BOOKS & ARTS COMMENT ILLUSTRATIONS ILLUSTRATIONS SEÑOR SALME BY WRITING Science fiction when the future is now Six authors parse the implications of our unhinged era for their craft. lphaGo, fake news, cyberwar: 2017 With technological change cranked up to — Lauren Beukes, Kim Stanley Robinson, has felt science-fictional in the here warp speed and day-to-day life smacking of Hannu Rajaniemi, Ken Liu, Alastair and now. Space settlement and dystopia, where does science fiction go? Has Reynolds and Aliette de Bodard — to reflect Asea-steading seem just around the bend; mainstream fiction taken up the baton? on what the genre has to offer at the end of so, at times, do nuclear war and pandemic. Nature asked six prominent sci-fi writers an extraordinary year. ©2017 Mac millan Publishers Li mited, part of Spri nger Natu21/28re. All ri gDECEMBERhts reserved. 2017 | VOL 552 | NATURE | 329 COMMENT BOOKS & ARTS disruption and decolonization are happen- future will actually happen is radically ing across the continent now. uncertain. It could be a good life for future LAUREN BEUKES The 1997 democratic constitution of humans in a shared and interdependent South Africa was based on the African biosphere. It could be extreme climate The power of philosophical principle of ubuntu: a per- change, a mass-extinction event, agricul- Afrofuturism son is a person because of other people. It’s tural collapse and intense deadly conflicts the rational humanist theory that we are all among desperate human groups, including Lauren Beukes’s latest volume is interconnected and interdependent. The nuclear war. Slipping, a collection of short stories most interesting science fiction examines To grapple with this bizarre breadth of and essays. what it means to be human through the lens possible futures, I tend to take it one story not only of what technology does to us, but at a time. And I deploy a set of organizing Is science fiction relevant in an age of also of what we do with it. And in South ideas. catastrophic climate change, the refugee Africa, with our unique challenges and lack Science fiction is the realism of our crisis and the rise of the far right? Yes: not of resources, we make a plan, we hustle. In time. It describes the present in the way a for what it predicts about the future of the Xhosa, the term is vuku’nzenzele — get up skeet shooter targets a clay pigeon, aiming world, but for how it unpacks who we are and do it for yourself. a bit ahead of the moment to reveal what in it. Innovation in Africa is a do-it-yourself is not yet present but is already having In her 1973 short story ‘The Ones Who magpie: we steal the an impact. This gives us metaphors and Walk Away From Omelas’, novelist Ursula “The stories we best bits from dif- meaning-systems to help conceptualize K. Le Guin wrote about a fictional utopia tell ourselves ferent disciplines our moment. So, as with any other realist that came at a terrible cost everyone knew and traditions to art, you pluck just one strand out of the about: a single child tortured in a room about ourselves create interven- fabric of the total situation, and follow underneath the city, in the filth and the dark, shape who we tions that work for where it leads. to pay for their happiness. are — and who our unique circum- Because a novel is not a world. Even if it For me, Omelas is a compelling way of we can be.” stances. Indigenous is about a world. It’s just one story among understanding the world I grew up in, as and social knowl- millions that could be told, so it doesn’t have a white South African under apartheid. edge has to sit alongside conventional sci- to describe everything. White people make up only around 9% of ence and medicine. Examples range from We read fiction to have two science- the population, but, until 1994, they held developing pioneering smartphone pay- fictional experiences: time travel and tele- the rest of the country hostage under a ment apps such as Mpesa to building kites pathy. Fiction takes us to other times and racist, inhumane and violent regime that to use as camera drones for geographi- places (Regency England, the Ice Age, the forced people of colour into indentured cal surveys, and sending text-message moons of Jupiter), and it takes us inside labour and inferior schools, and responded reminders to people on tuberculosis and people’s heads, where we hear their thoughts to resistance with tear gas and shootings, hit HIV medication. The Vimba app connects and feel their feelings. squads and torture farms. rape survivors with crisis organizations; And science fiction can describe any Science fiction allows us the distance researchers at Stellenbosch University near time, from tomorrow to