Another post about science fiction, but this one looking beyond comic books…
Reading old novels set in the future can be fun in different ways. On the one hand, it’s fascinating to see how other eras imagined (accurately or not) what was to come, based on contemporary technology and culture, or how authors commented on their own times through the guise of sci-fi allegories. On the other hand, there is a groovy coolness about all the outdated stuff, which turns these tales into a strange counterfactual history, as if they were set on alternate realities where things somehow evolved differently.
As I pointed out when looking at futuristic comics, though, sometimes that’s just the icing on the cake. Many of these are exciting yarns or touching reads, with evocative prose and absorbing stories… They’re genuinely satisfying books, on top of being interesting and bizarre.
Here are a couple of them that fit this description:
FOUNDATION
(Isaac Asimov, 1951)
“His name was Gaal Dornick and he was just a country boy who had never seen Trantor before. That is, not in real life. He had seen it many times on the hyper-video, and occasionally in tremendous three-dimensional newscasts covering an Imperial Coronation or the opening of a Galactic Council. Even though he had lived all his life on the world of Synnax, which circled a star at the edges of the Blue Drift, he was not cut off from civilization, you see. At that time, no place in the Galaxy was.
There were nearly twenty-five million inhabited planets in the Galaxy then, and not one but owed allegiance to the Empire whose seat was on Trantor. It was the last half-century in which that could be said.”
It took me a while to get around to checking out this seminal masterwork of science fiction, but once I finally picked it up I was completely hooked. I will get into the plot and themes in a bit, but first I want you to consider the passage above (which kickstarts the narrative after an excerpt from the fictional Encyclopedia Galactica). See how practically every sentence introduces a new concept, from intriguing places and incredible technology to the sense of overwhelming scale (such a far-off future, such an impossibly vast empire…)? That’s pretty much the pace of the whole book, which is made up of very short chapters, each one establishing at least one mind-blowing notion after another, gradually building an epic so sprawling that every fantastic premise and character sooner or later get subsumed into a much, much larger picture. And this is just the first novel in the classic Foundation series, which somehow managed to continue to expand this saga in surprising directions (in a future post, I may end up discussing the first sequel, Foundation and Empire, which is also quite neat).
I only knew Isaac Asimov from Nightfall and from his robot tales, where he tended to explore a few ideas to their logical limit, playing with paradoxes and speculating about all their possible ramifications. In Foundation, however, he keeps throwing more stuff at the reader while pushing ahead with momentum and determination. Early on, we learn about methods of hyper-space travel, about a planet whose whole land surface (75,000,000 square miles) amounts to a single city that operates mostly underground, and about psychohistory, a branch of mathematics that uses ultra-complex statistics and socio-economic formulas to foresee the future. And just as we settle into all of this through the eyes of a young psychohistorian who unwittingly finds himself entangled in a political thriller, the narrative takes a leap forward… and then another… and before you know it you’re in a whole other corner of the galaxy reading discussions about geopolitics between scientists, diplomats, and, even later, a type of priests that are a bit of both.
Asimov’s talent isn’t just in the way he ties it all together and makes the story flow engrossingly, but also in the way he juggles all the multiple scales, shifting from micro to macro and back again. Yes, this is definitely an ideas-driven book with just enough characterization to ground the plot, but even among all these wide frameworks we get to care about petty personal whims and intimate doubts. That said, much of the interior action does involve characters contemplating their own miniscule role or limited perspective in the grand scheme of things:
“He sighed noisily, and realized finally that he was on Trantor at last; on the planet which was the centre of all the Galaxy and the kernel of the human race. He saw none of its weaknesses. He saw no ships of food landing. He was not aware of a jugular vein delicately connecting the forty billion of Trantor with the rest of the Galaxy. He was conscious only of the mightiest deed of man; the complete and almost contemptuously final conquest of a world.”
At the core of the story is psychohistorian Hari Seldon’s prediction that the galactic empire will collapse and that the only way to minimize the ensuing period of chaos is to put together a massive encyclopedia compiling the whole of human knowledge, thus securing the basis of a future civilization. As the decades pass, however, the Foundation in charge of this enterprise gets itself embroiled in local and interplanetary politics, its mission reshaped by coups, espionage, and looming war. I won’t spoil the many, many twists, but suffice to say that power keeps shifting from one group to another, reflecting tensions between scientific research and other tools of imperialism (atomic weapons, trade, religion) that are typical of early Cold War fiction (even though much of Foundation was originally published in the form of short stories in the early 1940s).
