Babel Clash

Thanks again to Paolo for joining us on Babel Clash.

For the second time in Babel Clash’s short history, we have two featured authors joining us for our next geeky debate.  I’m very pleased to welcome Kate Elliott and Ken Scholes.  Kate is the author of the Crossroads and Crown of Stars series.  Her latest book is Traitors’ Gate.  Ken is the author Psalms of Isaac fantasy series, and the second volume, Canticle, is due in October.

Please join me in welcoming Kate and Ken, and tune in tomorrow to learn the topic of our next discussion.

Thanks for having me here, Morgan. I really enjoyed it.

“For those that haven’t read your work yet, what would you tell them to encourage checking out Windup Girl?”

Bottom line, The Windup Girl is a GMO thriller/political intrigue set in a future Bangkok.  And it’s pretty much guaranteed to give you a couple good shocks and surprises. But don’t believe me. Check out the reviews and see if the book seems like it fits your taste.

SF Signal describes The Windup Girl: “In a future Thailand struggling against gened plagues and rising seas, the most important elements of life are the calories needed to stay alive. But as iron-fisted food corporations, flawed rulers, and an impure army of environmental defenders fight to impose their views on this world, an unlikely girl—who could be the next step in human evolution—fights for the right to simply live as she wants.”

And some reviews, with links:

Publishers Weekly: (Starred Review) “This complex, literate and intensely felt tale, which recalls both William Gibson and Ian McDonald at their very best… is clearly one of the finest science fiction novels of the year.”

SF Signal: (Five out of Five Stars) “A disturbing novel… beautiful, fast-paced, exciting… One of the best first science fiction novels of recent years; a completely realistic and terrifying future.”

IO9: “The Windup Girl is obviously about the geopolitics of the present, where Monsanto tries to supplant local seedstocks with its own, and many governments teeter between the politics of isolationism and global capital. And yet Bacigalupi never slides into moralism or judgement. All his characters have their flaws and heroic moments. Nobody is clean, and there are no heroes who want to save the environment or bad guys who want to destroy it. Ultimately that’s what makes this debut novel so exciting. It’s rare to find a writer who can create such well-shaded characters while also building a weird new future world.”

And of course, you can always come to my website at windupstories.com where I have some of my short stories available for free download, if you’d like to try out some of my writing before you buy.

Thanks for letting me drop by.

-Paolo

Paolo, it’s been a great conversation.  Thank you for joining us on Babel Clash.  For those that haven’t read your work yet, what would you tell them to encourage checking out Windup Girl?  The book should be in most stores next week.

You know, Morgan, you’re probably asking the wrong person about this stuff.

But off the cuff, I’d point out that all of the disasters you cite are simply not going to happen.  They’re storytelling tools of fantasy.  They’re broadly designed to disengage a reader from the here and now and carry them far away. Which is great.  And it’s also why stories of this type, and apocalypses and disasters of these types, will remain highly popular.  Zombies/Machines that Take Over/The Oncoming Prophecy of Doooooom!  They’ve been popular for decades now, though the zombie increase recently has been rather astonishing.  Read someone like John Joseph Adams zombie anthology The Living Dead to get a good taste of brains, er, treatments of zombies in literature.

But I have to think that even though we can point to a few environmentally-related collapse stories, we aren’t very serious about it, and it doesn’t gain much ground in literature precisely because it’s a little too real.  To the extent that environmental stories become absurd action stories (what was that global warming movie a few years ago? I’ve already forgotten, and the ebola-like outbreak movie? bleh.) you see environmental topics showing up as a factor, but mostly it’s to provide an action set-piece (Water World. ugh.)

The extent to which the environmental aspects of a story are relevant and uniquely connected to the plot makes for a much smaller subset of books. Mostly, it comes across as the old science fiction cliche where a the trusty six-shooter becomes a ray gun and the white horse becomes a star fighter. If you could do the story with the environmental components flipped to something else, then it’s not really an environment story. It’s just another action thriller.

And really, I doubt that more genuine stories of environmental collapse will gain much ground. The more relevant they are to our present, the more disturbing they are, which destroys their function as escapist literature. I’m sure we’ll be telling stories about zombies around our campfires while we ride camels through the desert of whatever real apocalypse we actually encounter, but we won’t tell stories about how our daughter got H1N1 and died miserably.

