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I have a column up in today's @Slate's @FutureTenseNow: "The Dangers of Cynical Sci-Fi Disaster Stories."
https://slate.com/technology/2020/10/cory-docotorow-sci-fi-intuition-pumps.html
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https://slate.com/technology/2020/10/cory-docotorow-sci-fi-intuition-pumps.html
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It's an exploration of fiction as an "intuition pump": Daniel Denning's "thought experiment structured to allow the thinker to use their intuition to develop an answer to a problem."
That is, we use fiction to mentally rehearse potential scenarios.
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That is, we use fiction to mentally rehearse potential scenarios.
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I'm a fiction writer. More specifically, I'm a science fiction writer, which means I'm a pulp fiction writer, so plot is always front and center when I work ("I can do fucking plot. I can feel my links to Dashiell Hammett… I’ve still got wheels on my tractor"- @GreatDismal)
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And unfortunately, there's easy plot wins to be had through cynicism: rather than choosing between man-vs-man and man-vs-nature stories, we get a twofer by combining them into man-vs-nature-vs-man (the tsunami knocks your house down and your neighbors come over to eat you).
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I have both enjoyed and written these kinds of stories, even though I knew they were lies. Disasters, history tells us, are when people rise to the occasion, not when they sink into barbarism.
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Sure, plutes are always worried that crises will precipitate a comeuppance, but let's not let elite panic override our own experience: if your neighbor's house fell down, you'd race to dig through the rubble, right? Not steal their Amazon packages while they were distracted.
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The more I think about this kind of plotting, the more I worry that it is priming our intuition pumps with the wrong stuff, with the precursors for barbarism, the fiction-driven conviction that disasters precipitate a war of all against all.
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What's more, there are even better plots - chewier, gnarlier ones - to be had in telling stories of crisis in which people DO rise to the occasion, but can't agree on what to do about it - where crisis becomes disaster because of good faith, not bad.
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Today, @TorBooks published Attack Surface, the third Little Brother book, in which I really lean into this idea, finding my plot points primarily in irreconcilable and even vicious differences among people trying to do good.
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I'm not just trying to tell better stories - I'm also trying to create better intuitions. So many of the techies who were inspired by Little Brother still manage to rationalize their way into perverting technology into something that oppresses rather than liberating.
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The stories they tell themselves are often about the bestial nature of humanity and the justifiability of putting those beasts in high-tech cages.
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"New stories will help us understand the importance of seizing the means of computation and using it to build movements that break up monopolies, fight oligarchy, and demand pluralistic, shared power for a pluralistic, shared world."
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