A book of wisdom: The Dispossessed...

Some books are beautiful.

Some novels are exciting, and thrilling, and full of adventure.

Some stories are full of the wisdom of their authors.

Ursula K. Le Guin's The Dispossessed is so beautiful it brings tears to the eyes—you don't read it, it sings to you; it is so full of adventure and excitement that you run alongside the characters, feel their pain and their joy and their desperation and their hope; it is so full of the writer's wisdom that three times during the reading of it I had to dig out a pencil and scrawl a copy of a particularly amazing passage on the scrap of paper I was using as a bookmark.

From page 113  (Panther 1975 edition):

He tried to read an elementary economics text; it bored him past endurance, it was like listening to somebody interminably recounting a long and stupid dream. He could not force himself to understand how banks functioned and so forth, because all the operations of capitalism were as meaningless to him as the rites of a primitive religion, as barbaric, as elaborate, and as unnecessary. In a human sacrifice to deity there might be at least a mistaken and terrible beauty; in the rites of the moneychangers, where greed, laziness, and envy were assumed to move all men's acts, even the terrible became banal.

From page 158:

There are souls ... whose umbilicus has never been cut. They never got weaned from the universe. They do not understand death as an enemy; they look forward to rotting and turning into humus.

From page 205:

An Odonian undertook monogamy just as he might undertake a joint enterprise in production, a ballet or  soap-works. Partnership was a voluntarily constituted federation like any other. So long as it worked, it worked, and if it didn't work it stopped being. It was not an institution but a function. It had no sanction but that of private conscience. [...] Though it might seem that [the] insistence on freedom to change would invalidate the idea of a promise or a vow, in fact the freedom made the promise meaningful.

Call for Submissions: Guest Editors

The Future Fire, an online magazine of social-political speculative fiction with an emphasis on the progressive (feminist sf, queer sf, eco sf, multiculturalism/race) is looking for guest editors to collaborate on one or two themed issues/anthologies in the coming year. We would like suggestions for the theme and applications from prospective editors. If you would like to take part in selecting, editing and producing an issue of this magazine, please write to the fiction editor (fiction [at] futurefire [dot] net), using the subject line “TFF Guest Editor application”, by October 31, 2011.

In your application (maximum one page or c. 500 words), please include:

1. Your suggested theme. Please explain the theme you suggest and why you think it is interesting. Include how such stories fit the social-political speculative slant of TFF and any writers or groups you would target in a call for submissions.
2. Any credentials and/or experience you may have. You don’t have to have edited a speculative fiction magazine or anthology before, but it may help to know, for example, whether you’re a writer yourself, how much you’ve read in the area, whether you have any background in literature or any other relevant experience.
3. How much work you're willing to put into editing. We do not expect you to perform an unreasonable amount (we all have day-jobs), but it’s good to have realistic expectations. A call for submissions will need to be both disseminated widely and targeted to potential contributors and groups; stories need to be read, selected and copy-edited; the published issue then has to be widely publicized. It would therefore be useful to know how much you would be willing to help.
4. Do you have any ideas for fundraising for this issue? TFF is a non-profit publication; the only income is from donations and all shortfall comes from the editors’ pockets. Any ideas you might have for alternative finance models (e.g. print-on-demand version for sale; funding drive; special editions, subscriptions) would be very welcome.

This doesn't need to be terribly formal, but these are ideas we'd like to start brainstorming with you. We will of course discuss all of these issues in more detail later in the process, but as much background as you can give now will be valuable.

The Future Fire is open to fiction

The Future Fire, a magazine of social-political speculative fiction with an emphasis on the progressive and inclusive, is open to fiction submissions as of today. Please see our Submission Guidelines for information on how to submit. Please report our response times and outcomes to Duotrope's Digest; this will help keep us honest, and be useful for other authors to know what to expect.

For more on what sort of fiction we're looking for, have a look at some of the guest posts on various subgenres, topics and themes that we've been posting here every day this month (see below for the full alphabetical list).

A is for Alternate History
B is for Borgesian
C is for Cyberpunk
D is for Dystopian
E is for Eco-SF
F is for Feminist SF
G is for Gestalt
H is for Hardcore Horror
I is for Identity Crisis
J is for Juvenile
K is for Kafkaesque
L is for Low Fantasy
M is for Magical Realism
N is for Noir
O is for Occultists
P is for Postapocalypse
Q is for Queer SF
R is for Race in SF
S is for Surrealism
T is for Transhumanism
U is for Uploaded Minds
V is for Vampires
W is for World SF
X is for X-Rated SF
Y is for Young Adult
Z is for Zombie

Z is for Zombie

Zombies may be the most clichéd and least sexy of all tropes of horror fiction—even if vampires and werewolves are the paranormal romance-cliché of the year, shambling mindless zombies are surely among the most pointless monsters in the canon. Add to that their problematic status in terms of racial sensitivity, since the Hollywood zombie is an appropriation and perversion of an element of Afro-diasporic culture (Vodoun practitioners do not turn people into zombies, any more than they stick pins into dolls representing their enemies), and you might well imagine that zombie fiction has no place in TFF.

