“ Hello ? Is this the complaints department ? I want to register a complaint about last twelvemonth ’s future ; it ’s all broken ! ”
Quite a few of us have probably snarked like that about the anno horribilis 2016 ( leave government aside entirely rent me just say : David Bowie , Prince , Carrie Fisher * ) but there ’s a germ of Sojourner Truth in the assertion that world political science on December 31st , 2016 was entirely unpredictable from January 1st , 2016 . Just contemplate the U.S. presidential election for a moment : while Hilary Clinton ’s electioneering was almost locked in by January 1st , the Republican candidate ( and his electoral college majority ) were not on even on the radio detection and ranging of his own party . likewise , very few informed pundits anticipated that the commonly - compliant voters of the U.K. would bite the patrician hand and by a narrow majority reject continuing membership of the European Union .
2016 was the twelvemonth in which global political science went nonlinear . On which line , I ’d like to stop babble politics and excuse what this means for scientific discipline fiction .
Over - generalizing wildly , science fabrication falls into two category : scifi with a far future scene , and scifi about the present or the good future . Far succeeding background are fun to pen , and they also isolate you from the slings and arrows of contemporaneous chronicle in the making . If you ’re playing in a Star Trek setting circa 2400 , the events of 2016 are as remote as the events of 1916 , or even 1816 . And by “ remote control ” I do n’t mean that the denizens of 2400 might not have try of Donald Trump ; I mean they might not have hear of the United States of America—2400 is as far aside from us in time as 1632 .
Near future setting , however , are another topic only .
I ’m writing here because my publisher is keen to get the countersign out about my latest novel , Empire Games , which is set in the alternate - history version of 2020 that evolved from my earlier Merchant Princes books — a series that pulled a lure - and - switch by set itself up to attend like a portal fantasy , then took the premise gravely ( and terminate up in technothriller territory , with the President assassinate in 2003 by a steal US backpack nuke , an India / Pakistan nuclear state of war , and at long last B-52s carpet - bombing the easterly seaside of another time - railway line ’s North America with H - bomb ) . I finished the last novel in the old serial in 2009 , and began work on Empire Games in 2013 , to a background of WikiLeaks , Edward Snowden ’s bona fide bombardment of news leak from the NSA , and my editor program recount me to downplay all the material about spies and Russia in my book because “ spy are moth-eaten and sometime - fashioned . ”
So here ’s the affair : by extrapolating from a minimally - diverging parallel world that was almost indistinguishable from our own until 2003 , I ended up writing my way into a bizarrely relevant scifi setting . Back in 2014 , my principal focus was on how an tyrannous surveillance state might emerge in the United States in the era of smartphones , permeative internet , and a government activity waging interminable war on the multiverse ( in the name of trace down extradimensional narcoterrorists ) . I was writing with Snowden ’s leaks in head , and using the cold , old - fashioned relics of the Cold War that terminate in 1991 for wry satiric result ( Rita , the chief protagonist of Empire Games , has been raised by a ferine X - Stasi spy ; she ’s a born for a mysterious U.S. government agency ) .
Only then 2016 fare along and sandbag me . In the same calendar month my book launches , the newsworthiness cycle is dominated by headline about warm - over ex - insensate War Russian spooks compiling kompromat fabric and allegedly pressure the raw President ! Indeed , Vladimir Putin helpfully resurrected the old - time KGB — there ’s nothing like a small of that good onetime name recognition ! The Americans is snowball on cablegram television set , sabre are being rattle over territorial claims in the South China Sea , everyone knows their email waiter are tap , and ( another plot fibril in my book ) unapologetic racialist and homophobes are hear to push back the political docket .
Some aspects of Empire Games stay unapologetic escapist skill fiction . We do n’t , as far as I am aware , know in a multiverse where the US regime has access to technology that can post drones to represent uninhabited parallel sentence logical argument for oil . The Department of Homeland Security has not been written a blank check to protect the country of origin from all possible threats from parallel macrocosm . We do n’t even have a female Democrat President ( although the one in Empire Games is not Hilary Clinton ) .
dear - hereafter scifi is not a prognostic medium : it does n’t directly excogitate reality so much as it present us with a funhouse mirror view of the world around us . But in a post - truth world , it may be that only by contemplate deliberate un - truths can we retain our signified of what it is plausible to believe in the collage the sensitive surround us with .
State surveillance with overt goal that differ from actual , unadmitted motivations ? control . Intelligence bureaucracies that have their own order of business , focussed on institutional stability rather than carrying out their official deputation ? stop . Other groups infiltrate government agency and using them for their own purposes , like bloodsucking wasp laying their testis inside a paralyzed caterpillar ? Check . This is what near - future tense science fiction can do for us : it glues commodious grip — explanations we can grasp — on models of phenomenon that mimic the patterns of the actual world , and gives us the chance to generalize the intentions of the obscure manipulators .
And that ’s why near - future SF stay relevant — and dangerous — in the “ post - truth ” era .
- I ’ll give 2016 a conditional pass for lay claim Leonard Cohen ; he was 82 .
Charles Stross is the well - selling author behind The Laundry Files and the Merchant Princes series , among many others . His new book , Empire Games , is available now .
Art by Jim Cooke .
Charles Stross
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