It’s been a wild ride with TWG, and I want to thank everyone who read the book and liked it enough to vote for it. When we launched it at last year’s World Science Fiction Convention in Montreal, I didn’t dream it would be a candidate for this sort of attention.

So, again, thank you thank you thank you, and congratulations to all the other nominees. It’s an honor to be in such fine company.

His early books, a satire about big universities and an eco-thriller, were well received but not huge sellers. In search of big sales and big bucks, he collaborated with an uncle on a couple of political potboilers. “We heard that Tom Clancy had made something like $17 million the previous year and thought if we could snag 1 percent of that, we’d still be OK.” They didn’t come close, and in 1991, Stephenson says, his career “was moving along at low rpms.” Then he wrote Snow Crash, a book that postulated the Metaverse, an exquisitely fleshed-out vision of a digital alternative world, and Stephenson found himself at the front ranks of cyberpunk authors. “I was sort of going for broke with Snow Crash,” he told me a few years back. “I had tried to write stuff that was more conventional and that would be appealing to a large audience, and it didn’t work. I figured I would just go for broke, write something really weird, and not be so worried about whether it was a good career move or not.”

What I find interesting is the number of different angles of attack that Stephenson used before he really succeeded as a novelist, and the number of books he attempted. It’s not like he had one overarching plan and voice–he was testing different ways of writing about the world, different genres… If you read the Big U, or Zodiac, or Cobweb, you can see elements of his core voice, tested in many different formats. All of them have strengths, and if any of them had hit big, it’s interesting to guess where his writing career might have gone instead.

The other thing is his comment about “going for broke.” I’ve seen other authors who have described a similar process, where the moment they really started to break out was the moment when they stopped worrying so much about succeeding and just let their ideas run wild. Turned it eleven, so to speak.

A. The banking industry is in free fall and the problem is spreading.

B. There’s methane bubbling out of the Arctic.

To me, the really interesting thing about this period in history is the amount of uncertainty over what story lines will dominate our lives, moving forward. Both of the topics are obviously important, but only one of them is grabbing massive headlines.

In science fiction, it’s convenient to extrapolate based on a small number of factors – say increasing computing power and network effects, or in my case, something like intense drought. As you add more variables, it becomes harder to construct a coherent future, and it’s harder to deliver a focused experience with meaningful take-aways for your reader.

But the current set of events is a pretty interesting window into how randomized our future can actually be. The banking crisis is happening now, and so we’re already trying to construct storylines about what this means, everything from the next Great Depression, to the rise of China as financial hub. But these storylines either heark back to past (and probably outdated) metaphors to explain the present, or depend on the idea that there are no other variables in play. Even with just two variables, you can have a lot of interesting outcomes.

Which brings me to the methane bubbling away up in the Arctic. Right now, we’re under the impression that the banks are the story. That’s what those huge type-face headlines tell us. But maybe the real story is that climate change legislation is being put off yet again thanks to the banking crisis, or that the bailout may drain our coffers to the extent that we have no appetite to go after a comprehensive energy plan, regardless of who gets elected in November. Maybe, in a hundred years everyone will look back on the moment when our last window of opportunity closed for addressing climate change, and yeah, the banks were important, but only because they ensured that we missed the real storyline.

As an example, here’s the latest on the global warming front. (note: the link is changed to point directly to the Washington Post article as the MSNBC version expired) No big news, but here’s the money quote:

Steve Gardiner, a philosophy professor at the University of Washington who studies climate change, said the studies highlight that the argument over global warming “is a classic inter-generational debate, where the short-term benefits of emitting carbon accrue mainly to us and where the dangers of them are largely put off until future generations.”

When it comes to deciding how drastically to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, O’Neill said, “in the end, this is a value judgment, it’s not a scientific question.” The idea of shifting to a carbon-free society, he added, “appears to be technically feasible. The question is whether it’s politically feasible or economically feasible.”

A lot of sci-fi focuses on the technical aspects of a problem. And completely ignores or soft-peddles the human aspects. If you’re going to write realistic optimistic science fiction story about global warming (for example), you have to jump past the bullshit test of human greed and short-sightedness.

It’s not impossible, but first you have to explain how all the yogacizing organic carrot munching Baby Bjorn wearing liberal types who drive four blocks to the video store to get another DVD rental (real person, btw) are going to wake up and smell the coffee. I mean, if a supposedly supportive person (She buys local organic, yay!!!) is still clueless and destructive, how are you going to get the coal miner with the “Piss on Hippies” bumper sticker on his 4×4 (another neighbor of mine) to think sustainably?

Sci-fi’s urge seems to mostly go after the consumer/tech solution, ie we’ll design a better product (we love you Prius) so that we can keep doing our same old destructive things… but now, automagically, it won’t be bad. Makes me think of artificial sweeteners. Sometimes it’s not a magic bullet, no matter how much we wish it was.

So I see the central problem of realistic optimistic sci-fi as being at least two-fold:

1. We’re all so self-serving.
2. We seem to be biologically wired not to deal with any problem that’s not an obvious and immediate threat.

These two things seem to apply across the board, the difference between a liberal greenie in a Prius and Redneck cowboy in pickup is basically zero. If you’re driving, it’s a problem. And the last time I checked… all of America is driving, regardless of our political leanings. I’ve met a few fringe people who really do make a pretty good stab at living sustainably, but even they get on airplanes. Myself, I’ve got four cross-country flights scheduled this year. How’s that for hypocrisy?

In order to surmount this, fictionally, it seems that one would either have to pretend that the majority of people are not in fact lazy, self-serving, and most importantly short-sighted (which seems difficult given that these aspects are precisely what has driven us to the edge of the cliff), or you have to come up with a plausible set of reasons for people to change. Kim Stanley Robinson does this by making global warming a crisis. But what if it’s actually a death of a thousand cuts?