Then again, the world after a zombie outbreak is usually represented as a postapocalyptic landscape (or maybe a paranoid dystopia), both of which are great themes for socio-political scifi. In addition we’ve recently seen the ability of zombies to represent sexuality and sexual conflict; human rights and alienation; terrorism and the politics of fear. In other words zombies are very political.

As with every genre or theme we’ve discussed this month, the important point is that a story is not social and political because it’s overtly about societal roles or political activism. Whatever the surface subject matter of a speculative fiction story, a good writer who is willing to speculate and extrapolate changes to our world in a way that matters, cannot help but write socio-political fiction.

Y is for Young Adult

The Young Adult (YA) genre has come a long way since I was a teenager. Back in my day (!) we had to supplement books by the likes of S.E. Hinton with novels for adults. That wasn’t necessarily a bad thing; it meant that I was introduced to fully-realised feminist role models such as Dr Susan Calvin in Asimov’s "Robot" series and Patricia Luisa Vasquez in Greg Bear’s "Eon". But even though these strong female role models were a vital part of my formative years, I would have loved to have read about characters I could have identified with more.

The emergence in recent times of a wider YA body of fiction is both reassuring and welcome. Being a young adult can be so challenging that it is important that these readers have plenty of material to see them through their often difficult adolescent and teenage years.

But how much of present-day YA fiction is speculative?

Contemporary YA showcases recognizable science fiction tropes, such as time-travel in Rebecca Stead’s "When you Reach Me". But it is in the dystopian themes that socio-political elements are more prominent, for example in YA books such as Scott Westerfield’s "Uglies" series, where the pursuit of the body beautiful is taking to devastating degrees or the setting of "The Chaos Walking" trilogy by Patrick Ness, where not even an individual’s thoughts are private.

By contrast, another sub-genre in YA fiction — paranormal romance — could not be deemed speculative. The most famous female character in this genre, Bella in Stephanie Meyer’s "Twilight" novels, is neither empowered nor independent; she doesn’t care about her schooling or future career, and neglects her friends in favour of spending time with her boyfriend. This submissive streak can also be seen in the mortal female counterparts to the male fallen angels in Lauren Kate’s books and again with those of the sexy fairy kings in Melissa Marr’s "Wicked Lovely" series.

Luckily there are plenty of alternatives to this paranormal romance category. The most influential book I read as a young adult was Isabel Allende’s "The House of the Spirits", so it made me very happy to see such an accomplished speculative fiction author writing for young adults. In her YA books "The City of the Beasts", "The Kingdom of the Golden Dragon" and "The Forest of the Pygmies", Allende touches on humanitarian issues such as child slavery and inequalities between the developed and developing world. She also sets out to challenge perceptions about what makes a culture “civilised”.

No article on YA speculative fiction can fail to mention the legacy of the masterful storyteller Ursula le Guin. "The Wizard of Earthsea" spawned a legion of young adult novels that followed the pattern of its story: a setting in a walled city where a young person of humble origins becomes an apprentice to a sorcerer. Books such as Joseph Delaney’s "Wardstone Chronicles", Trudy Canavan’s "The Black Magician" trilogy, Garth Nix’ "Old Kingdom Series" and William Nicholson’s "Wind on Fire" trilogy all pay homage to this original idea. Ursula le Guin’s contribution to speculative fiction has been phenomenal - for example with her exploration of gender in "The Left Hand of Darkness" or her strong female characters in her YA novel "Tehanu".

Speculative fiction for young adults offers an exciting opportunity to forge a storyworld where limits can be pushed to the extreme to shed light on the problems facing our society. An author has the power to make her readers think differently, and this is especially true for YA authors whose audience is in the process of learning about themselves and the world around them. So if you’d like to submit a YA speculative fiction story to "The Future Fire", push boundaries as far as you can. Your readers will love you for it.

X is for X-Rated SF

There can be little that is more intrinsic to the human condition than our obsession with the erotic. If we’re ravenously hungry the need to eat becomes overwhelming; when threatened, fear and survival instinct take over; having our physical freedom restricted is intolerable. And at a visceral level that sometimes competes even with these, we want to love. We want to fuck. We want the release that comes with raw orgasm. We want to human connection that comes from sharing that orgasm. It gives us the illusion for a little while that we are not alone.

These obsessions are reflected in the huge popularity of pornography and erotica, in the success of  the genre of romance (mainstream, pulp, paranormal, historical, kinky, etc.), and in the inclusion of explicit sex and/or central romantic interest in the most racy of “action” genres in book, film, and computer game. I suspect it is a combination of this popularity and a puritanism that leads most “serious” readers and critics to consider episodes of explicit sex, whether in speculative or “literary” fiction as, like violence, a low brow, crowd-pleasing, gratuitous element of a story whose real focus is elsewhere. (And I suppose there’s the fact that a lot of the time this is precisely what it is.)

