Should-Read: Charles Stross: Why Scifi Matters More When the Future Looks So Dangerous

Should-Read: We are narrative-loving animals. It’s how we think. We are jumped-up East African Plains Apes, only 3000 generations removed from those who first developed language, trying to understand the world as monkeys with, as Winnie-the-Pooh would say, “very little brain”. We are lousy at remembering lists—that is why we need to write them down. We are not much good at retaining sets of information—unless we can, somehow, turn them into a journey or a memory palace. We are excellent, however, at remembering landscapes. And we are fabulous at stories: human characters with believable motivations; beginnings, middles, and endings; hubris and nemesis; cause and effect; villains and heroes. To place ideas and lessons in the context of a story is a mighty aid to our thinking:

Charles Stross: Why Scifi Matters More When the Future Looks So Dangerous: “Near-future scifi is not a predictive medium: it doesn’t directly reflect reality so much as it presents us with a funhouse mirror view of the world around us…

…But in a post-truth world, it may be that only by contemplating deliberate un-truths can we retain our sense of what it is plausible to believe in the collage the media surround us with. State surveillance with overt goals that differ from actual, unadmitted motivations? Check. Intelligence bureaucracies that have their own agendas, focussed on institutional stability rather than carrying out their official mission? Check. Other groups infiltrating government agencies and using them for their own purposes, like parasitic wasps laying their eggs inside a paralyzed caterpillar? Check. This is what near-future science fiction can do for us: it glues convenient handles—explanations we can grasp—on models of phenomena that mimic the patterns of the real world, and gives us the chance to infer the intentions of the hidden manipulators. And that’s why near-future SF remains relevant—and dangerous—in the “post-truth” era…