and I have out-and-out pleaded for this! Songs, poems, novels, movies, plays: which do not merely prophesy apocalypse if we continue on our current course, but imagine an alternative world. By way of context, we assumed in our plea that the fiction in question would be science fiction. It is, after all, an imagined future we wish to get at.

But it occurred to me today that one of the ways fantasy literature works best is by recasting our problems in specifics that are quite divorced from our specifics, while getting at the fundamentals that are just exactly our fundamentals. To riff on a theme from Tolkien’s essay “On Fairy-Stories”: science fiction of the sort we have suggested in Winning Slowly of late has the downside of being, in some sense, insufficiently fantastical. In this mode, sci fi is a kind of futurist realism. We noted even in the proposing that what we’re suggesting is not limited to “What if 100 years from now…” questions, but we have also spent a great deal of time on just those kinds of ideas. That is the temptation, here, I think. We need the genuinely fantastical—even if that is a genuinely fantastical substrate and backdrop (by dint of not assuming technique as substrate) for a tale set in the future—to help us imagine genuine alternatives to the world around us as we find it.

In very important ways, magic and science (or technology, if you like) are the same. It is not for no reason that many of those at the head of the scientific revolution—men like Newton—were equally interested in what we now recognize as science and what we now shrug off as pseudoscience or even superstition: magic. As C.S. Lewis pointed out, both magic and science are ways of attempting to control the world around us. And lest you think he overstates his case because of his distaste for technocracy (a fair thing to wonder), people of quite different temperament and philosophical out look make much the same point (if in different ways). Larry Laudan¹ argues that science tells us nothing true whatsoever: that it is useful as a means for accomplishing certain technological ends, but it is only instrumentally useful. In this telling—which I think is true if perhaps still incomplete—science is a means of controlling the world; the only difference between it and magic is that one of them actually works.

That is, to be sure, a very large difference… but also a very large similarity.

That similarity suggests, then, that one way of imaginatively thinking our way out of our current conundrum is by way of fantasy. It is not hard to imagine a world in which high magic had come to have many of the same downsides as high technology has in our own—where no one did anything without magic, where magic was simply assumed to be the solution to any problem, where magic was used for every form of entertainment and diversion, where problems created by the use of magic were obviously best solved by the employment of more magic, where those most skilled at devising new magics (or better: those best skilled at successfully ideating new magics and getting others to produce them) sit at the top of an increasingly lopsided economic distribution. It is rather harder to imagine the way out of such a world. It is yet harder to see what a world in which such a society had radically rethought its relationship to magic might look like.

But, two points:

1. As hard as that work is—and this kind of “sub-creation,” building up “secondary worlds” (to return to Tolkien’s parlance from “On Fairy-Stories”) is very difficult indeed, at least if we are to do it well!—it is easier in many ways than doing the same in a futuristic realism mode: because the author can set up difficult-but-not-quite-as-fiendish-as-real-geopolitics systems and economics, for example.

2. I think it would be an awful lot of fun to see such a world, and such a trajectory, and such a vision of how things might go.

So: any of you happen to be fantasy writers and care to take up the challenge?