Science Fiction Isn't About the Future

A couple of weeks back I purchased a copy of Phillip K. Dick's Five Novels of the 1960s & 1970s, a compilation of five of Dick's novels put together by the Modern Library Association.

I began reading the first novel in the edition, Martian Time-Slip, and it reinforced to me the old critical stance that science fiction is a genre that isn't about the future. It's about the present.

Dick's novel, while set in a future Martian colony, isn't about that future. It's about the America of the 1960s. The themes that Dick deals with here are the questions raised then: self-worth tied to career/economic competence, education as disguised propaganda, the corruption of society engendered by money and power.

It's a powerful vision of a world I grew up in, and it reminds me about some of the worst and best of things living in that time forty-plus years ago.

The Martian setting simply allows Dick a blank canvas with which to contruct these themes, a setting that he can manipulate at his pleasure and without concerns about accuracy and historicity. He can paint on this canvas what he will.

Yet there is enough difference between the America of the 1960s and the America of the late 2000s that we can clearly see that what Dick has created is his own vision of the 1960s, with his characters, their world, and their destinies laid out according to his understanding of the problems of American life. His insights are brilliant, even if some of them are now out of date.

It's this datedness that makes it possible to see the role that the present plays in any attempt to portray a future in science fiction. There's no way we can ever anticipate more than a fraction of the future, and if, like H.G. Wells, we guess at some things--poison gas, heat rays, tanks, and weapons of mass destruction--we are probably more fortunate than prescient.

Instead of trying to master the crystal ball as writers of SF, we ought to be turning the lense of that ball on what we know of the world today, so our fiction can capture those important ideas and themes that are worth illuminating today, and leave the future for those who will inhabit it. If they read our works in that far-flung future, it won't be for telling them what we guessed at then, but for what we knew about our own time and place today, a past that they'd like to recapture or at least understand, as we want to understand the world of Wells and Dick.