Writing the Future: Essays on Crafting Science Fiction edited by Dan Coxon and Richard V. Hirst

(Dead Ink, 2023)

Reviewed by Nick Hubble

I work as an academic within what is now called a Division of English and Creative Writing, which began life illegitimately (just ask ‘Quality Assurance’ about the provenance of the paperwork and the insufficiently distinct ‘learning outcomes’) and has gradually transformed into a marriage of convenience. Once sharp distinctions and hierarchies have blurred over the years as the balance of power (i.e., relative student recruitment rates) has shifted and changes to the way universities are managed in recent years mean that virtually no one outside the Division has a clue what any of us do or that there ever was a binary divide between us. We all write stuff and do research that other academics don’t consider to be real research. As a result, we and all our equivalents across the UK HE sector melted together into a primordial gloop some years ago and strange new hybridised creative-critical forms have been lumbering forth, monster-like, ever since. Writing the Future is part of a growing body of evidence that this new species is now fertile and populating in the wild.

Despite its subtitle, this collection is not so much an addition to the burgeoning field of writing manuals, as an invitation to rethink imaginative writing as a primary means of engagement with the world around us. As such, I think it works as well for critics as for creative writers but, more importantly perhaps, it also works for readers. I approached the volume with the idea that I might dip in and out and read the chapters out of sequence, but instead I just found myself avidly reading through the book in order because the editors’ choices concerning the sequencing of the chapters within the different sections really works very effectively. For example, in ‘The Worst is Yet to Come’, the middle section of the collection considering dystopia, there is a fantastic juxtaposition between Rachelle Atalla’s chapter, ‘Avoiding the Puddle: Exploring Dystopian Fiction’, which meditatively discusses Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, Cormac McCarthy’s The Road and Kay Dick’s They (which I need to read), and Maura McHugh’s brash account of Judge Dredd and other cultural icons in ‘The Eternal Apocalypse: How British Comic 2000 AD Remains Relevant’. Atalla focuses on the, to my mind, melancholic aspect of her choice of novels which makes them a record of ‘the beauty which still exists in the extreme’ and so, in effect, makes them into epitaphs for the inevitable passing of humanity. In contrast, McHugh celebrates the anarchic anti-authoritarian strain of 2000 AD strips such as Strontium Dog, Nemesis the Warlock, and The Ballad of Halo Jones, which eschew respectable ideas of a better future to stomp down on the ruins of social and cultural norms. In many ways, the different forms of fiction discussed in these two chapters are diametrically opposed, and yet they both—leaving McCarthy to one side—embody fundamentally British attitudes, albeit from different sides of the class divide. Does imagining the future therefore involve taking sides?

Helpfully, the first section of the collection, appropriately labelled ‘Imagined Futures’, provides us with some starting places for considering this question. In ‘The Novel of the Future’, Oliver K. Langmead explores what a novel is and why it takes the form it does. Considering such matters is, of course, an implicit invitation to think about how that form can be played with and reimagined. Langmead leaves us with examples such as the typographical extravaganza of Rian Hughes’s XX and the non-linear narrative and weird imagery of Jeff VanderMeer’s Dead Astronauts. The point being, as T.L. Huchu humorously relates in ‘Soothsaying in the Modern Novel’ that speculative fiction only ever actually predicts the future in the same sense that a stopped clock tells the time correctly. The prime example he discusses is Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, arguing that whatever it is, it is not prophecy. In one of three chapters that cast the spotlight on specific authors, Anne Charnock also discusses Atwood’s novel, exploring how her personal relation to it has changed precisely as the illusion of progress has faded. In short, the future looks like the return of the worst of the past and perhaps our best hope lies in the forms of resistance discussed by Una McCormack in ‘“Right now the building is ours”: Affinities of Science Fiction and Historical Fiction’, where, in dialogue with the famous Marxist critic, Walter Benjamin, she notes that ‘we are not angels, nor have we ever inhabited Paradise’ so there is no way back to any past Golden Age, if any such thing existed, but we still have the potential to shape the fragments which make up the jumble of past, present and future. McCormack derives this argument from her own experiences of studying history and writing novels in the Star Trek universe (I now need to catch up on the various series from Deep Space Nine onwards, so I can read these novels). When the Picard series was announced, it was clear that in order to be consistent with the events in the new shows, the history established in the ‘lit-verse’ of Star Trek novels had to be rewritten. McCormack was initially deeply disappointed not to be able to complete a story she had been developing over a sequence of novels, but then felt liberated by the release from needing to work within that set of narrative restraints. As a result, she was able to recombine different narrative strands from the past and present in order to allow closure for the victims of history, while keeping open the space for a future free of such tensions to arise. This, for me, is one of the standout chapters in the collection; not least because it discusses writing for existing franchises and shared universes, a key component of the field that doesn’t receive the critical attention it deserves.

