Nighttime Must-Read: Charles Stross: Cultural Estrangement and Science Fiction

…someone mentioned having a problem with one particular far-future (well, set 400 years hence) SF novel that disrupted their reading of it so badly that they ended up giving up on the book…. I think it’s worth taking a look at it, because it’s one of my own pet shibboleths…. These are not bad authors and they don’t write terrible books: that’s part of what makes the problem so jarring for me.

And the nature of the problem? It’s that the stories they’re telling are set in a far future… in an interstellar human polity…. And yet the civilization they portray can best be described as ‘Essex suburbia goes interstellar’… or… ‘Whitebread Middle American Suburbia to the Stars’… gender politics, religious framework, ideologies, fashions(!) and attitudes… has become a universal norm. And nothing else gets much of a look in….

You can make an argument for writing SF in this mode in that it allows the lazy reader to ignore the enculturation issue and dive straight into the adventure yarn for which the SFnal trappings are just a brightly-coloured wrapper. But I still find it really weird to read a far-future SF story that doesn’t deliver a massive sense of cultural estrangement, because in the context of our own history, we are aliens.

Imagine yourself abducted by a mad Doctor in a time machine shaped like a blue Police Box (itself an anachronism in today’s smartphone-networked world) and dumped on the streets of your home city a century ago, in 1914…. How familiar are you going to find things? The answer is actually ‘not very’…. You speak a dialect of the local language, it’s true. But you have some words or terms that nobody recognizes (‘atom bomb’), some words that have changed meaning radically thanks to the spread of technical neologisms (‘virtual’, ‘computer’) or social change (‘queer’, ‘n—–‘), and there are other words and slang that you probably don’t recognize….

The architecture and layout of cities will be vaguely familiar…. Some things will be mildly disorienting…. Some items will be disgusting (horse shit everywhere, and the flies they attract). It may be hard to tell the difference between a shop front and somebody’s living room, if you get away from the market stalls. And it may be hard to tell the difference between a contemporary crack house and the typical living conditions of the early 20th century poor…. Foodstuffs you expect to find are unavailable and exotic (bananas, kiwi fruit, curry), and stuff nobody in their right mind would eat is routinely sold (tripe, kidneys, beef hearts) and eaten…. Don’t ask about medicine….

You don’t want to know what passes through conservatives’ minds in 1914…. It’s worth noting, incidentally, that much of the social change that led up to the current cultural matrix was driven by technological change. Better medicine and family planning… which bananas… cheaper than potatoes, people aren’t worn out unto death by fifty, civil rights for people who aren’t rich white males… you probably aren’t dying of tuberculosis. So why do repeatedly we see the depiction of far future societies with cheap interstellar travel in which this hasn’t bought about massive social change as a side-effect (other than the trivial example of everyone having a continental sized back yard to mow)? Seriously, I feel that if I’m writing far-future SF, I’ve got a duty to at least try and portray a plausible society.