As I observed a while ago in a review of M. Christian’s Bachelor Machine, however, in the hands of a good writer, the crucial role of sex and love in our lives can make the explicit use of erotic material a very powerful vehicle for all kinds of messages, including the social-political and progressive speculative fiction that The Future Fire publishes. As I wrote at the time:

The sexual content in stories such as these serve rather to remind us that we’re human, that our concerns such as love, lust, companionship, rejection, nostalgia, however fleshy or base, are universals. The sex in these stories serves as a microcosm for all of life, for social observation, for political satire, for the promotion of tolerance. In other words, the role of sex in well-written erotica is analogous to the role of technology in science fiction, or magic and beasts in fantasy: yes it’s exciting, yes we take a geeky or prurient interest in them, yes we enjoy them for what they are, but ultimately they’re the tools that tell a bigger story, that paint a more important picture.

I might disagree with myself here a little on the last point: erotica should perhaps not be merely a tool that helps to tell a bigger story, a plot device to get things moving; sometimes it can be the story. The medium is the message. The story should be as much about sex (love, lust, carnal pleasure, self-gratification) as it is about whatever comes before and after it. Sex tells you a lot about a person, about their treatment of and attitudes to others, their self-esteem and confidence; a society’s sexual mores and allowances tells you a lot about the political climate in which a story is set. The history of sex, whom one is allowed to love, access to birth control and reproductive healthcare, and freedom to protect one’s own body, are all key factors in the political and social questions of our own day, questions on which we can’t afford to be without opinion.

A further point: science fiction that contains explicit sex should also colour the sex with social or technological science-fictional content.. That is to say: if you’re writing about a future world, or an alien setting, or a world in some other crucial way different from our own, then you should think carefully how the technology and/or politics of this time will affect people’s attitudes to, and for that matter practice of sex. An explicit erotic scene set 200 years in the past would be significantly different from one set today: social disapproval of casual sex would change the attitude of the participants, perhaps depending on their class, culture and gender (and relationship): there might be less concern for and understanding of disease, but conversely there would be little or no effective birth control for most; the very acts and paraphernalia of sex might be completely different. Why should the future not be at least as different from today as that?

If your speculative fiction is social-political and progressive and the sort of thing TFF is likely to be interested in, and you include explicit sexual material in your writing, then make sure the smut is as carefully crafted to bear witness to social-political implications as all the other speculative elements. Erotica is powerful stuff; use it with care and a sure aim.

And don’t be shy.

W is for World SF

Voice of a Hybrid, by Joyce Chng

I wrote my first novella (fan fiction, by the way—Pern, if you want to know) when I was just eighteen. I just wrote and mind you, I didn’t know what fan fiction was, until the advent of the Internet. My audience/reader was my best friend. It was a fun experience as feedback fed my creativity and vice versa.

Fast forward a few years later.

I found myself submitting a short story about female werewolves to a now defunct anthropomorphic ‘zine. It was accepted and I was published.

Fast forward a few more years later.

I got married, had my first daughter and wondered about my writing life (which, by then, had languished). I resigned from teaching and self-published my first anthology of speculative fiction. I dabbled in Pagan non-fiction, but found that it didn’t work for me. Despairing, I almost gave up. 2009 was my breakthrough—I started writing for real (partly because of my second pregnancy—I was flooded with creativity).

Then when it came to publishing, I hit a wall. Publishing in Singapore is almost impossible. I had more luck publishing in overseas publications. Crossed Genres, a fantastic online magazine, offered my first real break, followed by Bards and Sages Quarterly. Writing didn’t stop after I gave birth to my second daughter: I embarked on Nanowrimo and came up with Wolf At The Door, an urban fantasy novel set in Singapore.

Along the way, I learnt a few hard truths. Publishing is difficult. Publishing with a surname/last name like “Chng” pigeonholes me into nice categories. Publishing is mostly US or UK centric. You are lucky if you find an agent. Traditional published authors have more clout. Print is better than electronic.

Let’s start with my last name. It immediately signifies that I am not white. I am ethnic Chinese, my forebears immigrants from China. So, am I supposed to write literary fiction about tumultuous struggles out of Communist China or craft a tale about mother-daughter relationships ala Joy Luck Club? I write speculative fiction—genre fiction isn’t well received by local publishers. I can’t force myself to write literary fiction. It isn’t me. Don’t get me started about postcolonial fiction. Am I supposed to be a postcolonial writer? I think and speak in English. Yet my skin color already differentiates me from the predominantly white publishing world. My educational background has a foundation in the Anglo Saxon educational system (thanks to British colonial rule). Yet people still persist in thinking that Singapore is in China. Southeast Asia is a living and breathing landscape, not some exotic region with exotic people and creatures, best savored via travel documentaries or enjoyed in small touristy bits. Southeast Asia is a real place for me. Its monsoons, its food and its languages—not some section in a geography textbook. So what am I? I am a hybridized being. Where do hybrids go?

