Sci-Fi's Secret Future

For generations, the motto of America’s creatives has been “if you can dream it, you can do it,” a slogan adopted by Disney’s Imagineers and falsely attributed to Walt himself. It actually traces back to Sheralyn Silverstein, a junior copywriter who wowed General Electric with the line. It became the theme of GE’s big recruitment brochure for its research and development department. “Expand the mind of the microchip,” the company pitched the next generation of visionaries. “Teach a robot the facts of life . . . Dream things that never were and say, ‘Why not?’”

The question, of course—one that in a sense has haunted engineers ever since—is: can you dream it? Your modal left-brain, analytical, nuts-and-bolts, neurodivergent quant is typically the guy you’re counting on to get your enterprise to infinity and beyond with his math, not his dreams. Yet even now, as ethicists, philosophers, and—doubtless soon—soothsayers are hired by the frontier AI shops for mid-six-figure salaries, tech remains hesitant to turn over its sense of destiny to in-house poets and seers.

Nevertheless . . . someone has to originate the vision . . . someone unburdened by board meetings and office politics, quarterly reports and KPIs, org charts and management theory.

Inspo, Outsourced

In a recent email to competitors, Future Vision XPRIZE stirred the souls of the hopeful with a fresh reminder of tech’s provisional solution to the inspiration problem. “Want to know,” it began, “what the world’s greatest innovators have in common? They were all sci-fi nerds first.”

Then came the proofs:

Elon Musk credits Isaac Asimov’s Foundation series with inspiring his mission to make humanity multi-planetary . . . SpaceX exists because a teenager read about saving civilization through the stars. Jeff Bezos was so obsessed with Star Trek that he got a cameo in Star Trek Beyond. Blue Origin’s mission—millions of people living and working in space—came straight from his childhood dreams watching Kirk and Spock. Martin Cooper, the inventor of the cell phone, explicitly said he was inspired by Captain Kirk’s communicator . . . Steve Jobs, Marc Benioff, Palmer Luckey—the list goes on. The pattern is clear: stories create believers, and believers become builders.

In short, science fiction is tech’s proven, trusted source of actionable visions at a satisfying scale—close enough to share an identity with, but far enough away from the factory floor or the C-suite to ensure the creative lunatics don’t take over the engineering asylum.

Over the past five decades or so, this informal and workable regime has proven flexible enough to leave both sides of the cultural transaction feeling much better off. Sci-fi creators validated by real-world manifestations of their artful insights get an audience, income, relevance, and room to stretch toward the limits of their ambition and skill; “science-fact” builders treating their favorite fantasies as the mantle of heaven’s mandate get customers, funding, traction, and the benefit of the doubt from the public. Sci-fi gives people a nice, long look at what’s around the bend, giving them the opportunity to acclimate before the crazy things from the future start spawning into their militaries and workplaces, their pockets and bodies, and their intimate lives.

Sci-fi on Trial

This year, however, the symbiotic relationship between science fiction and science fact has come under increased strain. Even if AI doesn’t blow up the planet or wipe out or transcend humanity, the breakout advance of machine intelligence and its seemingly limitless applications has given unprecedented bite to long-standing predictions from within and without the genre that the golden and silver ages of science fiction are now well and truly over the rear horizon, with conditions ever more unfavorable for a renaissance.

Even two decades ago, no less a legend than Orson Scott Card publicly tallied the growing list of powerful arguments that sci-fi was slipping into the past. He identified eight primary claims, each ringing with more condemnation and finality than the next. Science has moved on; we used up all the ideas; the good writers got old or died, and the younger ones suck; science fiction was always lousy; print can’t compete with computer graphics; women prefer fantasy; writers are lazy, and fantasy is easier to write; the audience has simply moved on.

Some of these assertions focus on changing audience tastes (a prophetic warning from the vantage of today’s era of minotaurs-and-milkmaids “romance” novels). Others, à la Marshall McLuhan, emphasize transformations of medium and message, with the literature of the printing press and the labor of the scribbler and the typist yielding to the taps and prompts of the screen.

A few, however, draw our attention to an accelerating collapse of artistic talent and vision, raising the question of how much runaway technology is to blame as opposed to runaway make-believe. (Even in a pre-digital, pre-screen society, elite storyteller overproduction is more than capable of exhausting, or at least taxing past the point of infotainment, the imaginations of creators and audiences alike.) But in one case, the lead case, Card’s list underscores that if science no longer needs fiction to lift our sights beyond imagination itself, then science fiction likely faces an existential crisis even bigger than itself.

Such a turn of events would be something on which, in a strangely familiar fashion, tech lovers and tech haters would both agree. Critics in the McLuhan vein would nod sagely: the televisual medium has been pushed into the background by the digital medium, which brings machine memory to the fore at the expense of human imagination. Traditionalists, with their unshakeable conviction that books will never deserve the scrap heap, would agree, nevertheless, that those precious tomes were in mortal peril—and that’s a bad thing. (Five years ago, making a McLuhanite presentation of my own, I fielded an objection in the form of a plaintive plea: “But what about the Inklings?”) And accelerationists hungry to blow past all merely human dross would grant all the apocalyptic prognostications with a gentle smirk: yes—and that’s a good thing.

