SF-TH Inc Stories about the Future: From Patterns of Expectation to Pattern Recognition Author(s): Veronica Hollinger Source: Science Fiction Studies, Vol. 33, No. 3 (Nov., 2006), pp. 452-472 Published by: SF-TH Inc Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4241464 Accessed: 11/08/2010 12:51 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available at http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp. JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless you have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you may use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use. Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained at http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=sfth. 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We apprehenda version of the futurein the featuresof the contemporaryscience-fictional moment. William Gibson's PatternRecognition (2003) is a realistic novel set in 2002. It is also an sf novel set in the endless endtimes of the future-present.It brilliantlyconveys the phenomenologyof a present infused with futurity, no longer like itself, no longer like the present.1 Gibson's protagonistCayce is overcome by a sense of "invasive weirdness" (226). There is not much distance anymorebetween the facticity of realism and the subjunctivityof science fiction.2 This is not news; this is the way we live now. This is the story that Gibson tells in PatternRecognition, about(the impossibilityof) the future. And, for all the complex originality of his treatment,it is not a coincidence that variations on this story have appearedin recent novels by MargaretAtwood and Greg Egan, writers as different from each other as they are from Gibson. As N. Katherine Hayles has argued, "visions of the future, especially in technologically advancederas, can dramaticallyaffect present developments" (131). Each of these novels is, in its own way, a story about the problematic impact of the future-the future in/as technoculture-on the present. Atwood's Oryx and Crake (2003), a satire about the catastrophicpotential of increasingly commodified technoscience, is a text from the literary slipstream, written by an authorwhose prose works are more often associated with the realistnovel thanwith genre fiction. It is a telling demonstrationof how non-genre writers turn to science fiction as a way to characterize the lived experience of technoculture. Egan's Schild's Ladder (2001) is equally apocalypticin its vision of the future: situatedat the center of genre, it captures the fascination with which some contemporaryhard sf views the potential of technoscience to transform human history in radically unforeseeable ways. Egan's futurehas all the allure of unimaginabledifference, but its promises are not, finally, for "us." In contrastto both Atwood and Egan, in his latest novel Gibson trades in the tropes of sf for the strategies of mimetic realism. Pattern Recognitionis a story abouthow we find ourselves alreadyon the other side of radicaldifference, even as the future seems ever more out of reach. In fact, we might consider it a story about exactly the kind of world that tells itself stories such as Oryx and Crake and Schild's Ladder. In the discussion that follows, I want to read these three novels as a series of significantlyinterrelated responses to the increasinglycomplex natureof the future in technoculture. STORIESABOUT THE FUTURE 453 Future-present In the postmoderntime zone, it is nevernow.... The role of sciencefiction in a culture thatrepresents itself as futuristicis complexand not a little ironic.-IstvanCsicsery- Ronay,Jr., "FuturisticFlu" (30-31) It is also not news that "science fiction" has come to refer in the past few decades not only to a popular narrativegenre, but also to a kind of popular culturaldiscourse, a way of thinking about a sociopolitical present defined by radical and incessant technological transformnation.As Jonathan Benison suggests, "it might be argued that [one] reason for the special contemporary relevance of SF is that our present has in actualitycome increasingly to make sense less as a continuationof the past than as an anticipationof the future, which it pre-emptsor incorporatesbefore it can ever arrive" (158, n.3). The presentrepresents itself as science fiction, as alreadythe future, andnecessarily this is having an impact on sf's generic fortunes.3 The following list of "recentscientific andtechnological breakthroughs," as compiledby StevenBest andDouglas Kellner,provides a compellingdescription of the science-fictionalizedpresent: Therehas been intense speculation and research concerning black holes, worm holes, paralleluniverses, ten-dimensional reality, time travel, teleportation, antigravitydevices, the possibilityof life on otherplanets, cryogenics, and immortality.Moon and Mars landings, genetic and tissue engineering, cloning, xenotransplantation,artificial birth technologies,animal head transplants, bionics,robotics, and eugenics now exist. At the sametime, weightyquestions are being raised about how many "realities"and "universes"might simultaneouslyexist, whetheror not natureis "law-like"in its fundamental dynamics, andjust how exact scientific knowledge can be. (103) As Best and Kellner demonstrate, the sheer extravagance of contemporary technoscienceleads to the implosionof science fiction and science fact-only the future is rich enough to provide us with the image bank through which to interpretthe present. But what does it mean to name the presentafter a narrative genre devoted to the imaginativecreation of futureworlds? And what aboutthe genre in question? Science fiction is "the literatureof change," but change is exactly what now defnes the present. It no longer guaranteesthe futureas the site of meaningfuldifference.4 A very popular early version of this drama of increasingly intrusive technoscientific futuritywas outlined in Alvin Toffler's Future Shock (1971), which warned of "the pathologythat pervadesthe air" and attributedit "to the uncontrollable,non-selective natureof our lunge into the future"(366). By the mid-1980s, influentialand by-now-familiar theoretical models of postmodernity developed by Jean Baudrillardand Fredric Jamesonintersected with Toffler's critique of the blind instrumentalismof technoscience. For Baudrillardand Jameson, postmodernityis, at least in part, also a kind of crisis-of-the-future, and one which, as each notes, poses a radical challenge to commonsense understandingsof sf as "the literatureof the future."5 Baudrillardwrote with enthusiastic dread about the fascinations of the hyperreal,the realmof third-ordersimulacra that increasingly overlays the "lost 454 SCIENCE FICTION STUDIES, VOLUME 33 (2006) utopia" of the real and, by implication, works implosively to block any possibility of meaningful transformation.This, as he noted as early as 1981, cannot fail to mark sf: "In the potentially limitless universe of the production era, SF adds by multiplying the world's own possibilities" ("Simulacraand Science Fiction" 310). In the face of the absolute triumphof the hyperreal, however, Baudrillard rather cheerfully concluded that "the 'good old' SF imaginationis dead, and ... something else is beginning to emerge" (309). In 1985, Baudrillardannounced that "The Year 2000 Has Already Happened," marking the penetrationof the future into the present at the same time as he predicted the anti-climacticnature of the millennial event. On this side of the (non)divide that was the year 2000, the fascinations of Baudrillardian hyperrealityseem ever more in evidence. We remain imaginativelytrapped in what he described as "a period of implosion, after centuries of explosion and expansion. When a system reaches its limits, its own saturationpoint, a reversal begins to take place. And something happens also to the imagination" ("Simulacraand Science Fiction" 310). Jameson also announcedthe loss of "the future," but the startingpoint for his analysis was a perceived rupturein our connections to "the past." In the early 1980s, Jameson gloomily described a culturalparadigm shift responding to a new social moment. This moment can in part be defined by the disappearance of a sense of history, the way in which our entire contemporarysocial system has little by little begun to lose its capacity to retain its own past, has begun to live in a perpetualpresent and in a perpetual change thatobliterates traditions of the kind which all earlier social formationshave