I want to give a voice to my experiences. I want to write something I resonate with. Many stories I write now talk about the Chinese diaspora in the future. At the same time, I want to bring to people the joy of reading, the joy of finding a new world. I want to re-discover that hunger driving the reader. My best friend who read my novella wanted more. I want to find readers like that. How am I going to find readers like that? Being in Southeast Asia has again pigeonholed me in categories, fenced me up and bound me to restrictions. E-publishing helps transcend that. But even then, promotion is a slippery fish and I never know who is reading what, because my readers—if I have them in the first place—are silent. Silence compounds silence. It sometimes worries me. Is my voice going into a vacuum?

Of course, my wish is to have readers (and publishers) who forgo the ramifications of last names and ethnicities. That is an ideal. This world, unfortunately, is still stuck in a rut.

I am honored to blog at The Future Fire. It is a great magazine that welcomes non-white/non-Western writers like me. So, what’s in the store for the future (pun not intended!)? I'd like to see more speculative fiction from international authors in a magazine like The Future Fire and to have our voices heard.

Joyce Chng hails from Singapore, an island state in Southeast Asia. She writes YA SFF fiction and urban fantasy. She can be found wrangling blog posts at A Wolf’s Tale: http://awolfstale.wordpress.com/.

V is for Vampires

Vampires: possibly one of the most well-known and well-rehearsed narrative metaphors. Constantly reboot-able, vampires are high-profile candidates as tools of speculative fiction. Speculative writing, as the creator of this alphabetical series tells us, “can cast light on our own world […] it should show us how we need to improve [it].” Originally vampires were the monster in the dark; ‘Them’. They stood for everything nasty and undesirable, infectious and unspeakable and not ‘Us.’ Modern re-readings of older narratives have attributed this more specifically to colonialism, fear of the exotic, bigotry and sexism. As a palliative to the monster, there would be a thread of obvious or implied morality: the pure and sinless characters or repudiation of temptation.

Modern vampires are concerned with modern preoccupations of deviancy. Having been allowed right into the human circle, forming relationships with the human world, they stand for the ‘monster within.’ The part of human psyche most especially represented has been the ‘monster’ of fleshy delights and darkness, proving that they remain a figure for moral diatribes. But now the message is that we cannot blame an external, demonic force for evil, but must look to ourselves and what we are capable of.

The mainstreaming of vampires into romances and adventures has seen them become somewhat domesticated into objects of human sexuality; symbolic of desirability precisely because they are not ‘Us’. Instead of being abhorred, we are invited to identify and desire these creatures, to be titillated by their ‘wickedness’. Modern ‘dark romances,’ repeating the same formula over and over are effectively whoring out that ‘allowed’ naughtiness; stretching the Mr Rochester I shouldn’t-but-he’s-gorgeous myth to breaking point. At the same time, though, this rubbishes the isolating power of the Other the vampire once had. This being the one motivating power for the vampire metaphor, enabling discussion through the presentation of the vampire’s among us/ not us figure.

Are vampires still ‘speculative’? Perhaps it is worth asking, were they ever speculative? If truly speculative writing is all about holding a slightly differential mirror up to the now, to facilitate discussion of current social issues, then can vampires fulfil this function?

Vampires are an interesting sideline. They are a part of the wider monstrous genre, becoming extremely popular in their own right to the point of becoming a high-profile genre of their own. The monster stands for whatever we want it to against whom heroes rise and fight. Speculatively, this is not so much a debate or dialectic on what the monster may stand for but it is a dramatically presented purgative action where evil can be ritually expunged.

For example, the fleshier, nastier bodily horror of zombies and werewolves are seeing a new rise in popularity. Social theorists could attribute this to the current political gestalt being one based on bodily horror: the horror of perceived threat against the body politic and the body public by explosive, poisonous, it-is-among-us terrorism.

The suavity and humanity of the vampire’s presentation means he has become a monster very much of ‘Us’, rather than the repugnance of ‘Them’. This is where the vampire could become more powerfully speculative. Modern society has turned inward, seeking answers for horrific actions from the ‘monster within;’ precisely where the vampire metaphor now resides. The desire to rationalise means that the vampire is now in a position to be wide open to use as discursive tool: a seeming-human monster upon whom such narratives could be layered. There are some vampire stories out there that achieve this, keeping the validity of narrative vampirism alive. It will struggle, however, as these are a relatively few narratives fighting against the disproportionately oversized stream of current fashion in vampirism. This is the mainstream and the mass expropriation of vampire figures as objects of spectacle, comprising shows of sexuality and wham-bam-thank-you-ma’am action. This is the vampire as its own genre; no longer open to standing back and commenting on the action, the vampire, in becoming the action, has had their rhetorical fangs drawn.

