Response to Orson Scott Card

I recently reread an essay by Orson Scott Card titled “Are We the End of Science Fiction?" Just last week, I went to the movies and saw Surrogates, and haven’t been able to shut up about how happy I was with the science fiction involved. Sure, the plot was kinda predictable and the murder mystery was just an excuse to examine the human condition, but that’s what science fiction is supposed to do! Yes, Mr Card, we are not the end of science fiction, but the precipice of reevaluation.

I know, it’s irksome to go to the bookstore and hunger for a book that is truly sci-fi and have to dig through masses of sword and sorcery, books barely a step away from bewitching bodice rippers, and fifteen different types of media spin offs (Star Trek, Star Wars, World of Warcraft, World of Darkness, D&D and so many others). I picked up a hopeful by the name of Whitechapel Gods, which seemed to be a steam-punk book based on the summary, but quickly found myself in a fantasy involving human machines, not a shred of science to be found. There’s nothing wrong with that kind of story. It would definitely highlight the human condition. But I wasn’t able to get past the betrayal of expectations. The same thing happened with A Brief History of the Dead. A marvelous opportunity to examine our fears at the most basic level, with twists on science and socio-political theory…thwarted by the writer’s intent to write a survival tragedy with sci-fi trimming. And if you need to call that much attention to foreshadowing…but he must have done something right since his book was on the New York Time’s Best Sellers list for a while.

As much as it pains me, Card is right that fantasy is crowding out science fiction. Sci-fi is, as he puts it, too involved for most readers now. They need to observe and think about the world they are experiencing. I saw Surrogates with a friend from work. During the drive home, I started talking about the science- would the Surries correct color blindness and how would the human know since his/her brain had never experienced those colors before? Would the color I see finally be provable as the same the color you see since our optics are set to an industry standard or would we still have the theoretical misinterpretation of the brain? What about eating? If I had a food allergy, could I have my Surry eat something for me just so I could experience it? What if I have seizures? How come Twitter, Facebook, Myspace, the internet, and a life monitoring system aren’t included with Surries? My friend is a full time mom and part time gardener. She gave me a blank look and said, “I liked the story. I don’t know about the science. I don’t have time to think like that anymore!”

And it got me thinking. I had thought, the first time I read Card’s article, maybe a year or more ago, that the problem with writing science fiction now is that the science is always changing. I keep up with science magazines and the articles argue back and forth over so many topics that if I start writing about, say, a society that uses black holes as an energy source because they emit radio waves which can possibly do such and such (utopic/distopic sci fi), by the time I get to a finished draft in six months to a year, there will be an article about a brand new study that says that black holes DON’T emit radio waves, but cause vibrations in the dark matter field, thus debunking my “science.” And popular science hasn’t truly made it into scifi either. Why can’t my android secretary update her Twitter account while she’s being “murdered?” I mean, beyond the fact that she doesn’t know she’s an android and doing a constant upload of data?

Science has gotten to the point that magic is more believable. For some reason, our popular conscience (haha) finds that having witches and wizards building a conspiracy to keep Mundies like us from noticing how amazingly scary cool their world is even as it intersects our own is more reasonable. Maybe it has something to do with this “debate” about how “real” science is- after all evolution is only a theory that’s been proven with birds, peas, dogs, cats, fish, and other lower life forms that aren’t human. I mean, humans aren’t evolving are we? Oil of Olay has a commercial out that says that it protects my skin’s DNA and humans aren’t evolving. But I’ll totally believe in ghosts, angels, demons, and the power of my friend Will to overcome physical reality. Philosophically real reality.
But real science is changing every day.

If, as Card says, sci-fi is about exploring and preparing ourselves for the changes that science makes in our day to day lives, and I think it is, then science fiction is more important than ever. But it’s more than that. Science Fiction is supposed to help us stay human and recognize the humane in technology. There was an article on Wired.com around December of last year that talked about violence against Tickle Me Elmo. Does violence against a life like object desensitize us to violence against living creatures? If I kill an AI, does it count as murder? The first question was posed by the writer at Wired; I could draw correlations between “life like objects” being treated humanely and the studies being done with autistic persons via face recognition software that may answer that. The second question is purely theoretical right now but as we move toward a society that interacts with creations that mimic life to the point that we can’t tell the difference it will become important and be put to our lawmakers: Macintosh vs. Wade anyone? There’s already been a case where someone has “murdered” another by deleting their SecondLife character and followed up by murdering the real person.

There has never been a human time without human imagination. As long as we keep trying to understand our place in the world, the natural that exists without us and the social economic political network we have created, there will be something like science fiction. But we as science fiction writers need to do service to ourselves and imagine things that will be useful to our society. We aren’t going to get the science right- it is rare that we predict the future in that sense. But we have predicted human nature and we need to draw attention to that so we can get the minds of the world thinking again.