Science Fiction and System-Building

The best science fiction authors were system-builders -- Isaac Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke, Gene Roddenberry -- they all build up worlds of their imagination, made up of fictitious but well-integrated elements that fit together to give a harmonious, plausible (in the context of the genre), and intellectually pleasing whole; a system, in any other nomenclature. And part of their success in capturing the imaginations and loyalties of their fans and reader-/viewer-ship lies in the flexibility of fictional systems to admit and accomodate additions of our own devising -- fan-fiction. We, the fans, co-opted the fantasy worlds of theirs for our own fantasies, our own bedtime reveries as we stared at dark, black ceilings and imagined that to be the view of dark, black, space from some porthole or beyond some forcefield.

That is the strength of good science fiction: its systems, self-coherent, well-integrated storylines and characters, yet accomodating of elaboration and fantasy. Yet the mind which is predisposed to concoct great mental universes is also ill-suited for predicting human nature and collective personality, i.e. societal and cultural trends. This is ironic because the people most familiar to us as futursts -- specialists in predicting the advances and technologies of the future -- are largely science fiction writers, whom we imagine to be well-suited to the task, though as I shall contend, they are in a subtle way not.

The trouble lies in the systems. A mind that favours systems as the means to achieve progress or to go about doing things would tend to overplay the importance of collective endeavour and underestimate the value of private enterprise. Simply put, he or she may not be able to find a place for mavericks in the system. One of the epics of science fiction film, 2001: A Space Odyssey, shows the horror with which exceptions, singularities, are treated. All through the first part of the show we are treated to a sumptuous, 'futuristic' vision of how the well-oiled machinery of the future world works: seamelss air-space travel, excellent service in an orbital hotel, interference-free telephony, the closely-planned schedule aboard the Discovery. But when one rogue element with a personality of its own enters, it is the villain -- the computer HAL. Someone has said that HAL is the only 'human' character in the story, and even then, he is 'just' a machine. The individual is treated as a horror in the otherwise seamless and orderly world of the future that Clarke and Kubrick have dreamed for us.

Another instance concerns the Star Trek: Voyager series, wherein a Starfleet crew is stuck with a rebel crew (the Maquis) aboard the Voyager, in the opposite end of the galaxy, trying to return to the safety of Federation space. While the writers for the show have tried to layer and nuance the rebel characters and their motivations, rather than portray them as all-out bad guys forced to join hands with the good guys, you cannot deny that the Federation, as personified by its Starfleet crew, is seen as the model, the admirable prototype for the future: a uniformed, homogeneous service of talented individuals serving science, peace, and diplomacy. They have coolest gear and sleekest ships, while foreign ships and crews always look a bit messy, (even the straight-edged cyborgs, the Borg) or a bit disorganised (compare a Klingon ship interior to a Starfleet vessel). And it is tellingly convenient, too, how Starfleet subsumes the roles of a military, diplomatic service, scientific exploration service, and anthropological survey, all under the aegis of one organisation. Science fiction, it seems, is inordinately fond of comprehensive systems and organisations.

Enough digression. To be honest, what set me thinking about all these systems and organisations was a passage in Aldous Huxley's Brave New World where a character worries about a perfume tap at home left running. Perfume on tap? That must be the ultimate municipal supply system. The thing is, who would settle for perfume that came from a tap? We, as normal minded humans with average free will, would want something unique instead: perfume is something we wear to distinguish ourselves and match our personality, rather than just a functional means to mask bad body odour. This is why fashion is such a sprawling and all-consuming field, because it is a means to distinguish oneself from others in the most obvious way, through one's appearance. Any perfumer's would have a bewildering array of bottled perfumes. If you can find one who would mix xcents for you, then you'd have a potentially infinite number of possible combinations of scents -- it is entirely possible to concot one that is unique to you and you only. And that is it with humans: our irrepressible need for individuality and free will. To simplify things, this is why communism failed and will always fail, because you cannot make or treat everyone the same. Likewise, the world of the future will have too many choices to count, and not just one Starfleet or one kind of perfume on tap. We see it in our world already. For every kind of international issue there is a glut of NGOs and international bodies to tackle it. It seems a bit naive to think how Starfleet is simultaneously military and diplomatic. The same naivete is at work in those who see the UN as a sort of global police or international government. At best it is an international benevolent fund, but even in that capacity it is not always the best of solutions.

So what does this mean for the futurist? It means that the future will be far more chaotic and diverse than they could ever imagine it to be. Monopolies -- on technology, on perfume, on intergalactic travel -- may hold up for a while but do not last for very long once someone finds that alternatives are possible and economical. This is the message of the free-market economists: that planning an economy is a Sisyphian task beyond any man or politburo. One more example that comes to mind is the scientific database featured in the novel 2051, where any piece of the world's scientific literature can be searched and retrieved for a price. But this is not the case today: we have a rather more messy scene of publishers offering their own proprietary services, some free or per-payment public services, and so on. So futurists take note: global standards are rare exceptions, rather than the rule when technology and society develop. Even metric is ubiquitous, and it has had a long headstart and overwhelmingly good reasons for its universal adoption.

Thus galactic, or even merely global, standards, systems, and organisations will probably never see the light of day: the dreams of science fiction nonwithstanding. Science fiction lures its fans with the promises of well-ordered systems, but it is this same preponderance of system building in the psychology of the genre that is truly alien to the real human world. Heretically for a Trekker, I shall have to say that Star Wars, with its cultural and political chaos and sumptuous, Byzantine individualities, is likely closer to the future than Star Trek. Rationality is appealing, but we've learnt that human nature and thus human economics are something else entirely. Sorry, Spock.