Vampires stand on a balance of the intellectual and the fleshy; the innovative and the hormonal. Both have their merits for entertainment and enlightenment, and between them the vampire metaphor still just about dances the metaphorical jig that shakes off a definitive description. He remains something of a speculative free-lancer, available for consultation but not restricted to one employ.

U is for Uploaded Minds

What this blog post is, and what it is not
The sub-genre of speculative fiction which we have called Uploaded Minds™ includes any milieu in which characters live out their lives within the confines of one or more computer-generated world. That we will one day achieve this is a conjecture is loaded with philosophical implications. Covering them all in detail would require a book, as well as a savviness in philosophy which I do not possess. Simply listing them would be little more useful than a grocery list, a handful of suggestions fit for a google search.

This blog, then, is not a philosophy lecture.

What it is, is a question of whether the sub-genre of Uploaded Minds may be of any interest to a magazine like The Future Fire.

The Relevance of Speculative Fiction
The Future Fire craves a socio-political angle. At first glance, that is a rather lenient requirement: most sub-genres of sf contain fiction that claims to qualify. Speculative fiction revolves around change, after all, and change affects society, or individual, and usually both. Just as mythology and the classic parables imply that history is cyclic and that we should learn from the tragic choices of its protagonists, so speculative fiction shines its fog-lights on the road ahead, revealing the silhouettes of obstacles before we drive over them, or worse, into them.

But a magazine that accepts everything is a magazine that says nothing. A line must be drawn to create an opinion. Socio-political fiction, then, must be relevant fiction.

By relevant we mean those stories that comment on our society’s current state of affairs or on the human condition (and impact of political positions on) in a universal sense, not necessarily today’s news headlines. The film GATTACA, for example, is a far-future science fiction, but it remains relevant because it questions an issue which remains alive with debate to this day, namely the tinkering of human genetics, the commercialization of such tinkering and the class discrimination that might result from it. For another example, look no further than global warming: ever since its threat was publicized by the media, all manner of doomsday movies have cropped up in cinemas.

But Uploaded Minds Is Hardly Relevant, Is It?

The above definition of relevance is at risk of being misinterpreted. One might be inclined to think that the scenario posited by a science fiction story must be plausible, at least in part, in order for it to be relevant. But if that were so, then fantasy, which is often labeled the literature of ‘that which could never be’, could never be relevant! And yet we know that in many cases it is. Why is that?

When people think uploaded minds, the first thing that springs to mind is usually the movie Matrix. Matrix sits somewhere in the middle of the spectrum. Let us examine the extreme end first: true uploaded minds, more aptly namely simulated reality.

Simulated reality is different than its cousin virtual reality (a common catch-all phrase). Virtual reality can be detected—think video games—whereas simulated reality is no different than a lucid dream, albeit moderated by external rules. The ultimate goal of the “uploaded-mind paradigm” is to shed away not just our senses and our input, but also our physical bodies, and beyond that, our brains. It is to become pure software, an infomorph.

Once we become beings of pure data, we are no longer anchored to our physical bodies for identity. The ramifications of such an existence are endless. We could back ourselves up, leading to indestructibility. We could upgrade to better versions, but then would these multiple versions function as separate, distinct individuals? Which version owns the property? Are they are legally regarded as one? And if so, which version get to take the important decisions? What of the world in which we live? Or worlds, rather, for what is to stop each of us from living in the world we prefer? Who governs and polices this world? How can anyone ever feel safe knowing that the entire universe is hanging from a plug? These are among a host of fascinating issues associated with infomorphia, and it is beyond the scope of this blog to explore them all.

The question we are trying to answer is how relevant these issue are, and can they help us gain insight on our current state of living, our civilization and where it is headed? How likely is that we will become pure software? Not likely, considering we cannot even explain consciousness let alone recreate it. (See ‘The Hard Problem of Consciousness’, a term in philosophy of mind that describes the difficulty in explaining how physical phenomena can lead to the rise of inner life).

Let us take one step back, and examine the pop-culture phenomenon that is Matrix. In Matrix, the human race is imprisoned in mind and body by machines that we ourselves created. It is not the intention of this post to explore the threat of sentient machines, but from the uploaded-minds perspective, the concept put forth by the movie is that we might plug a USB into our napes and so enter an entirely virtual world that defies the laws of physics and intellectual resistance. It is a scenario more plausible than the infomorph, but still highly hypothetical in its premise.

Stories like Matrix are very literal takes on the metaphors of mind. To think that voluntary worlds will be entering our lives loudly and predictably, like cars or computers did, is in my view somewhat naïve. We need just look at massively multiplayer role playing games (MMOs) and social networking (SN) to realize that virtual worlds are already ubiquitous in our lives. MMOs, large persistent virtual game worlds, are subsuming our entertainment. SN has taken over much of our social interactions. But it is more than just time-consuming, mind-numbing escapism that we are dealing with here.

