Unsettling Futures - Why it's hard to get beyond capitalism in science fiction
I got up Sunday morning to find that there were quite a few people on Twitter gleefully dunking on a Salon article by fantasy author Kyle Galindez, called Why Can't Sci-Fi or Fantasy Imagine Alternatives to Capitalism or Feudalism?
Most of the responses were of the "Look at this idiot!" variety, with people holding up Star Trek, The Dispossessed, and some other iconic texts of SFF as counterexamples. And yes, a simple response to Galindez's article (which does point out LeGuin and others as exceptions) is that of course there are alternate systems of political economy in SFF literature. Yes, he is literally wrong.
He's also right, when you look at the big picture.
Science fiction is, across the broad spectrum of the field, pretty bad at imagining alternatives to our present system. We don't do it nearly as often as we pretend, and when we do, we often do it in shallow ways.
Since everybody and his mother brought up Star Trek, let's start there.
One of the cores of any political and economic system is how land tenure is determined. How do we say: this person has the right to use or occupy or sell this bit of land, and not that one?
In Star Trek, there are two specific locations on Earth that appear to belong to particular people or families. We have the Picard family vineyard, and we have the New Orleans restaurant of Benjamin Sisko's father Joseph.
By what right do they lay claim to these properties?
It seems obvious that the Picard vineyard has been passed down through multiple generations, perhaps from our own time or even the 20th or 19th century. Which suggests that private property still exists on earth, and that even the means of production (i.e. a farm and winery) can be held privately, that there exists in law a system of inheritance of property rights. How does that square with the idea of egalitarianism that we're told prevails in the Federation? My ancestors didn't own shit; if I'd been born in the 24th century, would I have to live in a grey replicated state-supplied apartment instead of a lovely, ancient French farmhouse? If there's no money, how do they decide who gets the wine? Is there some kind of gift economy going on here? Is it a lottery system?
Joseph Sisko's restaurant raises still more questions! Does he rent the space? If so, with what currency (various Star Treks having suggested that they don't use money anymore at all)? Was he assigned the space by a local bureaucracy? Is his tenancy based in part on usufruct? (Google it.) And then there's his ingredients – sure, Joseph is cooking for the love of the craft, but are people really digging up vegetables and harvesting shellfish for shits and giggles? How are they compensated? Do they get compensated more because their work is less fulfilling? How does any of this work?
No one has put in the effort to figure out how any of it works, so in practice it's riddled with inconsistencies.
Which is, y'know, fine. Because if they did explain in detail how people got education and housing and food and health care in the Federation, it would be boring as hammered shit.* That would be the worst episode of the series, bar none. No one comes to Star Trek for a detailed explanation of an egalitarian post-scarcity future. We just want to be reassured by the general idea that it is an egalitarian post-scarcity future, which allows Captain Kirk to get on with the business of spreading space-democracy, fighting space-Russians Klingons, and teaching alien women in silver lamé bikinis about this Earth thing called "kissing."
The great strength of science fiction and fantasy is the genre's roots in pulpy adventure fiction. This is also its greatest weakness.
At least 70 per cent of modern published science fiction and fantasy is still, at least in part, adventure fiction. Yes, there are novels like LeGuin's The Dispossessed, which combine richly imagined alternative political ideals with character-driven plots. These are the exceptions, and, frankly, they are a niche product.
It would be easy to make a list of novels by writers like Bruce Sterling, Cory Doctorow, Neal Stephenson, Malka Older, and Ken MacLeod that are founded on interesting socio-political ideas, even sometimes balancing them with katana fights and space battles. You could keep adding names, but it would still never be more than a sliver of the SFF published in any given year. The vast majority of settings feature lightly tweaked versions of capitalism, dystopian futures of post-apocalyptic scavenging or dreary autocracy, or a simplified feudalism in space.**
None of those are particularly revelatory. They are common, however, because they serve the plots the readers expect.
It's extraordinarily difficult to write alternate economic/social systems well and also have heavy sword & raygun action. Sure, there are exceptions. Matt Wallace's Savage Legion has a weird Incan communism/clan corporatism thing going on, for example. That was strange and delightful to find in a book heavy on the stabbing! But it's not easy to find a balance between raw ideas and adventure-driven plots.
Homage to Catalonia-Alpha-3
All of the above (economics = boring, adventure plots ≠ mesh well with big thinkies) is one aspect of the issue.
Another is that it really is hard for people (and SFF writers are a subset of people) to imagine a world beyond the one we've been living in all our lives. Heck, we don't even understand our own economic system very well, most of the time!
The late socialist writer Mark Fisher, in his book Capitalist Realism, expanded on the notion that "it is easier to imagine the end of the world than to imagine the end of capitalism." He writes:
That slogan captures precisely what I mean by 'capitalist realism': the widespread sense that not only is capitalism the only viable political and economic system, but that it is now impossible to even imagine a coherent alternative to it.
This would seem to have significant implications for science fiction. Is Fisher right? Are we starting the journey to imagining other worlds without a map, a compass, even a vague idea of the direction?