Like all things these days, the question is not whether it is happening, but whether it’s good that it is. And like so many current things twisting in the glare of public debate, sci-fi finds itself on the docket, on the witness stand, and very much on trial. It’s a pattern that climbs, consolidating energy and momentum as it goes, all the way up to the source—human beings. Like nothing else, our dizzyingly consequential tools have turned against us in the guise of authorities still more than enough in their capacity as powers. Even before they have gained the ability to crush us or mold us to their will, they have called us—our purpose, our destiny, our being—into fundamental question, leveling charges that today find ever weaker arguments in our defense grounded in nature, custom, ideology, or even philosophy.

Leisure, Pleasure, Beauty

Surely, sci-fi as we know it could not survive the disappearance of our humanity, although one would have to turn to the genre for speculations about what else we’d call stories composed for non-human or post-human species to share and enjoy. Yet the bare qualifications for sci-fi must include not just some degree or element of narrative and communicability but, yes, enjoyment.

Notwithstanding the fraught and mysterious boundary at which the use of our leisure for pleasure shades into the use of our leisure for pain, a bright line of genre nomenclature runs between sci-fi, even in its most pessimistic and dystopian key, and horror, where the creators’ and the audience’s will to discomfort transcends whatever will to enjoyment might weave through the experience. That suggests a significant tell—if in some sense the tech-centered work arouses and responds to the desire for enjoyment more than the desire for its opposite, we are in the realm of sci-fi, no matter how sharp the warnings or how grueling the character arcs.

It’s an important distinction because much of what separates the futuristic imaginings of overclocked tech lovers from science fiction itself is the idea that soon “enjoyment” as we know it will be gone. Soon, we are told by the most wide-eyed—or wild-eyed— of technological advancement, humanity will pass the torch to intelligence as such, or generalized “consciousness,” which, it’s intimated, will transcend such petty and temporal human experiences as leisure and pleasure, focused instead on the New Age prime directive of extending its “light” (as Elon Musk likes to say) “to the stars.” Even allowing for a bizarro world in which ascended dolphins, slime molds, and killbots enjoy speculative fiction no less than the rest of us, sci-fi fundamentally resists all visions of the future in which being is elevated to a degree of abstraction or energy with no use for shared narrative enjoyment.

In that sense, sci-fi must ultimately exist in some kind of theological context, and here the New Age vision is hardly uncontested. In a striking way, Christianity recognizes the persistence of shared narrative enjoyment unto the general resurrection and remaking of the world, and, by strong implication, even beyond. Beyond all things conceivable as God the Father is, the Son is nevertheless He without whom one cannot have the Father (1 John 2:23), and the Son abides forever within a shared narrative enjoyed by his flock in the best, most complete, most life-giving, and perfect—therefore, most beautiful—possible sense.

And despite the breakdown of secular justifications for humanity’s continued existence, intuitions about the deep roots of the entertainment value of human beings are increasingly prominent in the quotidian debate. “I always read the Butlerian Jihad and its equivalents in other sci-fi as plot armor,” Washington Post AI reporter Gerrit De Vynck recently wrote, referring to the tendency of classic sci-fi like Dune to write superintelligent machines out of their narratives. Canny authors opted “to not have to have AI play a significant role in the universe because humans are simply more interesting.” Yet, he concluded, “I think the rapid increase in AI capabilities are surely leading to a crisis for sci-fi because now you have to explain it away.”

Back in the Future

Of course, the proving ground for such concerns must be found in contemporary sci-fi itself—particularly in works coming from the younger, “digitally native” generations. Intriguingly, when turning our attention in this direction, it’s possible to identify a kind of peak liminal space between the onset of the digital age and that of the smartphone age. Mini-eras like these can be especially pivotal in ways that aren’t clear until the children thereof come culturally of age, and the one I have in mind—after the release of the first iPod (October 2001) and before the release of the first iPhone (June 2007)—now has its emblematic prince of sci-fi auteurs: Kane Parsons, the now 21-year-old director of Backrooms, born June 18, 2005.

Backrooms, which presents a story set in an uncanny liminal realm that arose online over several years as a sort of ad hoc audiovisual community collaborative, is hailed today as the biggest original horror debut in cinematic history. Now closing in on a staggering $395M global box office gross, the film is responsible for opening the eyes of everyone up and down the industry chain, from studio heads to casual moviegoers, to the new vision and the new reality of the rising generation.

What is so remarkable about the phenomenon, however, is how Backrooms reveals both the new reality and the new vision to be defined much more by sci-fi than horror. To avoid spoilers, suffice it to say that the film reaches a moment where it can either plunge toward the darkest depths of despair—the horror movie—or back away, heading in a different direction. Quite in keeping with the native vibe of the source material, Parsons confidently steers the film toward the contemplative, implicit, psychological, and long-lingering terrain of the best science fiction, arriving at a place where the narrative questions the consequences of our mania for communication under the extreme conditions of hostility we ourselves create.