These Realities Are Not Just Windows. They Surround Us.

In his story Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius, the Argentinian writer Borges described how a group of academics together creates a fictional world in what may be seen as a massive world-building exercise. During the process, disciples of this new reality start placing relics of the invented world in the real world, until eventually true history is entirely subsumed by the invented one of Tlon. As some clever writers have pointed out, this is already happening. Fans at conventions dress like their favorite fictional heroes and villains, buy merchandise, give their children the names of characters from these universes. More and more, we are attempting to drag fictional worlds into our lives.

We may not be uploading our minds to World of Warcraft and Facebook--indeed these games may expire harmlessly in a few years' time--but we would be foolish to not see them for what they are: they are like those round mirrors that stand at tight turns on roads, to help one see what lies behind the bend. In this case, what will happen if we do not delineate the boundaries of escapism.

Many already spend more time in MMO’s or socializing networking sites than they do disconnected from the screen. They prefer their ‘online personas’ to their offline ones. And in no way is it ending here. A large effort is underway to integrate SN’s and MMO’s: one may socialize and network in a separate world, while importing SN friends into an MMO world.

Instead of playing golf, businessmen will be raiding dungeons.

Perhaps this isn’t such a bad idea after all.

Should you send The Future Fire your World of Warcraft fan-fiction? Not exactly. What about stories where human consciousness survives in an entirely virtual (or should I say simulated) digital environment? We have seen that the sub-genre of uploaded minds is relevant despite its far-fetchedness, because despite appearances, the issues it raises may be transposed onto problems we are facing right now in the Information Age.

A story does not have to predict the future to be relevant, though some great works certainly have. A tale that nails tomorrow’s weather fluctuations or the winning lottery number will not make us think twice about today. A story about a far-flung intergalactic civilization where no man has ever touched another except through a multiplayer hivemind, very well might. Relevance is commentary, commentary through questions, imagination, speculation and unconsidered implications. Commentary is what The Future Fire is looking for, and what writers of all genres, not just speculative fiction, should be aiming for if they are to produce not just art, but an insight into the human condition.

T is for Transhumanism

By Sam Kepfield

Transhumanism is not a new concept. The quest to improve the human organism, and thereby improving human civilization, can be traced to pre-Biblical times, such as Gilgamesh’s quest for immortality. Subsequent quests, such as Ponce de Leon’s search for the Fountain of Youth, affirmed the notion in popular culture.

Some early strains of transhumanism focused on improvement through self-actualization, such as Friedrich Nietzsche’s “uberman.” Beginning in the late 19^th century, the Industrial Revolution shaped transhumanism, turning it into a technology-based notion. Naturally, as the Information Revolution came of age in the 1960s, transhumanism became closely identified with artificial intelligence and/or computer technology.

Man and machine are already merging. Pacemakers are a commonplace medical device. Artificial hearts, pioneered with the Jarvik-7 in 1982, are slowly becoming routine. Within the last several years, the “total artificial heart,” has been used in clinical trials. The prototype uses electronic sensors and is made from chemically treated animal tissues, called “biomaterials”, or a “pseudo-skin” of biosynthetic, microporous materials.

Cybernetic limbs are moving closer towards Luke Skywalker’s hand from The Empire Strikes Back. DARPA and Southern Methodist University are working on a fiber-optic nerve connection from the brain to the limb, allowing a direct interface, rather than relying on muscles to move the limb. In theory, this could allow the limb to “feel.” In twenty years, a prosthetic limb may be indistinguishable from a real limb—although the art-deco steel design from Creative DNA Austria’s Lukas Pressler and Nico Strobl looks like a classic sci-fi cybernetic limb, with a variety of different apps—sort of a Swiss Army limb.

The trend doesn’t stop there. A Dutch team in August 2011 announced the creation of “bulletproof skin,” made from spider silk and human skin cells, capable of stopping slow-moving bullets. Given ten years, skin” able to stop regular-velocity bullets does not seem beyond the realm of possibility, and in fact seems quite likely.

Man and machine will continue to blend until, at some point, they become indistinguishable. Ray Kurzweil calls this event “the Singularity,” and in a Time magazine article earlier this year, Kurzweil stated that the Singularity will occur in 2045. At that point, human and artificial intelligence will become as one, meaning—what, precisely?

Pessimists believe that it will spell the end of human civilization, as AI and nanotechnology utterly transform homo sapiens, voluntarily or (worst case) involuntarily. The positive ramifications could mean assistance for those with physical disabilities—artificial limbs or even bodies for those with physical injuries or disabilities, nanotechnology to fight disease. The potential applications are limitless.

