Please Remember That Science Fiction Exists
It's where people write all thinky-like.
People sometimes try to write about the future, and/or moral philosophy, without having read any 20th-century science fiction. This enrages me.
Not being hyperbolic here. I keep telling myself that I’ll write about Adam Kirsch’s The Revolt Against Humanity when I’ve calmed down, but it’s been well over a year so I think I just need to write angry.
The (or a) root problem with Kirsch’s book clicked for me when I got to this claim: “Richard Powers…wrote some of the earliest fictional explorations of cutting-edge subjects like artificial intelligence, virtual reality, and genetic engineering.”
He’s talking about books published in the 90’s. The 1990’s.
Frankenstein was published in 1818. I would like to think Kirsch has heard of it. But in his head, I guess, there’s a giant chasm in between Frankenstein and Galatea 2.0, a gap so wide that they don’t feel like they’re covering the same concepts. Not for me, and I think it’s because I’ve read enough old sci-fi from the intervening time that there’s a smooth evolutionary progression. Frankenstein is a story about artificial intelligence, including a plot point where the creator frets about the creation spawning a new race that supplants humanity. It doesn’t use the words “artificial intelligence.” But neither does A Logic Named Joe, a story first published in a 1946 issue of Astounding Science Fiction. That story doesn’t use the word “computer”, either, since in people’s heads that word still referred to a person who did math. When it describes a “logic” as a screen with a keyboard attached that connects to a network of similar devices to retrieve information, the mental translation there is near-automatic. (The plot is that the content filters on a web-accessible AI accidentally get turned off, so people start asking it for illegal advice and of course porn.)
Kirsch hasn’t read anything published in Astounding Science Fiction, is my guess. Nor has he read or seen R.U.R., the 1920 play that coined the term “robot” and whose final scenes discuss the possibility of a revolt against humanity, and ask what traits would make robots a worthy successor to our species. He may not even have watched the 1927 film Metropolis, which among other things depicts deep-fakes being used to discredit a political activist. Those aren’t “fictional explorations”—they’re science fiction. I don’t know exactly what the difference is. I just know that Richard Powers managed to get shelved in a different section of the bookstore from Murray Leinster, and that seems to be very important to Kirsch and his intellectual circle.
This failure of literature review underlies the book’s ignorance of some highly relevant facts and concepts. Here are a few I wrote down while reading.
People worried a lot about the extinction of humanity in the 20th century.
Transhumanism doesn’t require human extinction any more than writing a sequel requires pulping the original.
The human condition has been transcended many times and the result was a new human condition.
Minds can exist elsewhere in the universe without adhering to human values.
Figuring out whether the world would be “better off” or “worse off” without us involves clarifying your values (what “better” means).
The distinction between the philosophical question of whether an uploaded mind can be “you” or have moral worth and empirical questions about the future of technology.
The “exoself” and “endoself” concept (originally I think from Greg Egan).
I’m not saying everyone needs to read 20th-century sci-fi. (I am thinking it, though). But you definitely need to if you’re going to write a book whose subtitle starts with “Imagining a Future”, as does anyone involved in editing, publishing, or reviewing such a book.
People don’t write genre fiction by accident (even Mary Shelley deliberately set out to write genre fiction as part of a friendly competition). They write it to signal that they’re doing a specific kind of work. Plenty of novels have mysteries in them, but if you publish something as a “mystery novel,” you’re promising that you’ve crafted a puzzle that the reader can try to solve along with the characters, with a satisfying resolution at the end.
When people publish something as science fiction, they’re usually signaling that they’ve thought about an idea and its implications for humanity—a technology, a trend, a philosophy. I say “usually” because we also classify works like Star Wars as science fiction, and in those you’re instead making the promises that a fantasy novel makes, just with a different aesthetic. But the kind of writing that wins Hugo awards, or that shows up in anthologies labeled “science fiction short stories”, is almost always the first kind. It’s not necessarily an attempt to predict the future—it can be an alternate past, an allegory about the present, or a hypothetical about a different universe, for example. The key feature is just, as I’ve said, that the author has thought about the implications of aspects of the world she’s imagining. They’ve done reasoning. Usually also research.
There’s a certain expectation of rigor, even when you’re writing absurdities. If you write a sci-fi story where people gain the ability to instantly teleport to and from Mars using “psionic energies,” the reader expects you to address the whole “humans need to breathe” thing, the effects on society of people being able to escape from any prison, and what it might feel like to abruptly become much lighter. You can write a great story that ignores all those questions, but it won’t get published in Astounding Science Fiction. Maybe The New Yorker.
The Revolt Against Humanity comes from a different culture, one that clearly does not expect the same kind of critical thinking. To pick an example I was apparently especially angry about when writing my notes about this book, Kirsch merrily conflates the voluntary human extinction movement with the “minimize animal suffering” movement, without asking the obvious question of who’s going to minimize animal suffering if humans aren’t around to do it. Papers like this are what it looks like when people actually try to figure stuff out.
It goes deeper than that, though. The entire premise of the book is that contemplating or desiring the extinction of humanity, whether wholesale or as a transition to another state, is a new, 21st-century phenomenon. You couldn’t write that in sci-fi. Annoying nerds would be all over you. They wouldn’t just cite other genre fiction. They’d talk about the Cold War in popular consciousness. They’d point out that Christianity, the single most influential cultural movement in Western thought, describes a future where humans are transformed into something better (only a fool would think our bodies in heaven will be the same as on earth, says 1 Corinthians) and often advocates trying to make that happen sooner. They’d quote Tennyson:
Man, her last work, who seem’d so fair,
Such splendid purpose in his eyes,
Who roll’d the psalm to wintry skies,
Who built him fanes of fruitless prayer,Who trusted God was love indeed
And love Creation’s final law–
Tho’ Nature, red in tooth and claw
With ravine, shriek’d against his creed –Who loved, who suffer’d countless ills,
Who battled for the True, the Just,
Be blown about the desert dust,
Or seal’d within the iron hills?No more? A monster then, a dream,
A discord. Dragons of the prime,
That tare each other in their slime,
Were mellow music match’d with him.