5 October 2019 | New Scientist | 31Book
Gamechanger
L. X. Beckett
Tor Books
OF THE many flavours of science
fiction, the one author Kim Stanley
Robinson has least time for is
cyberpunk. During an interview
with New Scientist in 2017, he
said that it “claimed to be the great
expression of American science
fiction”, but was “basically saying
finance always wins. All you can
do is go onto the mean streets,
find your corner, pretend you’re
in a film noir and give up. I thought
it was capitulationist.”
If you believe that sci-fi stories
have the power to shape the future,
this capitulation has consequences.
Many have spoken of the prescience
of science-fiction authors Neal
Stephenson and William Gibson.
But if you take Robinson’s
perspective, maybe their stories
helped condition us to accept the
current hyper-capitalist landscape:
the “out for number one” zeitgeist
that sees billionaires prepare
doomsday bunkers and “plan B”
planets against the reality of climate
change, while populist leaders
strain to keep out climate refugees.
I know when I read Gibson’s
Neuromancer as an impressionable
young thing, I was transfixed by the
cold romance of brute-forcing your
own way around an irreparably
broken system. Young idiots
tend to be libertarian and I was
no exception. It didn’t occur to
me that maybe I shouldn’t buy
into this particular world view.
But now that we are here,
the best we can do is ask: how
do we get out of this mess?
Remarkably few authors do ask
this, but there are some.
Robinson is enthusiastic about
a crop of writers working on a
genre that could be described as
“adaptation lit”. Instead of escaping
a ruined Earth for “back-up”
planets, these authors show the
work that needs to be done to pull
us out of dystopia and into a new
acceptance of our power and
responsibility as a species.
L. X. Beckett’s work has been
compared to Neuromancer, but they
share more DNA with Robinson than
with Gibson. They are something
of a scout, fashioning life rafts
out of our existing technologies,
even the ones we love to hate.
One of these, in their new book
Gamechanger, is social media.
In their vision of the near future,
life is as oppressively under
surveillance as it was in Dave
Eggers’s The Circle, but our
inherent conformity has been
harnessed to help humanity
bootstrap itself out of disaster.
With a reputation economy
measured in “strikes” and “strokes”,
the gig economy has been retunedto reward volunteer tasks that, bit
by bit, are returning the world to
order from the chaos of what the
book refers to as “The Setback”.
Beckett’s world-building skills
are formidable and their story
is compelling. But it isn’t fun.
Even if you recognise the necessity
of retuning human nature, the
measures that assure compliance
here feel oppressive.
Social media keeps individuals
fixed in a circle of hell woven
together by Twitter mentions.
Anyone can request anyone else’s
full history of media utterances and
appearances. Assistants like Siri
have metastasised into inescapable
“sidekicks” that monitor everything
from your calorie intake to your
social reputation, perpetually
nudging you to stay in line.
Is there a better way to achieve
the same ends? We need ideas
on how to steer ourselves into
a world we can actually live in.
With luck, a book is now being
written somewhere that will
paint a picture of ecological
redemption that is less dependent
on hive-mind fascism. ❚Do our visualisations of the
future world influence how
things will turn out? GO
RODE
NKOF
F/GET
TY
IMAGESWriting wrongs
How do we get the world out of the mess it is in?
Sally Adee explores a new sci-fi genre that could help
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