Pattern Recognition and the End of the Future
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8 Conclusion: Pattern Recognition and the End of the Future Curious shifts and changes in the literary field surrounding science fiction writing have taken place in the course of the last decade. Au- thors from the more highbrow sectors of the book market have taken on topics and areas that have otherwise been categorized as clearly science fictional, “poaching” subjects of technoscientific extrapolation in ways that would have been unlikely a few years earlier. Margaret Atwood published her novel on cloning and an apocalyptic end-of- man scenario, Oryx and Crake, in 2003;1 less surprisingly, Michel Houellebecq, certainly with fewer qualms about pop culture, pub- lished Possibilité d’une île in 2005, in which a future clone and “neo- human” successor recounts and comments the life of his genetic blue- print; or Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go, published the same year. Set in England in the late 1990s, Ishiguro’s novel revolves around a group of children, who, throughout a soberly told and heart wrenching narrative, turn out to have been cloned as future organ donors. Evi- dently, by virtue of some curious metamorphosis, writing about science fictional topics no longer necessarily leads to a text being classified as science fiction, while general fictional writing about science was never necessarily science fiction in the first place – the li- terary field has grown more complex, to say the least. As far as William Gibson is concerned, this is even more the case, as the temporal approximation is a reciprocal one. After having concluded his near future Bridge trilogy with All Tomorrow’s Parties 1 Apparently, Atwood herself has claimed that she was not writing science fic- tion, since that were about spaceships and such things, while Oryx and Crake were “speculative fiction” – neglecting the fact that that term had over half a century ago been introduced by Robert A. Heinlein, who himself was not ex- actly adverse to outer space, as John Clute points out in a scathing review in his Excessive Candour column, titled “Croaked” (Clute 325). The ensuing ex- changes nicely demonstrate, how hotly debated the genre distinctions afore- mentioned in my introduction still are. 226 No Maps for these Territories? in 1999, his first book of the new millennium, Pattern Recognition (2003), is set in the present, even if it maintains a vague feeling of fu- turity, and so are his most recent novels Spook Country (2007) and Zero History (2010) which complete his post 9/11 trilogy. As I have argued elsewhere (Höpker 2006), we must reconsider the potential interest that science fiction – in its broadest sense – has for a society in which the enormous speed of technological innovation and social change make everyday experience sometimes seem science fictional already. Science fiction is, by definition, more than any other literature genre that of the thought experiment, of the speculative and of extrapolation. It is the genre of model worlds and future scenarios, and its fictional worlds offer testing grounds for the hypothetical (Wunschel 2004). As I outlined earlier with respect to Darko Suvin’s theory of the novum, science fiction is a genre that works through strategies of es- trangement and defamiliarization. It has the capacity to interrupt habi- tual perception and thus set our perspective of our own world ever so slightly askew (Olsen 1992: 11). A writer like Gibson, despite and be- cause of his distinct science fictional heritage, does not need to take detours through alien worlds. The main purpose of science fiction is not prognostic, and even if a prediction that is borne out may serve as an indicator of an author’s acuteness of sociocultural observation, science fiction is not really about the future. As I would argue for Gib- son’s writing, while futurity may be a useful tool for creating a narra- tive trajectory, its ability to render its readership sensitive to possible futures has to do neither with utopian encouragement nor a pedagogic agenda; nor even with the social criticism of dystopian warnings. Science fiction’s strongest effect and literary potential lies in the ways in which it can open up an alternative perspective on the present, which, despite its future setting, is in fact the past. As Jame- son argues with reference to Dick’s Ubik: Science fiction is generally understood as an attempt to imagine the unimaginable futures. But its deepest subject may in fact be our histor- ical present. The future of Dick’s novels renders our present historical by turning it into the past of a fantasized future […]. (Jameson 2005: 345).