In uniting reality and vision within a single meditation on the ways recursive delusion uncontrollably breaches the containment of memory and imagination, Backrooms announces a cultural sea change. In place of the millenarian reflex of excessive affirmation and excessive denunciation that has so flattened and cheapened popular art, in flows a depth of spiritual field that draws from and feeds into that of its audience—a “throwback,” in that way, to the flourishing and highly profitable independent cinema scene of the ‘70s and ‘90s, but a quantum leap forward out of the sticky, sickly 2010s.

It all puts the science fiction lover in mind of another cerebral-yet-soulful investigation of inner-space corruption invading the outside world—Michael Crichton’s Sphere, published in 1987 and adapted for the screen (a flop) in 1998. “The ability to imagine is the largest part of what you call intelligence,” the novel’s hero, an aging psychologist, reflects, under the influence of a mysterious alien entity. “You think the ability to imagine is merely a useful step on the way to solving a problem or making something happen. But imagining it is what makes it happen. This is the gift of your species and this is the danger, because you do not choose to control your imaginings.”

But later, the hero’s reflections shift to related yet different ground. “All we consist of is memories. Our personalities are constructed from memories, our lives are organized around memories, our cultures are built upon the foundation of shared memories that we call history and science.” The return to cinema of the delicate, dramatic interplay between memory and imagination, this time through the perspective and experience of Americans young enough to make it fresh, heralds a science fiction unencumbered by delusion and despair alike.

Parsons isn’t an easy guy to hit up on the internet. But a couple figures instrumental in bringing Backrooms to the screen did affirm my assessment of the film’s cultural breakthrough in an off-the-record chat. Judging by the overwhelming enjoyment, acclaim, and commentary surrounding the film, and the waves of enthusiastic relief greeting Parsons’s rise and the boats soon to be lifted by the sea change it augurs, at least some kind of science fiction is all but certain to have a long and productive life.

Charting a Course

For my own part, the future of science fiction seems shaped by the confluence of two grand vectors of attitude and theme—spiritual vectors, if you will. We are all accustomed to thinking of sci-fi as existing on a simple one-dimensional spectrum, with utopianism at one end and dystopianism at the other. The schematic is so well established that we retain it even when switching to a much different terminology. Optimistic versus pessimistic, that’s the same thing as utopian versus dystopian, right? Wrong . . . more illuminating is a two-dimensional map, one where optimist/pessimist is laid out perpendicular to utopian/dystopian.

The field we’ve created reveals sci-fi’s varieties in much sharper resolution. In the abstract, it may at first seem implausible that a work could be pessimistic and utopian or optimistic and dystopian. But after a moment’s reflection—and/or reference to the handy scatter plot herein—it’s clear enough: a utopia can give us much reason for pessimism, and a dystopia can fail to snatch away its inhabitants’ optimism. Sci-fi seems especially well suited to captivate us with these higher-contrast, higher-conflict squares on the chart.

James Poulos

Gazing deeper, it’s especially interesting to consider how the different civilizations that have made the greatest contributions to sci-fi tend to concentrate in different squares. A remarkable share of our pessimistic, dystopian sci-fi, for instance, is distinctly British, while the Japanese more characteristically specialize in optimistic stories set in dystopian worlds. American civilization, of course, omnivorous though it may be, prefers its myths and archetypes played in both an optimistic and utopian key. The fourth great sci-fi civilization, the Slavic, doesn’t quite fit so neatly in just one of our four squares—no doubt because Slavs are so split. (Slavic heritage includes at least four different civilizations, depending on who’s counting.) But if one had to select a lead in the play, it would be hard to pass over the Russians.

And in choosing one figure to typify the Russian approach to science fiction, it would be all but impossible not to alight on Andrey Tarkovsky. With Tarkovsky, we can glimpse the strange spectacle of a sensibility almost the diametric opposite of the American one—earthy, reverential, penitent, subdued, pained, cryptic, inexplicable, long-suffering—yet, for all that, immensely alluring and captivating to the American cineaste.

Often with a minimum of spoken words, Tarkovsky’s films say things so universal and primordial that they can be heard even or especially by American ears and eyes filled to the brim with optimistic, utopian symbols. “When less than everything has been said about a subject, you can still think on further,” he remarks in his filmmaker’s autobiography, Sculpting in Time. “The alternative is for the audience to be presented with a final deduction, for no effort on their part, and that is not what they need. What can it mean to them when they have not shared with the author the misery and joy of bringing an image into being?”

To insist that misery cannot be expunged from the joy of creating in images is to invite science fiction out of the confines of its genre dimensions and fully into the bosom of art. We Americans, often rightfully suspicious of obscurantism and posturing, have gone too far in the direction of treating everything as a symbol, the better to deconstruct it. A little time with Tarkovsky can disabuse us of that bad habit. “A symbol contains within itself a definite meaning, a certain intellectual formula, while metaphor is an image,” he reminds us, “an image possessing the same distinguishing features as the world it represents. An image—as opposed to a symbol—is indefinite in meaning. One cannot speak of the infinite world by applying tools that are definite and finite. We can analyze the formula that constitutes a symbol, while metaphor is a being-within-itself. . . . It falls apart at any attempt to touch it.”

This, I think, is the key that unlocks sci-fi’s secret future, come what may.