Clarkesworld Magazine Issue 73 by unknow

Author:unknow
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: science fiction, fantasy, magazine, short story, clarkesworld, science fiction magazine, fantasy magazine, short stories, semiprozine, dark fantasy
Publisher: Wyrm Publishing
Published: 2012-09-30T04:00:00+00:00

About the Author

Yoon Ha Lee is an award-nominated Korean-American sf/f writer (mostly short stories) who majored in math and finds it a source of continual delight that math can be mined for sf/f story ideas. Her fiction has appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Clarkesworld, Tor.com and Beneath Ceaseless Skies. Her collection Conservation of Shadows will be published in 2013.

The Future, One Thing at a Time

Matthew Johnson

It’s conventional wisdom in science fiction that the future doesn’t come one thing at a time. This idea, which is sometimes called Campbell’s Rule (or Campbell’s Exception), is explained in these terms in the book On Writing Science Fiction by George Scithers et. al: “You can never do merely one thing. Our world a century hence could be almost as alien as another planet; each change triggers countless others.” As fondly as the book is remembered, history shows that this rule simply isn’t accurate. Different fields of science and technology do not march in lock-step; the world may change more rapidly or slowly for different places and people, and sometimes it really does change one thing at a time.

As literary advice, the rule was probably meant to prevent the sort of shallow stories that focus on a single change or technology in isolation. These are particularly common among beginners and among non-genre writers dipping their toes into the genre, which may be why SF writers and editors hold to this rule so fiercely. The problem is that it embodies an attitude towards technology that forms a big part of why so much older SF feels dated today. It may also lead to a lot of today’s most cutting-edge SF seeming out-of-step in just a few years: just as we laugh at giant computers of old SF novels and the voice-call-only communicators in the original Star Trek, many novels published just a decade ago are already beginning to look left behind. (Nearly all books that depict online social spaces, for instance, portray environments that are nearer to Second Life than to Facebook, while hackers are shown as outlaw programmers rather than basement-dwelling script kiddies.)

Why do we believe that the future can’t happen one thing at a time? In my opinion, it’s based on three fundamental fallacies about technological progress.

First, the fallacy that technological progress is inevitable. This is the idea that the future must be different from the past, but in many ways our lives are fundamentally the same as they were 20, 50, or 100 years ago. Consider a typical morning: we are likely awakened by an alarm clock (first adjustable, mechanical alarm clock patented 1847), eat a breakfast of eggs, toast or, if we are feeling particularly futuristic, corn flakes (patented 1896); shower in water heated by electricity (first electric water heater patented 1889) or gas (1868); put on clothing made of cotton (made affordable by the cotton gin in 1793) mixed with, perhaps, some synthetics such as nylon (1935), Lycra (1959) or Gore-Tex (1976).

Many technologies basically stop developing, in

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