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By Root 563 0

burn that carbon, and all hell will break loose. Such journalism is expected to confine its range to observable factors. In the nineteenth century, Tennyson wrote a poem called “Locksley Hall,” which appeared to predict—among other things—the age of airplanes, and which contains the line “For I dip’t into the future, far as human eye can see”; but no one can really do that. The future can never be truly predicted because there are too many variables. You can, however, dip into the present, which contains the seeds of what might become the future. As William Gibson of Neuromancer and cyber-punk fame said, “The future is already with us, it’s just unevenly distributed.” So, in forecast journalism, you can look at a lamb and make an educated guess, such as, “If nothing unexpected happens to this lamb along the way, it will most likely become (a) a sheep or (b) your dinner.” But you will probably exclude (c) a giant wool-covered monster that will crush New York.

However, if your writing about the future isn’t forecast journalism, it will most likely be something people will call either science fiction or speculative fiction. The terms are fluid, as we’ve seen. Some use speculative fiction as an umbrella covering science fiction and all its hyphenated forms—science-fiction fantasy and so forth—and others choose the reverse. SF novels of course can set themselves in parallel imagined realities, or long ago, and/or on planets far away. But all these locations have something in common: they don’t exist, and their non-existence is of a different order than the non-existence of the realistic novel’s Bobs and Carols and Teds and Alices.

Here are some of the things SF narratives can do that “novels” as usually defined cannot do.

They can explore the consequences of new and proposed technologies in graphic ways by showing them as fully operational. We’ve always been good at letting cats out of bags and genies out of bottles and plagues out of Pandora’s Box: we just haven’t been very good at putting them back in again. These stories in their darker modes are all versions of “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice,” in which the apprentice starts up some of the sorcerer’s magic but doesn’t know how to turn it off. They may help us to decide whether such apprentices could maybe use a little supervision.

They can explore the nature and limits of what it means to be human in very explicit ways, by pushing the human envelope as far as it will go in the direction of the not-quite-human. Are the robots in Čapek’s R.U.R. human? They make a good case for their rights. Are the Stepford Wives human? How about the replicants in Blade Runner, or the beast folk in The Island of Doctor Moreau?

These are scary or creepy examples. But on the other hand, such quasi-humans can take more positive forms that help us to understand and navigate differences. In such fictions, the characters may diverge from the standard human model—Data in Star Trek, the gifted mutants in John Wyndham’s The Chrysalids and the one in Russell Hoban’s Riddley Walker, the Martians in The Martian Chronicles, Octavia Butler’s Oankali—but they are viewed sympathetically.

SF narratives can also interrogate social organization by showing what things might be like if we rearranged them. Sometimes they are used primarily as a way of reconsidering gender structures. Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Herland, John Wyndham’s Consider Her Ways, W. H. Hudson’s A Crystal Age, the works of Joanna Russ, Sheri Tepper’s The Gate to Women’s Country, and many of Ursula K. Le Guin’s stories have this end in view.

But SF has also abounded in a subgenre we might call “economic SF”—Bellamy’s industrial romance, Looking Backward, which anticipated the credit card, is one of these, but so is William Morris’s socialistic News from Nowhere. Such stories, whatever else they may be doing in the way of redesigning women’s clothing (sexier, less sexy) or putting food on the table (more, less; tastier, horrible), have as their central focus the production and distribution of goods and the allocation of economic benefits among