Professor Bainbridge...on law, politics, religion, culture & food

Writing Near-Future SF about the USA

British SF writer Charles Stross has a long and thoughtful post about the perils of writing near-future SF about the USA:

The US government is currently hemorrhaging over 600Bn a year on military and security spending, against a domestic budget around the $350Bn mark. It’s uniquely credit-worthy because of the dollar’s status as a de facto planetary reserve currency, and because when you get down to it, the USA is still one of the most productive nations, with around 25-30% of planetary GDP and only 5% of planetary population.

But the US government has been spending money faster than its economy could earn it, while the hollowing-out of its financial infrastructure continued, and we’re now seeing the biggest financial crisis since 1929. Even in August, about 9% of all mortgages in the USA were in arrears or in default, and that’s before the latest round of ARM resets. It’s the collapse of a gigantic credit bubble, and it’s hard to see where the US government is going to turn for the money it needs to keep those overseas military commitments going. ...

Put yourself in the shoes of an SF author trying to construct an accurate (or at least believable) scenario for the USA in 2019. Imagine you are constructing your future-USA in 2006, then again in 2007, and finally now, with talk of $700Bn bailouts and nationalization of banks in the background. Each of those projections is going to come out looking different. Back in 2006 the sub-prime crisis wasn’t even on the horizon but the big scandal was FEMA’s response (or lack thereof) to Hurricane Katrina. In 2007, the sub-prime ARM bubble began to burst and the markets were beginning to turn bearish. (Oh, and it looked as if the 2008 presidential election would probably be down to a fight between Hilary Clinton and Rudy Giuliani.) Now, in late 2008 the fiscal sky is falling; things may not end as badly as they did for the USSR, but it’s definitely an epochal, historic crisis.

As far as the real world issues go, there was at least as much sense of imperial decline in the US during the Carter years. The economy was in shambles, everybody thought the world was running out of oil, the US military looked like a paper tiger, and the odds were high that if the Soviets came through the Fulda Gap they’d make it to the Channel without breaking too much of a sweat. So I’m not sure I buy the parallels between the decline of the Soviet or British empires and the USA’s current situation.

Having said that, we do live in interesting times. Global warming, large scale species extinctions, wars, terrorism, and financial crisis. The Cold War era in general produced a ton of post-apocalytpic fiction and the interesting times of the 1970s, in particular, produced some classics of the genre (e.g., Stephen King’s The Stand). So if I were a science fiction writer, I’d be tempted to focus near-term SF on apocalytpic and post-apocalyptic themes.

Indeed, I already see a few signs that there might be a surge in post-apocalyptic SF and fantasy. In 2006, for example, we had a modern classic of the genre in The Road by Cormac McCarthy, which is forthcoming in film. On a somewhat more pedestrian level, we had the Resident Evil film series. How about Max Brooks’ wonderful World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War? I just finished reading Terry Brooks’ Genesis of Shannara series, which might be the best thing he’s ever done and lays the origins of Shannara series in a near-future USA scarred by war, disease, and environmental collapse. Just to name a few.

If there were a prediction market for literary genres, I’d lay heavy money on the post-apocalyptic category. For some odd reason, people seem to like reading about the world going down the tubes when they’re scared that world is really going down the tubes.