I’d love to see good meaty sf that goes after the big questions about where we’re headed and how we’re going to sort it all out, but I have a hard time believing that it’s going to be done by techno-fix alone. And I have a very hard time believing that we’ll do anything before the damage is already enormous. After all, I’m writing this on a coal-burning computer, which will then be posted to a coal-burning web server, and there’s a pretty good chance that you’re reading it on a coal burning computer at your end, too.

At this point, writing realistic optimistic sf feels like another genre entirely– it feels like fantasy.

I myself let my SFWA membership lapse this year. It seemed like the organization couldn’t really address, nor was it interested in addressing, a lot of what Charlie outlines. The problems with the Nebula awards are particularly odd, because they seem like such simple things to fix… and yet. In any case, during an earlier stage in my life I decided that when something is dysfunctional, it’s better not to be involved with it. So I’m sitting it out while the organization decides what it’s really about. Hats off to those who have the time and energy to devote to the issue. They obviously have a higher threshold for pain than I.

When I wrote “The Calorie Man” this questionable little trick had been performed on rabbits. It provided the creative spark for Cheshires, and also formed the basis for the grain-sniffing IP enforcement dogs that show up in the beginning of the story. Two sides of the same coin: one animal that had been successfully (and safely) engineered, one that hadn’t.

Now that we’ve got glow cats, it just seems like a matter of time before some designer GM critter makes it into the wild, either because it escapes captivity, or because some dingwad dumps it off on a highway somewhere when the novelty wears off. It won’t happen this year. Or next year. Or the year after that, probably. But still, it has to happen. Genies like this were meant to get out of the bottle.

I know this is an old piece, I know that Star Wars is a roadside accident fast receding in our rear view mirrors, and yet I’m delighted that I unearthed this essay once again.

It opens:

Sith. What kind of a word is that? Sith. It sounds to me like the noise that emerges when you block one nostril and blow through the other, but to George Lucas it is a name that trumpets evil.

This is a must read for anyone who is convinced that critics can only be subsidiary to artists, the leeches who feast on real creatives’ work. Lane proves that one can springboard off trash, and create Art.

Because of Lane, I forgive Lucas. For everything.

The setting, while cohesive and technologically interesting, seems entirely divorced from the plot. He’s created a reasonable extrapolation of what life in 2300 might look like and what technologies might exist — and it is interesting, as an intellectual exercise — but I’m not really sure that the dating/networking tools that the characters are shown using are actually in any way relevant to the thrust of the story. It all feels like window dressing.

It’s as if he’s decided to write a story about the future, and because we know the future will look different than today, he is obligated to enumerate the differences. In the dating case, because we know networks will be big in the future, he’s showing how a social-networking tool like mySpace could be translated into meatspace so that people in a bar can pick each other up.

Now, don’t get me wrong. The tech is cool. The idea is fine. But it has nothing to do with the thrust of the story. It just feels like he’s spending a bunch of time futurizing his story.

Futurizing: The process of adding kick-ass gadgets, tools, and extrapolations to a sci-fi story to make it feel more futuristic so that it can fit more comfortably in the sci-fi genre. Closely related to Sense-of-Wonder Interior Designing.

Futurizing almost always has nothing to do with the core of the plot or the core actions of the characters. It’s just about the sci-fi bling.

I’ve actually had a story rejected because I didn’t futurize it enough. Basically, I was told that the premise was too outlandish for the relatively staid environment that I was placing it in: People were still basically people, they still had (updated) cars and malls, the setting just wasn’t out there enough. It was the future, quite distinctly, but the editor felt that the setting just wasn’t eye-poppingly different enough to support the core premise.

I’ve also had situations where I very consciously went back into a story and futurized it more so that it would be more appealing to market I was aiming at. I tried not to be cynically manipulative about it, but at root I was already satisfied with the story as it was and went back into the story to add more sci-fi bling to make sure it would fly in the market I was submitting to. So I’m guilty of futurizing myself. But I’m also conscious of the fact that every bit of futurizing I add means that a reader from outside the sf market is more likely to scoff at the story.

Last year, when I read stories submitted to High Country News for our attempt at a sci-fi issue, one of the major problems that cropped up was sci-fi’s determined techno-fetishism. We were looking for extrapolation, we got future fetish. These were not necessarily bad stories. Some of them were excellent. But the techno-fetish thing meant that they were entirely dismissable by readers from outside the sf genre.

A story that had a journalist in it inevitably meant that the journalist was going to be fitted with a camera for an eye. The response around the office when I brought this sort of sci-fi to people was “What the fuck’s going on with the whole cyborg thing?” Their bullshit meter for futurizing was extremely highly attuned.

Which makes me wonder about what parts of a sci-fi story are really necessary. It seems like in order to be cool and hot within the sci-fi genre you need to be adequately futurized. But in order to be relevant to the world outside the genre, this futurizing is a joke. Children of Men is sci-fi but (from what I understand, no I haven’t seen it yet, Lou) very little of its setting is. The core premise is sci-fi, and that’s enough. It doesn’t need any more sci-fi bling to carry it.

Personally, I write science fiction because it is the only literature which provides the tools I need to dramatize and crack open the concerns I have about the present. My fondest hope is that these stories will not remain inside the genre but will have some amount of impact on the larger world.

I want to be able to give a story like “Small Offerings” to my grandmother and have her really think about endocrine disruptors. I want someone to read “The People of Sand and Slag” and really think about our long love affair with techno fixes for the world’s ills. If these stories futurize too much, they become easily dismissed as silliness. Perhaps deservedly.