One of my favourite comments about science fiction comes from Frederik Pohl, who once wrote of the pursuit:
A good science fiction story should be able to predict not the automobile but the traffic jam.
It’s a simple statement, but it contains a profound difference in worldview not just for science fiction writers, but for dreamers in the world at large. Techno-optimists and futurists of similar stripes tend to be celebrated for imagining “the automobile”: for leaning with boundless energy into the great “let’s do it! yes! why not?”—even when what they’re dreaming always has material technology at its heart: Let’s build a colony on Mars. Let’s send ships far beyond our solar system. Let’s upload ourselves and swap out bodies for eternity. Let’s transform our financial systems with new forms of currency. Let’s make planes go faster, boats carry more, and all our vehicles electric.
The more robust dreamer/storyteller, in Pohl’s view, is the one who goes Hm.
Now, Hm doesn’t mean No.
It means, “Have we thought this through? Is this ‘fix’ solving the problem it claims to? Is it creating new ones in the process? What will we do if things go wrong?”
But of course, people who predict the traffic jam don’t necessarily help to bolster new industry. They’re not filled with infectious enthusiasm for the surface marvels of tech, and they don’t amplify every breathless utterance of its visionaries, so they’re useless for turning grand “what if”s into (at the very least) short-term profit for investors.
In fact, a lot of traffic-jam prognostication ends up advocating for a far less materialist future entirely—and that can be difficult for average citizens to imagine, because we’ve been trained since childhood to expect The Future to involve all sorts of whizzbang gadgets for all manner of everyday needs. That’s why the most common refrain about our present-future’s failings is still: “I was promised flying cars!”
And yet, the important question isn’t “Where are my flying cars?”
It’s “Why was I promised flying cars at all?”
Why was that as big a dream as our forebears could think to dream?
Today’s piece for paid subscribers reflects on how techno-optimism has narrowed the scope of our imagination—and how it’s up to the people who go Hm to take it back.
For everyone else: Keep an eye on Grist Magazine, which in two weeks will launch its call for this year’s Imagine 2200, an annual writing contest (free to enter) that invites the world to imagine what future generations will look like, and what they’ll try to achieve in response to the problems they face. What this contest offers (along with cash prizes for a lucky few) is an excellent reminder that human struggle will never end, in any era. Even if we can tackle today’s problems, others will arise down the line—and some will no doubt be created by the fixes we dream up now.
The key is to keep the constancy of struggle in mind while facing our own.
And may the people who go Hm finally learn to lead the way.
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