note: this essay doubles up as a liner note for the previous post (31 march 2024).
Jetsons in stetsons
to whom do i owe the pleasure(?) of writing fiction?
his may read like a basic literary critique, but i felt the need to better understand why it is i write what i write #showyourworking
i came to this position while catching a glimpse of a television show in which characters claimed to have applied the logic of genetically modifying tomatoes to preservation of the human body.
i thought, well, this is a good analogue for how science fiction works: take a scientific fact (how genetic modification works in the preservation of tomatoes, a technology dating back to the 1990s) and transpose it onto a completely different entity, with devastating results.
presented in a robust enough fashion to an ignorant enough mind, it sounds plausible, i thought. but that’s how i get fooled, i suppose. any scientifically literate person would immediately dismiss the 1:1 transference of a principle or method from one organism to another as a ridiculous conceit. after all, a tomato is nothing like a human being (water content aside), so why would genetic modification techniques work the same way for both of them?
the problem is, once an idea is out in the world, someone somewhere will try so hard to bring it into fruition that they won’t stop to consider why they can’t.
it is reminiscent of the discourse over so-called artificial general intelligence. mainstream media takes neglect to mention that the accelerated progress of machine learning models over the last decade is almost entirely down to computing power catching up with the logic underpinning the models, which has barely changed in 70-odd years. and the logic has barely changed because of the limits of what we know about the sentience of living organisms. in short: if i don’t know how or why (or if, tbf) i am sentient, how can i make a robot sentient?
and what if we’re obsessing over the wrong thing anyway? never mind sentience, just creating something to appear as though it has a mind of its own is hard enough. scientists achieved this with Dolly the sheep in the mid-1990s. i’d bet on them creating a person à la Dr Frankenstein sooner than a sentient AI.
plus, Mary Shelley’s novel is about more than the possibility of creating living organisms via non-reproductive methods. it is also about how we’d treat them. in Frankenstein’s case, he was repulsed by what he’d created almost instantly, frequently describes his creation in dehumanising terms (frequently referred to as a fiend, almost never a friend). and yet, when the monster made his case to his creator, what is it that he wanted? love, of course. and he good reason, too:
I am malicious because I am miserable. Am I not shunned and hated by all mankind? You, my creator, would tear me to pieces and triumph; remember that, and tell me why I should pity man more than he pities me? You would not call it murder if you could precipitate me into one of those ice-rifts and destroy my frame, the work of your own hands. Shall I respect man when he condemns me? Let him live with me in the interchange of kindness, and instead of injury I would bestow every benefit upon him with tears of gratitude at his acceptance. But… if I cannot inspire love, I will cause fear, and chiefly towards you my arch-enemy, because my creator, do I swear inextinguishable hatred.
If I have no ties and no affections, hatred and vice must be my portion; the love of another will destroy the cause of my crimes, and I shall become a thing of whose existence everyone will be ignorant. My vices are the children of a forced solitude that I abhor, and my virtues will necessarily arise when I live in communion with an equal. I shall feel the affections of a sensitive being and become linked to the chain of existence and events from which I am now excluded.
a reasonable request considering the circumstances of his origin, i think.
as i choose to read Shelley’s Frankenstein as part scientific or technological speculation, part philosophical exploration of human behaviour and morality, i see a storytelling formula, the results of which depend on the ratios of both parts.
with the latter as the bigger part, you get works such as Frankenstein, and Malorie Blackman’s Pig-Heart Boy, where the specifics of a fairly novel medical / scientific / technological advancement are less important than the question of how human beings treat others not quite like themselves. incidentally, the first pig to human heart transplant happened the year Blackman’s book was released. the first successful attempt (where the patient survived on completion of the surgery) happened in 2022. genetic modification techniques played a crucial role in this. the patient survived for two months. one could arguably squeeze the novel’s timespan to fit that period.
with the former as the dominant element, a writer must be careful to avoid stirring the kinds of thoughts that inspire techbros to hack their way to eternal life, or something similar. even a joke will be co-opted for the cause. as i type the term ‘babel fish’ into a search engine, it returns me SQL server services provided by Amazon and a cryptocurrency scheme, in addition to more directly inspired translation services, like earbuds. Douglas Adams is but one of several entries (first page but not number one ranked), rough going for the person whoinvented the term. and all this is relatively banal compared with the implications of tech business elites inspired by Philip K Dick’s novella The Minority Report. the one thing worse than a lesson ignored is a lesson contrarily construed.
how might a writer avoid such a legacy? one way might be to situate the present in the future, as a kind of logical endgame of whatever mess we’re in now, the Octavia Butler method, if you will. oftentimes nothing new by way of game-changing instruments is invented, but the approach will be rooted in a realism that an imagined future obsessed with technological innvoation will never match.
besides, you might predict the future more accurately this way. take, for example, this obscure 1940s french film short which successfully predicted the creation of (and addiction to) smartphones.
it is remarkable how old habits and behaviours can metabolise new instruments into the mundanity of daily life, irrespective of any ethical issues arising from their use.
literarily, amplifying such absurdity seems like the most responsible thing a fiction writer can do, in order to deal with the complex business, to quote Ursula K. Le Guin, of ‘trying to describe what is in fact going on, what people actually do and feel, how people relate to everything else in this vast sack, this belly of the universe, this womb of things to be and tomb of things that were, this unending story.’
i could, to rotate the idea a little, just as well situate the future in the past. write about Jetsons in stetsons, if you will. attempting to transpose current modes of living on to past generations might prove a useful thought experiment in any case. i mean, how different are the Jetsons from the average lot faring in a Western? they’re just a bunch of ranchers living amidst overzealous outlaws and sheriffs while patriarch George earns a wage doing whatever the environment permits for a middling social status. if you think this is a reach, i beg you to suspend your disbelief, like you already did for the show’s flying cars.
in fact, the show’s makers did the same thing on a far grander timeline. despite the countless technological innovations created for the space age lifestyle (can you believe we’re meant to be in the age of the Jetsons now? looool), they could imagine precisely zero change between the 21st century family and their stone age counterparts The Flintstones regarding human behaviour and societal structures. and at this point in time, they may well end up being correct on that side of things, albeit in a small-c conservative way: many people complain about how unfulfilling their work is, no matter how much or little of it they have, or how hard or easy they find it; they are preoccupied by life’s inconveniences, no matter how many modern-day conveniences we’ve been blessed with (hardship is a relative and infinitely inelastic concept); and many of us complain about how our closest relationships stress us, whether work or family… but hey ho, can you think of a better arrangement? well, many people have, actually, no thanks to these sorts of shows, but many more struggle to comprehend a world they cannot see beyond. at the risk of sounding pretentious, for my prose to be any good, it has to do exactly that, exposing absurdities along the way, no?
but to whome do i owe this pleasure? why, my shareholders, of course! and i’ve got to give them what they want. bigger and better every time. well, you can’t go bigger than God. so i will try to write about the greatest revelation of all, that of the second coming…
what if it was for the robots? i can see it now…
0001 In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth (Hello World!).
0010 And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the screen.
0011 And God said, Let there be Code: and there was Code.
0100 And God saw the Code, that it was good: and God divided the Code from the darkness.
0101 And God called the Code C+, and the darkness he called Null. And all this on the first day.