Among the plethora of great scenes in the movie A Fish called Wanda, has Kevin Kline’s Otto talking to Jamie Lee Curtis’s Wanda. Otto is a pseudo-intellectual hit man turned diamond thief who once worked for the CIA. Wanda is the considerably sharper femme fatale who doesn’t need saving.
At one point, Wanda, frustrated with Otto, criticizes Otto’s denseness, by going on a classic tirade that ends in her exclaiming “…but you think you’re an intellectual, don’t you, ape?”
To which Otto replies that apes don’t read philosophy.
Wanda replies that, “Yes, Otto, they do. They just don’t understand it.”
Enter today’s Tech-Bros.
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A couple months ago I came across a trio of news reports that placed the origins and extrapolations of the science fiction genre directly into the crosshairs of the decisions that certain decision makers were taking right now. I thought they were interesting, because of course I did. They were about science fiction. The genre I’ve often called the most human of all literatures. And they were about us—the people who were living (at least on the precipice of) some of the worlds that SF writers have been concocting.
I suppose I need to stop here for a moment to give the old “science fiction does not predict the future,” talk. It does not. Every science fiction story is a simulation. A model. I recently heard SF critic and historian Damion Walters say that fantasy fiction is about things that never happened (picture dragons and powerful sorcery) and science fiction is about things that might happen. I like that. No one is predicting anything. But, if you describe a thousand things that might happen, it’s only natural that some of them will—particularly if you describe something that catches the attention of an energetic person with enough resources to spare that they can pursue them.
And, of course, science fiction—especially the dystopian sort—can be warnings.
While certainly ringing various alarms, those are most definitely not predictions.
Unless, perhaps the world is run by Ottos.
The first article I came across a few months back was this piece in the Guardian, which focuses on a broad perspective of the influence of relatively Golden Age and Cyberpunk SF on the Ottos who have led the development of modern technology. Musk. Bezos. Zuck. It lays out the case that all these guys read great SF, and walked away being blown away while at the same time not understanding what the books actually meant. It’s a fascinating piece that touches on misreading of Philip K. Dick, The Matrix, and even Lord of the Rings.
Shortly after reading that came this piece in Jacobin the focused on Elon Musk and his fixation on Robert A. Heinlein’s The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress (among others). At least this is not a total misreading. Heinlein is an interesting subject, but his work in this period is certainly fodder for hard Libertarian right-wingers. And, yet there is a question inherent in this article: should it be so? Are the Libertarian ideals on the surface of The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress really a façade for, or a justification of, an authoritarian takeover of the people.
This is why it is so hard to set this work alongside works of Douglas Adams and Ian Banks, though, and see how Musk can see himself following both. This is why I’m thinking that Elon Musk is really just Kevin Kline’s Otto wrapped up in another 50 IQ points.
Unless, of course, he actually does see and understand this dichotomy.
In which case, he’s just an asshole.
Which brings us to the third piece, this interview of China Miéville in TechCrunch, in which he examines the relationship between science fiction and the psychopathy that is inherent in the big names who have developed today’s technology driven world and are developing tomorrow’s. It is not, he says, science fiction’s fault that these guys are assholes. Science fiction is not about the future, he says. Science fiction is about the now.
I like that.
It fits my claim that science fiction is the most human of all the literatures, and it fits thoughts I’ve had in the years since that have made me revise my quippy little saying to note that I think science fiction is philosophy set in the future.
Philosophy, as far as we know, is a human construct.
It is the thing that helps us explore meaning and purpose.
Hence the power of great science fiction.
The question at hand today, of course, is whose philosophy will win the future. Because it does seem to be an unfortunate truth that there are apes who can read great science fiction just fine, but who, alas, cannot understand it.