billions of years to circumvent issue fatigue in our very Cape Town have developed nanofibre tea hence. That’s a big spread, and it creates troubled times. We can play out ideas bags to filter water in rural areas. a number of subgenres, each with its own and scenarios because we are creatures of But our uniqueness also lies in how we qualities. Space operas set in the distant parable and myth and allegory, TED talks tell our stories. That includes the discovery future use the whole Universe as a story and ethical trolley problems. Fiction is how of the 250,000-year-old hominin Homo space, sometimes to spectacular effect. we grapple with ourselves. By imagining the naledi. An all-women team of “under- Near-future science fiction is the proleptic unimaginable, it’s possible to make reality ground astronauts” descended into the realism I describe above. In between these, more bearable. “cave of stars” near Johannesburg to say from about one to three centuries from Afrofuturism is an artistic, aesthetic exhume the remains, using the language of now, there exists a less-populated story and philosophical movement that com- astronomy to break away from a history of zone that I find interesting. You could call bines science fiction, magic, traditional human palaeontology that had been used it future history. Stories set in this zone beliefs, black history and culture. Take, to prop up racism. resemble nineteenth-century social novels: for instance, Nigerian-American novelist All of this is why we need science fiction the characters interact not just with each Nnedi Okorafor’s genre-straddling works; in Africa. The stories we tell ourselves about other, but with their societies and even Senegalese director Selly Raby Kane’s 2017 ourselves shape who we are — and who we their planets. Possibly, confronted with virtual-reality film The Other Dakar; Kenyan can be. the mind-boggling complexity of our pre- director Wanuri Kahiu’s “AfroBubbleGum” sent, describing events a century from now art; Malawian writer Shadreck Chikoti’s allows us to de-strand chosen elements for sinister utopia, Azotus the Kingdom (Malawi KIM STANLEY ROBINSON closer examination. Writers Union, 2015). All these are pre- Here’s how I think science fiction works occupied with the unique social issues of 3D glasses on aesthetically. It’s not prediction. It has, developing countries and the creative, alter- rather, a double action, like the lenses of native and unexpected ways in which people reality 3D glasses. Through one lens, we make living in them respond. a serious attempt to portray a possible The most exciting aspect of Afrofuturism Kim Stanley Robinson’s latest book is future. Through the other, we see our pre- is perhaps how it dares to imagine a future New York 2140. sent metaphorically, in a kind of heroic for what has been historically, abhorrently simile that says, “It is as if our world is like dismissed as ‘the dark continent’. It’s not We are now living in a science-fiction novel this.” When these two visions merge, the necessarily about imagined alternative that we are all writing together. The pre- artificial third dimension that pops into cities, but about the real ways in which sent feels dangerous and volatile, and which being is simply history. We see ourselves 330 | NATURE | VOL 552 | 21/28 DECEMBER©2017 Mac mi ll2017an Publishers Li mited, part of Spri nger Nature. All ri ghts reserved. ©2017 Mac millan Publishers Li mited, part of Spri nger Nature. All ri ghts reserved. BOOKS & ARTS COMMENT We humans are trapped by the narrative fallacy. The physical world may be irreduc- ibly random, but our minds have evolved to assign causation to correlation, to see pat- terns in noise, to comprehend history not as one damned thing after another, but as the unfolding of some grand plan — perhaps the work of an Author. The pace of invention seems to be speeding up, and advancing technology amplifies the power of every individual in our complex world, for good and ill. It’s possible now for a single person to bring the world to its knees with a well-designed bit of computer code; soon, someone may engineer a biological virus and slaughter millions. The world has grown only more random and unpredictable. Science fiction has reacted with ever more imaginative predictions. Will genetic engineering allow us to live for hundreds of years? Will we be uploaded into the cloud to live as digital gods? Will a super artificial intelligence enslave us? Or will we devise a post-scarcity creative economy so that aliens will finally show up to welcome us to the Galactic Republic? Chances are, none of these futures will transpire. They are too easily derived from the trajectory of the present.