The recent announcement that a UK laboratory had created 150 human-animal hybrids touched off a controversy over parahumanism, which could be called a subset of transhumanism. Few details were released; the ostensible reason for the creation of the hybrid embryos was disease research. However, it’s not hard to imagine the creation of a human embryo with certain animal genes mixed in—perhaps the night vision of a cat, a bat’s radar-like means of navigating, reflexes a cheetah, perhaps a digestive system modeled after a bovine, able to consume anything. It’s old stuff to anyone who read Cordwainer Smith’s 1962 short story “The Ballad of Lost C’Mell” as a youth.

Legal? Most likely yes; Britain’s Parliament passed the Human Fetilisation Embryology Act in 2008 which permitted such research. Ethical? Well, that’s a whole different subject—and it’s one of the ways science fiction can lead the discourse.

Science fiction has, of course, been at the leading edge of the curve on transhumanism. Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein: Or, the Modern Prometheus (1818) is, arguably, one of the earliest science fiction novels. Victor Frankenstein seeks immortality for mankind by mixing organs and limbs from the dead, and re-animating them. It’s a crude form of genetic engineering, but Shelley blends science and philosophy, which is the essence of good science fiction—that is, the stuff that makes you think, and lets you learn more than you ever did in high school science class.

The cyberpunk movement of the 1980s is generally credited with making the notion of human/machine melding a staple of popular culture, with works such as William Gibson’s Count Zero or Neuromancer, which display a nihilistic, shallow pop-culture slant. In contrast, Thea Von Harbou’s Metropolis (1927), later brought to the screen by Fritz Lang, features an android named Maria, copied from a human Maria, who assumes leadership of a worker’s mob who seek to destroy the city’s power generation machinery. Both works have barely-disguised Socialist leanings.

Bernard Wolfe’s Limbo (1954) is the first cyberpunk book. Wolfe foresees a post-World War III future in which the amputation of limbs and their replacement by mechanical limbs becomes a means to channel warlike aggression into peaceful means. Martin Caidin’s Cyborg (1972), which was turned into the popular TV series The Six Million Dollar Man, carried the idea into the popular imagination.

Frederick Pohl’s Man Plus (1976) explores the cybernetic transformation of the human body to survive on the surface of Mars, with no artificial assistance. Pohl goes beyond the merely physical and focuses on what happens to a man’s mind when his body is no longer human—does his mind change as well?

J.G. Ballard wrote in 1971 that “everything is science fiction. From the margins of an almost invisible literature has sprung the intact reality of the 20^th century.” Ballard’s words are even more true as we begin the second decade of the 21^st century. Transhumanism or para-humanism will continue to be fertile ground for those writing science fiction. The traditional “hard” science fiction, with spaceships and colonies will still provide numerous opportunities for social commentary on mankind’s urge to explore, and how that exploration can shape mankind and the type of social organization he favors—Allen Steele’s Coyote series is the best example today.

Trans- or para-humanism allows a talented writer to go to inner space, to ask even more fundamental questions, such as what makes us human, or what separates man from the Other, or eve if there is any separation. As transhumanism and parahumanism become reality, not everyone will embrace the products of such experiments, even if the results of the experiments are all too human in appearance. Technological advance does not take place in a social/political vacuum, and while those of us in the science fiction community may give our support in varying degrees to the concept made flesh, others will stoke a backlash. Witness the reaction against the British experiment above. Mankind has shown himself to be all to willing to separate out some other group from the mainstream, and give it a lower status. Slavery from pre-Biblical times, the Jews, Africans who became African-Americans, native populations in America and elsewhere, and the GLBT community in the present day, all have been seen as less than human, and subjected to all manner of sanctions from loss of civil rights to mass extermination. There is no reason to believe The Future will be any more enlightened—see A.E. Van Vogt’s Slan (1940) as the best example. Perhaps science fiction can clear the way for this next step in our evolution, to make it acceptable and even normal to the population at large, making our community even more relevant and necessary if we are to survive as a species.

S is for Surrealism

After the recent death of my favourite visual artist of all time, Mexican painter Leonora Carrington, at the age of 94, “Surrealism” has usurped the many other candidates for speculative fiction sub-genres beginning with the letter “S” that could have made it into this blog marathon. In many ways this art form needs no one to defend its inclusion in a magazine focusing on social-political and weird writing: it shares with magic realism a respectable history of worldwide, cosmopolitan, intellectual and fiercely political practitioners. The earliest surrealists were protesting against the reactionary, against bourgeois materialism and fascist imperialism, which are high among the enemies we array ourselves against. And surrealist works are by definition “weird”, in every sense, containing as they do unrealistic details, counter-intuitive settings and events, and stories that tell a story with tone and imagery more than with linear plot and rational representations of the human condition. (It’s for this reason that I’ve never seen the point of recent pseudo-genres like “bizarro”, whose claim to create outside of the restrictions of genre or good taste do nothing that surrealism has not done before, and usually do it not as interestingly. Sub-genres like absurdism, magical realism and the dreamlike weird tale do a better job of taking the struggle forward.)