It's notable that, apart from dystopias, the strongest trend of alternate political futures in SFF is not socialism or anarchism or gift economies or hypertech post-scarcity, it is writers who want a libertarian future, which is to say, "Existing capitalism, but more of it and even faster." There's even an annual prize for libertarian SF writing! (It's been won several times by avowed socialists, which is a whole other layer of weirdness.)
The only reliable wellspring of ideas for writers who want to write more expansive, truly alternative futures is research: political philosophy, anthropology, history, and economics. After I binge-read Ken MacLeod's Engines of Light and Fall Revolutions books more than 15 years ago, I went on a deep dive into alternative political philosophies, just so I could understand what the heck he was talking about. I'm a little rusty now, but I used to be able to explain the differences between libertarian agorism and mutualism, for example, which is a skill that makes you really popular at parties.
If Fisher is right, and the long reign of capitalism has seriously eroded our ability to imagine alternatives, it shouldn't come as a surprise that the alternatives we see in actual SFF are mostly either dystopian, or hand-waved, or grossly simplified. We have built up a grammar in SFF to talk about some kinds of ideas, but our lexicon of the political remains thin, and it can only be fleshed out in the long, slow conversation of books and stories, between writers and readers, between writers and other writers.
Fisher's idea also, I think, explains the knee-jerk response to the Galindez article. There are an awful lot of people on SFF Twitter who are social democrats and left-liberals. The question is, how far afield from the conventional are they looking when they say a fictional future is truly different? What do they consider economically radical, or revolutionary? Is their (our) thinking hemmed in, and unaware of it, and therefore defensive?
Is SFF really the 'literature of ideas'?
Finally, I have to raise this question: is science fiction the best place to talk about alternative political and economic systems?
We are inducted into this genre with a lot of high minded talk about what science fiction is "for." It's for teaching people about technology, it's for warning us about grim futures ahead, it's for exploring the possibilities of the human condition under altered technological circumstances, it's for writing pew-pew-pew laser battles, it's…
It's not for anything.
No. Scratch that. It's for whatever each individual writer and each individual reader needs, something it shares with all other forms of literature. Sometimes it might be for talking about political ideas, but that is not its ultimate goal. The pew-pew-pew LASERS! stories might not be as artistically or intellectually challenging, but they're just as valid a reason to start typing.
That said, the "literature of ideas" justification is one that's hung on for a long time.
But is SFF as it is presently practiced actually built for talking about big political ideas?
I would argue there are trends in the modern genre that impede its ability to take on that role.
First, SFF has gotten a lot more literary since the 1960s, when the New Wave kicked off the idea that science fiction should actually, y'know, not suck. That it might be possible to write in modes other than two-fisted pulp adventure tales and straightforward Campbellian prose.
This was, on the whole, good! Yay, good writing!
But it brings its own baggage.
There has been a steady drumbeat for decades now that character is the central element of any SFF story. But if character is made into the keystone of "good" SFF writing, then society must fade further into the background. The personal is political, but emphasizing the personal forces a narrower focus. From there's it's harder to see those background details of the society in action. Sometimes, you need to see a world from 10,000 feet up, and that may be difficult to achieve in a very character-centered story.
The other issue is that craft advice actively discourages one key tool necessary for political/economic writing in SFF.
Yes, the dreaded infodump. There are writers who still employ it without shame. (Hello, Kim Stanley Robinson and Neal Stephenson!) But in general, it's frowned on. It's déclassé, it's gauche, it's like wiping your nose on your sleeve in church!
It's also the best, if not the only tool to use when describing a really, really weird society! You can't just use the equivalent of "the door irised open" to explain an economy based on social capital.
Does this mean that authors pull back from describing certain aspects of their worldbuilding, or avoid certain ideas altogether for fear they aren't commercial enough? Does it mean agents and editors are less likely to pick up manuscripts that devote three pages to explaining a key bit of socio-political setting?
I don't know. But I suspect something along these lines does happen.
Everything is a trade off. If you want a real literature of ideas, you have to give those ideas room on the page. And that means less room for niceties of character and plot structure and even pretty prose.
Maybe the best place for imagining a radically different future isn't a novel of character, but in a manifesto.
Kill the economist in your head
Way up near the top of this post, I mentioned that we don't look too deeply into the mechanics of Star Trek's post-scarcity utopia, we just want to know it's there. It's reassuring, and it's all the more reassuring because we don't know how it works.
If we did, we'd probably be alarmed.
Any fictional utopia worth its salt would be profoundly unsettling to the sensibilities of a majority of people alive today.
If we want to imagine futures beyond the economics we know today, we'll have to be prepared to shake ourselves up first.
Footnotes:
*Look, I would watch the hell out of that episode, and argue about it online forever. But I read 30-page court judgments for fun. I am not a reliable guide to what makes good TV!
**If you piled up every SFF novel with a truly weird political system, and I piled up every book with a semi-feudal space empire, whose pile would be bigger? Remember, I get all the Dune and Foundation books to start with!
Self-promotion corner
I had a new story published at the end of January, called "Payday Weather," over at Escape Pod. It is not set in a radically different political and economic environment. Mea culpa, I suppose, but I'm still pretty proud of it, and I hope you'll give it a listen.
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