Even leaving aside the fact that Foundation’s breathtaking imagination isn’t enough to anticipate a future with women in positions of power, from a purely scientific perspective the notion of psychohistory flies in the face of chaos theory. Asimov does make a point of explaining that such predictions could only apply to overall trends – rather than to an individual’s specific behavior – and he shows awareness that the very act of predicting can change the turn of events, but at the heart of the book is still a general understanding of history as essentially determined by large structural processes without much room for contingency. In fairness, this is a vision shared by many current historians and theorists (from Marxists to neorealist IR scholars) and its evolution in our own future would actually match the ongoing development of big data and machine-learning algorithms. Yet, Asimov himself came to complicate the challenges of psychohistory in the sequels…
That said, I’m less interested in Foundation as a historiographical or a futuristic proposition than in the existentialist implications of eroding our self-importance and putting our trust in what we don’t fully understand. By framing our sense of individuality, free will, and impactful agency against the backdrop of invisible, unstoppable forces, the book gradually blurs the line between equations and prophecies, between logic and faith, or between social dynamics and divine destiny.
“Verisof nodded, a trifle doubtfully. ‘Everyone knows that’s the way things are supposed to go. But can we afford to take chances? Can we risk the present for the sake of a nebulous future?’
´We must – because the future isn’t nebulous. It’s been calculated by Seldon and charted. Each successive crisis in our history is mapped and each depends in a measure on the successful conclusion of the previous. This is only the second crisis and Space knows what effect even a trifling deviation would have in the end.’
‘That’s rather empty speculation.’
‘No! Hari Seldon said in the Time Vault, that at each crisis our freedom of action would become circumscribed to the point where only one course of action was possible.’
‘So as to keep us on the straight and narrow?’
‘So as to keep us from deviating, yes. But, conversely, as long as more than one course of action is possible, the crisis has not been reached. We must let things drift so long as we possibly can, and by Space, that’s what I intend doing.’”
NEUROMANCER
(William Gibson, 1984)
“The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel.
‘It’s not like I’m using,’ Case heard someone say, as he shouldered his way through the crowd around the door of the Chat. ‘It’s like my body’s developed this massive drug deficiency.’ It was a Sprawl voice and a Sprawl joke. The Chatsubo was a bar for professional expatriates; you could drink there for a week and never hear two words in Japanese.”
Set in a gritty, neon dystopia drenched in Blade Runner-ish aesthetics, Neuromancer follows Henry Case, a down-on-his-luck hacker-turned-hustler who used to be able to jack into a virtual reality matrix that allowed him to communicate with computer programs, inhabiting a vast datascape (picture a more immersive form of internet browsing) before his central nervous system got all fucked up. When Case gets hired for a high-tech heist with an eccentric crew, he finds himself involved in an intricate plot where he can’t trust anyone, especially as people may turn out to be simulated holograms or hallucinations or brainwashed by machines run by the viruses of artificial intelligences working for (or secretly controlling?) shadowy corporations hiding behind shell companies with headquarters in space and a cryogenically frozen board of directors… or something approximately like this.
Along with a noirish narrative, we get plenty of noirish writing, as there is an acerbic wit running through the whole thing that would make Raymond Chandler proud (‘His ugliness was the stuff of legend. In an age of affordable beauty, there was something heraldic about his lack of it.’). Bombarding readers with slangy neologisms and turning descriptions of weird technology into something quasi-poetic, William Gibson effectively bends the English language to accommodate the novel’s vibrant world.
The result is as cyberpunk as it gets. The ‘cyber’ bit was particularly groundbreaking, popularizing the very expression ‘cyberspace’ (which Gibson had coined in an earlier short story… and which helps him keep the action visually grounded even when Case is online, translating his interactions with software into chases and violence and actual dialogue). The ‘punk’ is in the attitude and in the look that Neuromancer vividly evokes (albeit with more mechanic prosthetics than piercings or tattoos). The latter also applies to the close relationship with drugs, including plenty of junky-sounding prose as well as plenty of actual junkies…
“He walked till morning.
The high wore away, the chromed skeleton corroding hourly, flesh growing solid, the drug-flesh replaced with the meat of his life. He couldn’t think. He liked that very much, to be conscious and unable to think. He seemed to become each thing he saw: a park bench, a cloud of white moths around an antique streetlight, a robot gardener stripped diagonally with black and yellow.”
This is one of those texts whose place in the canon is visible in almost every line, on the one hand taking Philip K. Dick’s trippy thrillers to the next level, on the other hand directly setting up the stage for Ghost in the Shell and The Matrix, not to mention at least half of Warren Ellis’ comics (particularly the early stuff, like Lazarus Churchyard, City of Silence, Transmetropolitan, and Mek, although Gibson’s spirit has really haunted most of Ellis’ career in one form or another).
At the same time, it’s hard to fully confine the book to a bygone era. In 2022, revisiting this paranoid nightmare about the fusion of globalized capitalism and out-of-control AIs, I can’t help but fear we may currently be living through a bootleg prequel of Neuromancer.
“Power, in Case’s world, meant corporate power. The zaibatsus, the multinationals that shaped the course of human history, had transcended old barriers. Viewed as organisms, they had attained a kind of immortality. You couldn’t kill a zaibatsu by assassinating a dozen key executives; there were others waiting to step up the ladder, assume the vacated position, access the vast banks of corporate memory.”