Contrary to André Breton, most good surrealist work is not “automatisme psychique pur”, or automatic writing. Paintings like Dali’s or Carrington’s are superbly crafted by well-trained draftsmen; perhaps the origin of a surreal story may be a dreamlike or unconscious mental state, but the execution is usually very well planned and polished. Most truly automatic writing is pretty unreadable; even if from the pen of a great stylist or poet, the lack of structure and story divorces it from most interest. Writing is after all an act of communication, which usually requires at least two actors; if the reader is not a party to this act of communication, the writing is likely to fail. Surreal or semi-surreal stories that we have published (e.g. ‘Wingspan’, ‘Omega, maybe’, ‘Wings so Foreign’) have had a very clear plot as well as riotous and mold-breaking imagery.

This is not to say that writing should be easy to interpret and without challenge for the reader; on the contrary, we have always argued that good writing should shock the reader out of their lazy expectations and comfortable world-view. Surrealism does this par excellence, with unexpected juxtapositions and alarming non sequiturs to disturb the reader’s peace of mind, and with the freedom to imagine worlds different from our own, better or worse in some details, radically experimenting in response to the conservatism of the establishment. It will of course be a matter of taste whether a given piece is too unstructured to be readable or not, and while our tastes may not be as avant garde as some radical Dada surrealists might like, we’re very keen on the kind of freedom that comes from being taken out of your comfort zone.

And just as I could stare for hours at the beauty of Leonora Carrington’s mind-blowing paintings, so I want to read stories that are beautiful and mind-blowing as well as useful and politically informed.

R is for Race in SF

I grew up on a steady diet of science fiction and fantasy. Everything from the Twilight Zone to Dark Shadows to Star Wars to P.C. Hodgell to Diane Duane was a part of my life. And in some ways it saved me from a less than stellar reality, so I sought it out at every turn. Dragons, spaceships, fairies, quests, wizards, aliens...what's not to love about flights of fancy? Except the more I read/watched, the more I started to notice a theme in who played what roles. All too often characters that were sidekicks, or wise nurturers, or villains were also the only characters of color. They weren't leads, or at least not leads that lived for long. Especially if they were darker skinned, in which case they might not get much (if any) character development. There would be all kinds of little details about everyone else, but you'd hear about their skin color, possibly some strange/mysterious/scary customs and that would be it. Most often they were there to be conquered, or saved, or educated by the “enlightened” white leads. People of color couldn't be heroic, wouldn't be heroic, because they were ignorant, or weak, or some other such plot device that made the story all about the white lead's journey.

Oh sure, the Magical Negro, Sassy Latina, Wise Indian, etc. might die to protect the lead characters, but those deaths were what they were there to do. Usually the story treated their demise like a blip in the real hero's life, or as an additional impetus for the protagonist to defeat the villain. Stories were framed around the idea that valuable people are white, and everyone knew it. Occasionally, the stories would focus on the idea that the oppressed brown/red/yellow people really needed the white lead to come in, learn their ways, & then use them to fight evil. For some inexplicable reason the characters of color doing the teaching were never strong enough to win their own freedom from oppression. Or there would be no characters of color at all. Stories set in cultures clearly based on Egypt, or India, or Asia, but somehow all the people in an equatorial climate on a planet with multiple suns were pale skinned with straight hair & light eyes. Hmm, there's something wrong with this picture...what could it be?

It is alternately frustrating & enraging to read fiction that erases you, or treats you as nothing more than a convenient plot device. And yet, I still love SF/F even when I find myself critiquing it regularly. Growing up, I wanted to see a future that included people who weren't white if only to know that we had a place in the future at all. SF/F is the genre that's about making our dreams real, or as real as possible. Well, what happens when you're erased from those dreams, or trapped in the same roles that already exist? When you're oppressed even in fiction what message does that send? And yes, it's easy to say that representation in fiction isn't important. That it's just a book, a movie, or a TV show. After all it's not like you have to read it, or watch it right? Right. Except, what happens when there's nothing for you to read or watch? At least not if you refuse to accept that your only options for representation in popular media are variations on maid, whore, pimp, thug, & invisible.

Granted things are better in my personal universe these days. In high school and college I found writers like Octavia Butler & Samuel Delaney, and it was amazing. I've had the great fortune of reading things written by people like N.K. Jemisin, Nnedi Okorafor, Andrea Hairston, Nalo Hopkinson, Nisi Shawl, etc. I've been able to introduce friends and family to their work. But, it's not enough to have a few writers you know you can count on. Among other things I'm a fast reader with a voracious appetite for new media, and options are a great and wonderful thing. Plus, there's the question of how the genre can evolve, when so much of it still focuses on the same imperialistic colonizing framework? We talk a lot about the craft of writing, but what about the politics? What about the impact? Race matters in our society. It is part of a problem that won't be solved by pretending not to see skin color, or ignoring history. We have to talk about it directly and indirectly, and that includes recognizing the importance for POC of being seen in the media as real people, and not just a collection of stereotypes.