Fiction As Learning Tool

Do you remember in Health class when you had to watch Degrassi videos?

I ask this in full expectation that it's a universal - I know we watched some in Canada and some in the U.S., and expect that everyone in North America at least had to watch episodes of TV about pregnant teenagers as part of either class or homework at some point.

But that's not where I meant to start.

I'm taking a class right now called Technology and Social Responsibility. It's all right up my alley, from the discussion material to the class meetings on Twitter, and it's made me think about how we establish stakes in issues, and the power stories have. Because this is a university class about technology and social responsibility, we don't have Degrassi to watch: mostly we read relevant articles, but one session we did have to watch episodes of Black Mirror. I'm not particularly a fan of the show, aside from it's odd prescience in one incident, because it shows such an unrelentingly bleak view of our future with technology. I've found myself making reference to a lot of other novels and TV shows, though, such as Person of Interest and Orphan Black, because they also extrapolate on current issues with technology and IP and ideas of ownership and privacy. And the reason I come back to them is this:

Fiction answers the question "why should I care?" before it even raises the issue it addresses.

Some of the things we're talking about in Technology and Social Responsibility are easy to think of in the abstract, because so many of the issues sound science fictional and like a future problem, but a lot of the issues we're talking about, such as if we really own our own DNA and how secure our data is, are things that impact us right now. There are current court cases about these issues, not least the FBI fighting with Apple over whether we're allowed effective encryption on the devices on which we store our whole lives.

Fiction makes these things real, and immediate, playing out the consequences of treading wrong in a way that's easier to hold on to than an abstract thought experiment. Fiction allows for exploration of worst-case scenarios without explicit fear-mongering.

And for me, at least, fiction shows me the things I want to work to prevent.

Why are your aliens wearing Prada?

Writing science fiction opens up a plethora of fascinating aspects to explore: "physics"-enabled magic, cool weapons, thought experiments on everything from economics and ethics to the viability of a nitrogen-based lifeform. It can be what-ifs for how we would deal with disaster if it struck in the next week to far-future scenarios on Earth or Earth-parallels or on spaceships dealing with revolution or alien encounters or just internal politics or relationships against this new background.

That last part is key: no matter how futuristic and strange the world, there are characters acting on that stage. And, unless those characters are all time-travelers, they come from a society shaped by the technology available in the story.

That's what baffles me most in some sci-fi stories I read: the world changes, but the social mores don't: in fact, they're about mid-90s and a little conservative, with no obvious in-world reason they'd be that way. Technology alters culture. Look at what the printing press and the industrial revolution and the Internet have done to society. It's the industrial 'revolution' for a reason.

How human beings react to new situations is the point of all fiction. More so in speculative fiction, where inherent social conditioning can be more easily examined by removing or changing the conditioning the characters have. If their conditioning is the same as that of an average modern person, it's removing an entire dimension from the story.

Of course, one doesn't want to completely remove those elements of a character which make them relatable. But everyone needs air, food, shelter, companionship no matter their environment nor their relationship with it. How they approach their search for their basic needs (are they employed? living in luxury in a post-scarcity economy like someone from Heinlein or Doctorow or Stross? do they get their social interaction in person? for pay? online?) illustrates a world as well or better than all the ray guns you can fit in the prop room.

So when an otherwise promising story has characters who might as well have grown up in the 90s in North America, I'm disappointed: we can all do better.

Author Interview: Laura Bradford

I just finished an interview with Laura Bradford, author of the upcoming novel Flyday.

EY: What's Flyday about?
LB: It's set in the future, about a journalist who gets pulled into a murder investigation when his fiancee's brother is the accused. The journalist finds himself visited by a time traveler who brings new insight into the case, and things just take off from there.
EY: What inspired you to write it?
LB: Well, I've been writing since I was very young, but I decided to write a novel a few years back and this was the idea that took off. It mixes a lot of my interests--science fiction, music journalism, adventure stories, etc. The characters sort of captivated me, and I wanted to see where their story went.
EY: Is Flyday going to have a sequel?
LB: Yes, I have a whole series planned out. I'm editing the second book now.
EY: That's exciting! When do you think that will be coming out?
LB: Right now I'm not sure. It still has a long way to go, and I'm coming up on my last semester of school.
EY: Quite an accomplishment, to have managed to put Flyday out while going to school. What made you decide to self-publish?
LB: I sent queries to agents, and the answer was a unanimous "Interesting, but not for us." But when I showed it to people, they seemed to love it, and I had a lot of requests for copies to pass around--more requests than I could fill. Eventually I saw that e-publishing was taking off, and I decided that putting it out there was much better than letting it sit on my hard drive, especially once I started working on the rest of the series.
EY: Will you be making it available in print as well as electronic versions?
LB: Eventually, yes.
EY: What channels are you using to sell it as an ebook?
LB: I put it on Smashwords, and right now I'm waiting for it to go up on Amazon and Barnes & Noble.
EY: Is there anything else you'd like to say?
LB: Mainly that I hope people enjoy the novel. E-publishing has been a really interesting experience for me, and I'm glad to finally be getting the book out there. My blog is also http://lauraebradford.blogspot.com if anyone wants updates about the project.
EY: Okay. Thank you for being my first interviewee for Authors' Refuge, and I wish you luck with Flyday!

Science Fiction Future

It probably says a lot about my social group that "how should we end the world?" is not a question that even makes me blink anymore.

I do a lot of collaborative writing; I currently have three on the go, though one I've taken over most of the writing portion while my collaborator gives me ideas. They all tend to be post-apocalyptic science fiction, as is a fair amount of what we read and pass around to each other. But the focus isn't on the end of the world, it's on what happens after, in the days-weeks-months after everything changes. The way it ends isn't usually important, either; the most recent collaboration the end of the world was decided based on an article I'd read in the paper that morning, with no real emotional investment in it or plan to explore how we got to that point in the story.

A concept bandied about in science circles nearly as much as science fiction is that of a singularity, an idea or instant or tipping point beyond which the future is unrecognizable and can't be accurately predicted. With the rapid rate of change in technology, my friends and I tend to take for granted that we'll live through at least one more singularity.

But, given the very nature of a singularity, it's difficult to write past one. So we write not singularities, but the kind of disaster that comes from attempts gone wrong; anarchy, oppressive regimes, and accidental genocides. It's half adventure and half thought experiment as to how radical a shift we the writers could survive.

And it's a lot of fun to write.

All of it, if we ever finish, will be available free online under Creative Commons, because a communist approach to intellectual property is something else we four share. As one succinctly put it, it's better to have it out there for free and have people read it than to charge and sell one copy. In an ideal world, of course, we'd be able to exist on our writing and other people would be able to read it whenever they liked, but we don't have one yet.

Accelerando

Mid-way through reading Accelerando by Charles Stross. It's an interesting take on the dot-com boom and what might have happened if it didn't bust. It's also an interesting look at evolution; technical modifications allowing us to continue to advance and adapt. Our ability to adapt is key to staying on top. That, and those are really awesome glasses.