So books that I’d recommend? They’re all non-fiction. Read something like David Quammen’s astonishingly good exploration of speciation and extinction in Song of the Dodo. Read Jared Diamond’s fascinating Collapse.  James Howard Kuntzler’s worst case scenario meditations on peak oil.  Read Alan Weisman’s end of the world examination in The World Without Us.  Those books do what good science fiction does.  They will change the way you look at the world.

And as horror goes, they aren’t bad, either.

Three trendy cataclysms in current speculative fiction disaster stories are zombie invasion, the 2012 “Mayan Prophecy” and the singularity (when artificial intelligence surpasses human intelligence, which theoretically translates into Terminator-style Doomsday).

Each has been turned into some very cool books.  Max Brooks’ World War Z, Brian D’Amato’s In the Courts of the Sun and Charles Stross’ Accelerando, to name a few.

Zombie infestation feels more metaphorical.  2012 is more mystical, sort of like a prophecy in a fantasy novel.  The singularity is the only one that has a hardcore Science Fiction feel to it.  It feels like there’s some plausibility there.

Do you see the trends changing?  Are environmental disaster and resource limitations going to be bigger and bigger pieces of  Science Fiction in the years ahead?

On the other hand, maybe the environmental piece has been there for a long time, from Waterworld to Stephen Baxter’s Flood.  Paolo, do you have any favorites or recommendations, other than your own, for fans wanting to explore these issues in SF?

So, as I wrote previously, it doesn’t seem impossible to write a positive future, where society is actively sorting out its problems instead of creating new ones.  So… Why don’t we?  I’ve been mulling this, as I’ve gotten a certain amount criticism over the years about the kinds of futures that I create.  Generally this criticism runs along the lines of “Bacigalupi writes well, but after you’ve finished one of his stories you just want to go slit your wrists.”

Which actually makes me laugh, because a lot of times, that’s how I feel after I’ve finished writing the story, too.

So what’s wrong with writing a Utopia?  Or at least creating a positive version of a future society? And why don’t more SF authors do it?

My theory is that the real problem with writing Utopias is that it puts a writer’s values front and center. It’s the artistic equivalent of tearing open our shirts and baring our chests while bleating about the need for true love in the universe.   It’s a vulnerable position because in a society that values the the ironic eye over the naive one, you’re basically setting yourself up as the artistic equivalent of Dennis Kucinich.

He’s just so painfully sincere, y’know?

Writing a Utopic vision of the future means you really are going to talk about people working out their differences (yawn), show them living as is if they valued the earth (gag), and worst of all, you’re not even going to make fun of them.  The future awaits, and it’s made of granola.  Nearly everything that you propose (reducing consumption? controlling corporations? making people aware of waste streams?) has that reek of do-gooderism and social engineering that even if you do it well, it still has the whiff of singing The Internationale. It’s not so much that it’s impossible to write a positive future, it’s more the fear of someone making fun of your vision that really sends a writer running in the other direction.

That’s my theory, at least.  Artists want to look smart, and smart and painfully sincere go so badly together.

I watched the new film “9″ tonight.  It’s a fun movie, imaginative and tightly constructed, and I enjoyed the characters and story.  The clever construction of mechanical beasts was a highlight for me, and the animation is top notch.  I highly recommend this one.

Its apocalyptic wasteland setting is particularly interesting given our current topic.  This is no spoiler, since it is clear in the trailer and within the first few moments of the movie, that technology is mankind’s doom.

Scarcity is a looming problem.  Could we be equally vulnerable to overabundance?  In the case of “9,” you could argue it is overabundance of technology.  As science fiction addresses the dangers of “too little,” it would also be compelling to see writers continue to address threats of “too much.”  Are they really that different or just the same scarcity issue from different points of view?

Hi Morgan,

You say:

“At the heart of storytelling is drama, tension and struggle.  In a world lacking scarcity issues, much of the tension is removed, and it becomes more difficult to tell a traditional story.  Unless the Utopia is an illusion or secretly corrupt, and that makes for good stories, too.  Assuming that the Utopia is real, is it still possible to infuse that story with danger and suspense without creating an outside source to threaten it?”

I think you’re conflating two very different types of story. One is Utopian storytelling.  The other is telling a story set in a society that functions sustainably.  These are two very different beasts.

