As long as there is life, joy will never die.
As long as there is joy, light will never die.
As long as there is light, joy will never die.
As long as there is light, life will never die.
This was a song in a dream I just had. It was being sung in a bomb shelter, during the apocalypse.
…cheery, non?
At NYCC, I went to a panel involving Cory Doctorow and Intel’s “Chief Futurist.”
During the panel, the idea of what it is a science fiction writer does—something that I think about and talk about basically all the time—was brought up.
The basic notion that the panelists put forward is that there’s nobody who should even try to predict the future, because for one thing your book ought to last and you’re going to be wrong, but for another thing, you want your message to be more than just “this is what is going to happen.”
Instead, Doctorow suggested that a science fiction writer, among other things, could steer the future. This runs a little different to what I’ve heard elsewhere. Other writers like to say that they write science fiction that’s actually about the present. In NEUROMANCER by William Gibson you can see some of that, with the feel that’s lot like the video game arcades of the 1980s. But that same book has elements that steer the future. Doctorow related that people tell Gibson all the time that he writes dystopian fiction, but when he looks back on 1984 he wonders why they feel that way. In the early 1980s he wrote a book about a future where the Earth hadn’t been destroyed by nuclear war. Seems pretty optimistic in that context, no?
The point is that the science fiction writer can load their present hopes into the writing, and their present fears, creating a future shaped by these uncertainties. You can take away all the possibilities that aren’t triumphant or terrifying, and leave only the future that has the most exciting rewards and the most dangerous risks. You can show people what the extremes lead to. It’s an interesting conception, and I think it bridges the gap between this notion of “predicting” and the other notion of “writing about the present.”
Someone appears to want to put short fiction that I wrote into print.
Cool. :)
Just signed the contract.
Well, hello there. Blogging for yourself is still a thing, isn’t it?
There was a time when I wrote things on a blog called The Anachronist’s Blog. Back when I started that blog, I was working on a fiction project it was tied to, and I was focused solely on that fiction project. Not anymore.
Now I run a discussion group called Immodest Proposals through a thing I call Better Worlds. I’m still pursuing (and getting close to end of) my PhD, as well.
On top of that, I’ve been a finalist in a writing contest and have switched to a focus on short stories. My goals have changed somewhat, and with that, I’ve changed johnskylar.com to point here, instead of to my fiction-only blog that was written in the “Dr. John Skylar, Professor of Anachronism,” character.
Yes, I recognize that this makes me yet another idealist writer with a blog and hopey, dreamy, changey stuff.
Pretty sure I’m okay with that. How are you?
