Putting the life back in science fiction

I think it could be inspirational but it also dodges the hardest bit of going from where we are now to some better future. If your past civilizations were just “naturally” better at treading lightly, and never had any collective action problems or short-term destructive belief patterns to overcome, it doesn’t really say anything about humanity’s problems other than it would be nice not to have them. But in fairness, I don’t have any good idea how to get to a better future that doesn’t take a detour for the worse first. I think the idea of invisible civilizations hidden in the deep past is compelling for fiction, so that should probably weigh heavier than didactic concerns.

For that matter, I think that there’s no particular reason a sustainable future should be a boring, forced-to-eat-your-broccoli sort of setting for stories. Pre-agricultural human societies were basically sustainable but that doesn’t mean that they were free of conflict or that they render stories set there boring. A sustainable future is one where humans can project their current behavior a hundred generations into the future and see that those inhabitants of the future aren’t going to be screwed over and can continue to behave basically the same.

Obviously we’re not there yet. Humans will eventually find a way to a sustainable future or they will go extinct. They could find sustainability at a level of material comfort approximately equal to the present enjoyed in the developed world, at a level well above the present, or at a level well below the present. We don’t know if the sustainable future is peaceful or plagued by war. We don’t know what its political issues and systems are like, what its artistic, cultural, or scientific components are, how its economy is structured, or how many people are living in it.

It seems to me that you can get most of the way to sustainability with just a few major changes. Stop burning fossil fuels. Reclaim rare elements from trash. Substitute common elements for rare elements that can’t be sufficiently reclaimed. Stop growing the human population ever-upward. Stop degrading and paving over farm land. Stop over-harvesting wild animals and plants. Stop turning jungle, forest, and grasslands into farms, mines, and buildings. I don’t think these changes are easy to achieve, but assuming they’re achieved they don’t place many constraints on the sorts of future societies and potential stories available to a writer.

You can write milquetoast, didactic fiction in the manner of Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward. You can tell gritty stories of inequality and violence, like Richard K. Morgan (just because the rich discover a long-term interest in preserving the planet doesn’t mean they’re preserving it for the little guy). You can tell hopeful-but-realist stories of building new societies in the manner of KSR’s Mars Trilogy. You can tell detective stories, coming of age stories, crime capers, rise-and-fall of family dynasties, romances, exploration adventures, new scientific discoveries, almost any sort of subgenre, trope, or type of fiction that you could tell in the present or past.

Sustainable-future-fiction is going to be boring only if you decide to make it a guided tour of how nice and sustainable the future has become, and explaining how it all works in excruciating detail. This is what I’ve heard called “wiring diagram fiction” before, more commonly seen in old SF, where the characters seemed to be there mostly to explain things to each other that they already knew so the reader could get a detailed picture of the amazing new gizmo or society the author had spent a long time daydreaming about. You’re trying to make a compelling story, not a diorama. Write a compelling story set it in the sustainable future, and show off only as much of that world’s underpinnings as properly suits the story.

Don’t interrupt the chapter where a character wonders if they’re being followed by someone with a page-long infodump about how the house’s toilet system extracts nitrogen and phosphorus and produces methane from wastes. Characters shouldn’t be thinking to themselves or saying to others awkward phrases like “I think I’ll get today’s groceries from the nearest urban farm, which provides fresh vegetables without the energy waste and breeding for bland sturdiness that plagued the Oil Age.” Characters think or talk to characters in their own context and for their own purposes. They shouldn’t be playing tour guide for the reader.

If you can’t resist the urge to show off the underpinnings of the world you’re building, you could try putting infodumps in their own chapters, like the whale lore in Moby Dick, or using footnotes like Peter Watts did when the reader might not have grasped some important point of biology but it didn’t make sense for the explanation to be delivered by the narrator.

The things we need to do to get to sustainability are comparatively simple. The high level concepts can be explained in less than a page. There are a few big changes, and a lot of consequent changes, that need to be implemented to get there. Humans already have all the basic scientific knowledge and technology necessary to provide a pretty good and sustainable life for everyone on Earth, even though it won’t have every perk that the median turn-of-the-millennium inhabitant of the EU or United States enjoyed.

So it’s simple, but it’s not easy, because there are powerful interests fighting it every step of the way. As a historical example, “all citizens equal under the law, all law decided directly by voters or by their elected representatives, one vote for every adult citizen” is a simple way to describe the basic workings (or at least ideals) of modern democracy. But it took struggles and a long time for democracy to become common in the world, and individual democracies have taken a long time to expand the pool of eligible voters until it was representative of the entire population.

Back on the storytelling, it’s fine and fun to show the reader what’s different about your fictional world if you can do it in an unforced way. Characters having to deal with weird or broken toilets or other machines is fine. Having characters say things like “I’m taking my biodiesel scooter into town for spare LED lights” isn’t. In a future where those things are common they’ll just be called scooters and lights. Someone will add the prefixes in ordinary conversation no more than I would say “It’s getting dark. Should I turn on the electrical light?” for the benefit of Victorian observers who might otherwise think I’m talking about gas lights.

This last quirk is one that drove me crazy while reading the otherwise wonderful Ship Breaker by Paolo Bacigalupi. Every single time artificial lighting was used he had to say “LED light.” LED glowpaint, LED spot light, LED running lights… I agree: the future is full of LED lighting! But once was enough: the narrator shouldn’t be trying to provide a “director’s commentary” at the same time he’s telling the story.