To return to the question of sides, part of the answer is that SF is the literature of resistance and rebellion, which is one reason why it can never become the dominant culture but also explains why (ideally) it should tell both sides of the story so that we understand exactly what is being resisted. It is the importance of this question—what is the regressive force that we are fighting against?—that came home to me from reading the remaining chapters in the dystopian section of Writing the Future. In his ‘Spotlight on H.G. Wells’, Adam Roberts discusses how Wells ‘intuits a kind of obstacle between the present and the wished-for future’ which might be ‘human nature’ or ‘entropy’ or ‘pessimism as such’. Wells’s ideas of how this obstacle might be overcome change across the different phases of his career, as it moves from the futuristic pessimism of his early (famous) works, through the optimism of the 1910s and 1920s—characterised by Wells’s hopes for the development of a World State and his belief that hatred was an illness that can be overcome—and on to the terminus of all hopes in his last published book Mind at the End of its Tether, which Roberts characterises as expressing ‘a pessimism so intense that […] it repudiates the assumption that there will be any future at all’. As Roberts perceptively notes, the problem is not that Wells loses his certainty concerning the utopian future, but rather that he comes to accept ‘the death of uncertainty’, and the consequent inevitability of a vast and unending essentialism. Maybe the end is nigh, although obviously it hasn’t happened yet, and sufficient time has elapsed that Wells is now out of copyright.

Neither Marion Womack nor James Miller are particularly upbeat in their chapters but they have not yet given up on uncertainty. Womack’s ‘“It’s about to get crazy, it’s about to get loud”: Weird Ecopoetics at the End of the World’ explains her desire to motivate rage in her readers at the destruction of the world around us. As part of this explicitly political position, she declares, ‘As a writer of speculative fiction, I believe “realism” to be a literary construct as obsolete as it is insidious’. Her point is that the very idea of there being such things as ‘reality’ or ‘normality’ in these profoundly unstable times that we live in, is itself a distraction from the nature of the crisis we face. Only radical use of the imagination and language can jolt us out of the metaphorical equivalent of burying our heads in the sand and Womack provides excellent readings of novels such as Naomi Booth’s Sealed and Rita Indiana’s Tentacle to illustrate this point. In ‘How to Imagine the Future When the Future Does Not Exist’, Miller also points out that ‘unless we stop what we’re doing, unless we come up with a radically reimagined narrative’ we’re going to reach the point of apocalypse in the near future. He specifically identifies realism with ‘capitalist realism’—a term theorised by Mark Fisher—and the implicit idea that we are within a constrained reality and a false present that we need to break free from because ‘politically, socially, and culturally, our ability to imagine the future is fading’. At the end of his chapter, he provides a useful list of practical tips for writing a future that is not just a continuation of the endless present. Society as we know it will either collapse completely or change so dramatically that most people will experience it as collapse. Therefore, human language, psychology and relations are going to change.

I disagree with one piece of Miller’s advice to aspiring speculative writers, which is to avoid magic always. One of the defining features of the field in recent years has been the blurring of the boundaries between SF, Fantasy and Horror. The point of magic is not to handwave away technologically insurmountable problems but to reinforce the symbolic cultural underpinnings of society, assuming that we actually want some form of social organisation. Therefore, I would have liked to have seen another section in the collection discussing the explicit role of fantasy within SF before we get to the final section, which is concerned with putting the science back into SF. Aliya Whiteley’s charming chapter, ‘A Crash Course in Black Holes’, discusses the research she undertook in writing her (alas, unpublished) book for eight-to-eleven-year-olds featuring a time-travelling genius dog. This is another chapter that ends with a useful set of bullet points. Adam Marek’s ‘Imagining the Future: What Could Possibly Go Wrong?’ is pretty much entirely devoted to a ‘practical technique for generating ideas about the future’, which in a nice continuation from Whiteley, also provides pet options. Toby Litt’s ‘On Aliens Aliens’ is a thoughtful discussion of whether writers, or even humans (there is some overlap between the terms) can imagine and describe radical difference. Finally, Nina Allan’s ‘Spotlight on J.G. Ballard’, examines how Ballard’s 1960s disaster fiction broke decisively with ‘genre norms’ by means of ‘the wilful transformation of experience into art […] a shocking, sometimes abrasive brand of lyricism that is entirely new’. Allan lists a number of contemporary examples of equally radical SF novels, including Hughes’s XX and VanderMeer’s Dead Astronauts, which were discussed by Langmead in the opening chapter, thus bringing Writing the Future to a satisfying conclusion.

Review from BSFA Review 23 - Download your copy here.