Futurismic

Editor Jetse de Vries has posted up the full table of contents for his forthcoming Shine anthology of optimistic science fiction… and I’m proud to see there are quite a few Futurismic alumni among the names mentioned! Here’s the full run-down:

• “The Earth of Yunhe” – Eric Gregory
• “The Greenman Watches the Black Bar Go Up, Up, Up” – Jacques Barcia
• “Overhead” – Jason Stoddard
• “Summer Ice” – Holly Phillips
• “Sustainable Development” – Paula R. Stiles
• “The Church of Accelerated Redemption” – Gareth L. Powell & Aliette de Bodard
• “The Solnet Ascendancy” – Lavie Tidhar
• “Twittering the Stars” – Mari Ness
• “Seeds” – Silvia Moreno-Garcia
• “At Budokan” – Alastair Reynolds
• “Sarging Rasmussen: A Report by Organic” – Gord Sellar
• “Scheherazade Caught in Starlight” – Jason Andrew
• “Russian Roulette 2020″ – Eva Maria Chapman
• “Castoff World” – Kay Kenyon
• “Paul Kishosha’s Children” – Kenn Edgett
• “Ishin” – Madeline Ashby

Shine is due for publication by Rebellion/Solaris Books in April this year, and is already available for pre-order on Amazon (UK and US). As far as I can see, there’s a dollars-to-pounds parity on price, meaning that Stateside readers can net themselves a real bargain.

And keep your eyes open for another optimistic science fiction story by one of the authors above, to be published right here on Futurismic later today…

While the rest of us were stuffing ourselves with food and alcohol, editor Jetse de Vries was bashing out an essay* re-examining a refrain that’s been heard a few times in the last year or so: is written science fiction dying, is that a good thing, and if not, what should (or could) be done to save it? [image by timparkinson]

Regular readers (or those who know Jetse already) will be quite right to suspect that it’s another variation on his suggestion that science fiction needs to reacquire relevance by not only highlighting the big issues of the day but examining potential solutions to them, rather than revelling on post-apocalyptic gloom. But that’s a massive oversimplification of a fairly wide-ranging essay, so take twenty minutes to read the whole thing – while you may not agree with all of his points, there’s a lot of sound thinking and food for thought in there. Here’s some snips from the conclusion:

SF doesn’t want to (try to) tackle today problems. It just wants to highlight them, exaggerate them into apocalyptic disasters and let the world go down the drain in five hundred different ways. SF is very good at imaging how civilisation (or the world in general) ends: if it only used part of that imagination thinking about solving an actual problem it might have had some more respect from the world at large.

So let’s call it what it is: a failure of the imagination. Yes, quote me on it: ‘most written SF today suffers from a failure of the imagination’. It’s lazy, it avoids doing the hard work.

[...]

In short, SF should get off its arse, be totally open to outside influences and other cultures, and get involved with proactive thinking, proudly using science, about the near future.

Previous discussions (including some right here) around these points have highlighted the sharp division of opinion they create. I still find myself somewhat on the fence with respect to “optimistic” science fiction (in that I’d very much like to see more of it, but have no wish to see the demise of the darker flavours), but Jetse’s points about science fiction’s WASPish makeup, plus its perplexing resistance to taking creative risks and breaking with established tradition, hold a great deal of water for me.

That said, I still find myself thinking that the problem is one of imprecise nomenclature; given that it’s still almost impossible to get any three people to agree on a useful working definition of science fiction, maybe we should give up defending the ragged and patchwork flag of a territory whose citizens long since underwent a diaspora into the continent of the cultural mainstream.

[ * To be fair, and knowing Jetse, I fully suspect he did some eating and drinking over the holidays as well... indeed, probably a lot of drinking. ]

Well, it looks like all those who’ve been so negative about the positive science fiction manifesto will get a chance to see whether or not it can work in the real world. Jetse de Vries, former Interzone fiction co-editor (and a writer in his own right) has pitched and sold an anthology of positive sf to Solaris Books. Here’s the press blurb:

Shine is a collection of near-future, optimistic SF stories where some of the genre’s brightest stars and some of its most exciting new talents portray the possible roads to a better tomorrow. Definitely not a plethora of Pollyannas (but neither a barrage of dystopias), Shine will show that positive change is far from being a foregone conclusion, but needs to be hardfought, innovative, robust and imaginative. Most importantly, it aims to demonstrate that while times are tough and outcomes are uncertain, we can still bend the future in benevolent ways if we embrace change and steer its momentum in the right direction.

There’s a separate Shine anthology blog/website which Jetse intends to become “an open platform for optimistic sf”, and there are guidelines for those interested in submitting stories for consideration – the reading period isn’t until late spring next year, so there’s plenty of time to polish up your piece before sending it off.

I’m happy to say that, while we’re not involved in any material way, Futurismic is proud to stand behind Jetse and Solaris on this project, and we’ll be giving it whatever support we can; I hope some other science fiction venues will see the merit in supporting people who are trying something new, even if it doesn’t necessarily line up with their own personal tastes.

That said, it seems even the strident ladies of io9 are divided on the merits of dystopian science fiction… maybe Shine will win over the hardcore? We’ll just have to wait and see…

Here at Futurismic, our fiction guidelines state that we’re looking for near-future science fiction only. There’s no elitism involved – we just like to have a niche to focus on, one that (we hope) fits with our readers as well as it does with the editorial team.

But there is an argument to the effect that, in some ways, near-future science fiction is more challenging to write well than the out-and-out fabrication of, say, space opera. Few would know that better than Jetse de Vries, who has just finished a four and a half year stint as fiction co-editor for Interzone magazine. De Vries has been doing some thinking-out-loud about the problems of near-future sf from the writer’s perspective:

It’s what makes writing near-future SF such a daunting task, and a kind of catch-22 exercise: if it looks too believable it (most probably) won’t happen; if it looks too implausible it might very well happen.

So if you dive into the world of tomorrow, you need to find a balance between not being too conservative in your predicitions, but also not too ‘off-the-wall’, either. For example, back in 1997 the movie “Wag the Dog” satirised the Clinton/Lewinsky affair by fabricating a war to cover up a presidential sex scandal. Nowadays, one would not only wish it was only a sex scandal they were covering up, but — much more importantly — that the war was ‘fabricated’ instead of real.

[snip]

So what’s a poor SF writer to do? Well, dare to make mistakes, try to ride the fine line between extrapolating too straightforwardly or too crazily, and face complexity.

I hear that: the older I get, the more relevant the old aphorism seems to become – the truth really is stranger than fiction.

How do the writers among you approach plausibility in your near-future science fiction stories?