While I agree that storytelling requires drama, tension and struggle, I’m not certain that I can think of all that many “traditional” plots which actually depend on questions of scarcity to function.  Most conflict plotlines I can think of actually tend to revolve around human struggles–politics, relationships, power, obsessions etc.–I’m thinking Shakespeare here–none of which are precluded by a society which handles its day-to-day affairs in a sustainable way. A Romeo and Juliet story isn’t off the table just because both families recycle.  A society that burns very little carbon, reuses its waste efficiently, and recognizes its interdependence with its resources isn’t necessarily Utopian in the perfected sense, it’s just a less stupid society.

Being a smarter society doesn’t preclude power struggles, feuds, and though you take it off the table– outside threats.  In many ways, 21st-century America is Utopian. Compared to earlier points in history (and to many countries around the world today) we live in an astonishingly luxurious society. We live longer, are better educated, eat better, have more toys, have more leisure options than at any point in human history.  But that doesn’t mean there aren’t intensely human stories going on within it. Wealth does not end conflict and human drama, nor do I think does sustainability equal the death of story.

The question of writing a genuine Utopian story is a different thing.  Utopian world-building not only assumes that you’ve solved resource problems, you’ve also solved human conflict problems, social and health problems, education problems….  This sort of world is more an exercise in political theory, an exploration of how societies might organize themselves in more rational or positive ways than we do spontaneously, and often based on the assumption that people at root could also be radically different in behavior and outlook than they are in reality. They’re deliberately stories of perfected worlds, where all children are above average.

To the extent that a Utopian story has conflict, I think that it’s contained in the tension between how *readers* react to this very differently ordered world, and how they then consider their own world with the new lens that a Utopian theory provides.  My sense is that Utopian novels tend to focus on ideas rather than plot, and that’s okay because they’re a conceptual exercise rather than a story per se. They’re just a different beast and provide different satisfactions.

But even then, I suspect a clever writer could find a thread of conflict if they were motivated. Certainly looking at past Utopian novels, I can see ways of rewriting everything from Bellamy’s Looking Backward to Callenbach’s Ecotopia that might provide a better thread of story than the one that was chosen by the authors.

Paolo, we’d all like to predict a better future.  The Grand Society or New Golden Age.  Environmental problems are fixed.  Diseases are cured.  Wars have ended.  I’m not sure if it is a realistic vision for some far future day or not.  My question is how does a predictive Science Fiction genre tackle an idealized future, even if that idealized future is logical or reasonable?

At the heart of storytelling is drama, tension and struggle.  In a world lacking scarcity issues, much of the tension is removed, and it becomes more difficult to tell a traditional story.  Unless the Utopia is an illusion or secretly corrupt, and that makes for good stories, too.  Assuming that the Utopia is real, is it still possible to infuse that story with danger and suspense without creating an outside source to threaten it?

Any comments from the Rogue’s Gallery of Babel Clash readers?  Can you recall any great Utopian Science Fiction visions where we see both a grand future and drama and suspense?

One of the interesting things that came up at the symposium I attended in Japan, was about the way we in SF treat scarcity concepts–mostly with rioting, looting, banditry, complete societal breakdown, and Australian desert–and how that may work to embed certain images and perceptions in people’s minds about what scarcity might mean in the future.

SF isn’t predictive very often, or, at least, not successfully predictive, but it does have an interesting function in illustrating mythologies about our future.  SF written during the aerospace expansion of the cold war was not only inspired by the changes that were happening in technology, it also provided in some ways a dream for people to live into.  By the time something like 2001 was in theaters, you could see a version of the future that was inspired by and also inspiring, and you could almost unconsciously lean into that shuttle flight to the moon.  To the extent that we’re all still wondering why our 2001 was so lame in comparison to Clark and Kubrick’s, it’s an indication of how powerful the myth was.

And so with scarcity and apocalypse. If the visions of scarcity that SF provides are all visions of horror, it means that in some ways we (as sf writers) are providing powerful reasons for our society to not look scarcity questions squarely in the face, and also not challenging society to come up with positive versions of societies handling scarcity well, as opposed to poorly.  If you don’t have a model or archetypal pattern of a highly functional society that deals with drought or peak oil or global warming it makes it difficult for a rational dialogue to commence about how to create an adaptable society.  Instead, we all bury our heads in the sand and hope the apocalypse will never come, because a Mad Max world can only be met with denial.