Sell it, boy!

Before I get things rolling I thought I'd take an opportunity to point out that Cameron's Avatar—in which a man takes on the persona of a nigh-perfect nonhuman and eventually becomes much happier as such—is titled wrong. Plainly Cameron meant to name that film Fursona.

Anyway.

SF writer Michael McCollum had an essay, Sci-Fi And Society, in which he points out that a major purpose of science fiction is to get the populace used to changing technologies. We watch Star Trek, with the little communicators and the whoosh-y doors and the talking computers that periodically attempt to destroy everything, and then when cell phones and automatic doors and touch-tone customer service come along, it's not so jarring.

But, as of late, they ain't been doing their job. There is a feeling abroad in the land that technology needs to stop—"This far and no further," as Picard said in one of his "doesn't hold up to a second's scrutiny" speeches. For instance, people feel (especially in the U.S.) that irradiating milk would make it dangerous, and so you can rarely get the stuff here. Or people feel (in Europe) that genetic modification of foods, no matter how well-understood the process used, will simultaneously doom ecosystems and mutate you, the consumer, because genetic engineering apparently leaves spiritual stains, like other forms of black magic. Therefore they won't buy bananas genetically modified to improve hardiness, and the blessed yellow herbs are apparently in immanent danger of extinction, much more than polar bears. I don't know about you, but I don't find a polar bear an enhancement at the breakfast table.

Sure, a part of it is technophobia—what you'd probably call Luddism, with your usual concern for the accuracy of historically-derived labels. And there's the environmentalism aspect, with its "the internal combustion engine is a worse invention than Zyklon-B" rhetoric. But some of the blame really must be laid at the feet of SF writers.

There are three complaints. First (thought I was gonna use HTML's "Ordered List" function, didn't you?) is the fact Star Trek set the precedent of meaningless technobabble. The first series was the only SF under the counter for a while, and it really did get people acclimated to computerized everything, among other innovations. But thanks to them not caring about the words people said, if you put something like pneumatic muscle fibers in a story, people would assume it was meaningless technobabble, not something being researched now for prosthetics among other things (tip: use hydraulic instead, in your stories, that way androids have an excuse to bleed). Perhaps I am a dreamer, but I prefer my high-tech SF to be product placement, of a sort, for emerging technologies.

The second complaint is writers using things that, all in all, would be for the good, but emphasizing the remotest possibility of a downside for the sake of getting a story out of it. Nanomachines are a good example. Think of all the applications for nanomachines, of various types, self-replicating or otherwise—we won't need bees anymore, we can pollinate and make honey with robots (I'm poorly disposed to the Hymenoptera, you would be too if your state had been invaded by both Africanized bees and fire ants). We could do things in medicine nobody who wasn't a centaur ever did before. But no. Drexler had to open his silly mouth, and warn about self-replicating nanomachines reducing everything in their path to "gray goo". Everyone—especially the SF writers—heard that, of course; nobody heard 18 years later when he basically said, "Look. I just said, you know, 'don't do this, because that might happen.' I didn't say it would happen, and certainly nobody'd be dumb enough to do it now! Can we please actually do some nanotech research, maybe develop, you know, a nanomachine? Maybe? Please?"

Yes, I'm sure he'd agree that that was his precise gist.

Why, precisely, do we have to have all these "accidental doomsday" scenarios, gentlemen? Why, the gentlemen respond, because if we didn't make the stories about haywire tech—Man Vs. His Own Screwing Around With Nature—we'd have to come up with politics and future history to justify believable human (or similar) conflict, and most SF writers suck at that. Fair enough, but only Niven ever really managed to sell me on the alternative—his aliens suck, but he can make "flying too near a neutron star" a gripping premise. Did I just say most SF isn't very good? Yes, I did; unfortunately the space and aliens and tech and crap are its selling point, so it still sells despite everything else being C+ at best. It's like Baywatch: since people aren't there for the stories, why should they even bother with them?

Third, is that writers create worlds where tech is used...and they're dehumanized nightmares, where nobody has a decent normal feeling—imagine if all the bad Freud in post-war fiction were replaced by bad Skinner, or even Kinsey. Any tech in a world like that will naturally seem as evil as what the Green Party Anti-Spirals make it out to be. And it's not just dystopias—if an SF writer is messed up enough, stuff they mean for a utopia can actually give the Imperium of Man a run for the money in Grim Darkness.

Apropos of nothing, is there a way to point the Dark Eldar at Iain M. Banks' Culture? I was gonna say Necrons, but decided to go for the poetic irony.