The singulatarian spectrum
Posted by goatchurch at 1:49 AM
Mundane SF, like atheism, is so completely mainstream in science and futurology that it's rare that anyone bothers to mention it. The IEEE Spectrum magazine has published a Special Issue on the Singularity aka Rapture of the nerds, pointing out often forgotten issues like:
IT'S A LITTLE EARLY TO TALK ABOUT SIMULATING CONSCIOUSNESS ON MACHINES WHEN WE BARELY KNOW ABOUT THE NEUROLOGY OF A SEA SLUG
but that doesn't ever seem to dampen speculation by those who would also be counting on a painless replacement for fossil fuels in the next ten years, or anti-gravity cars.
The editors gave a good interview in this week's Scientific American Podcast.
Take home message:
In actuality in the future we'll be wondering whether our great technology is able to perform basic requirements, like feeding us. The best scientists in the world using the fastest and most high-tech computers have made the predictions to within a practical margin of error.
Now pay attention to it.
IT'S A LITTLE EARLY TO TALK ABOUT SIMULATING CONSCIOUSNESS ON MACHINES WHEN WE BARELY KNOW ABOUT THE NEUROLOGY OF A SEA SLUG
but that doesn't ever seem to dampen speculation by those who would also be counting on a painless replacement for fossil fuels in the next ten years, or anti-gravity cars.
The editors gave a good interview in this week's Scientific American Podcast.
Take home message:
- God doesn't exist
- There's no evidence that our pitiful technology is going to somehow invent God in the next ten or a hundred years
- You will die like all other humans before you.
In actuality in the future we'll be wondering whether our great technology is able to perform basic requirements, like feeding us. The best scientists in the world using the fastest and most high-tech computers have made the predictions to within a practical margin of error.
Now pay attention to it.
25 Comments:
What does Mundane SF have to do with atheism? The hostile reaction to Mundane SF all along has been a consequence not of its content (after all, it makes a lot of sense) but of its execution. Now you want to put the final nail in the coffin by marrying it to the childish Culture Wars? Now not only is there a list of off-limits tropes in Mundane SF, but it turns out you have to be a declared atheist as well?
You guys are killing yourselves with your own contradictions and double-binds. The problem with space opera and the other tropes you're opposed to is tech-fetishism. What Science Fiction needs is less Science (capital S, i.e. less Scientism.) Unfortunately, most of the arguments presented on this blog rely heavily upon What Scientists Know To Be Correct Right Now. No wonder Mundane SF has found so few allies (usually the best you can get is SF writers saying "I don't support it, but I'm a closet sympathizer.")
Your enemy is Scientism, not the lack of it. Mundane SF needs to find some people to speak for it who actually understand why it's needed.
My problem with Mundane-SF has always been the sense of elitism and pretentiousness that comes with it.
Now, you've categorized yourselves with the even more pretentious notion that you're smarter than everyone else because you recognize that God doesn't exist. Despite what Mundane-SF seems to claim, spirituality doesn't make people stupid or less scientific. Believing in something isn't childish, nor is it a sign of a lesser ability to see the world with an open mind.
The movement of Mundane-SF has a noble, underlying concept, but it's followers have it mind that by simply believing in it they're better than other people. There are a lot of very good speculative fiction writers who take it upon themselves to be very socially conscious people. Sometimes that is reflected in their writing; other times it is not. But to claim that by not writing Mundane-SF, you are blind to the troubles of mankind or our future, is naive and ignorant.
You expect others to be enlightened by your ideal of a perfect society that is continually aware of its own downfall, but you reject any attempt at reconciliation with that future that's anything other than your own. It's sad. As the anonymous poster said, you have to make friends if you want allies, and you certainly haven't done so thus far by rejecting all of those people who could have been followers if not for your disdain for the very people you help you preserve the future.
You should read The Religious Case Against Belief. There is a difference between Blind-Faith Believers and Open-Minded Followers. Classifying all those who are pious as the former is insulting, and this is coming from someone who's not either of those two things. And if you want to look at scientists who are spiritual - and who are very much intelligent men - read this article: http://www.sacred-texts.com/aor/einstein/einsci.htm.
Mundane-SF may one day be the new wave of the science fiction genre, but until it grows up and recognizes that it's not going to be making any kind of headway in converting the masses.
The problem is that they've left a bunch of narrow-minded Scientists (note, again, the capital S, as not all scientists are narrow-minded, but all followers of Scientism are) in charge of a literary polemic. Are any of these people even SF writers? Who is "goatchurch"? Which one of them is Geoff Ryman? Why have they taken down the manifesto and failed to put forth a new one?
It's sad when the very people who most agree with the premise of a manifesto are the ones who the most put off by its abysmal execution. Ryman needs to fire these people and find someone with wit and personality. I hear the Cyberpunks have all gone Green--maybe Bruce Sterling is available.
I've been lurking on this blog for a while and I find all the vitriol expressed in the previous comments funny. As far as I can tell the Mundanistas have simply invented a new SF subgenre in a manner similar to the New Wave, Cyberpunk, Steampunk, and Space Opera have done before, and in all proability will be done again in the future. There's no reason to get upset at this; it's just silly. To judge by somme commentary I've read you'd think that the Mundanistas were a totalitarian movement dedicated to stamping out any SF that is not Mundane. I see no such tendancy on their part. Instead they've just pointed out what they see as a few problems of current SF and are seeking to correct them by inventing a new subgenre of SF.
I suspect what really ruffles some SF Fans about Mundane SF is the way reality comes crashing through the front door of fantasy. It poops the party everyone is having in Science Fantasyland. I'm an atheist myself and have borne the fury of believers many times when I even dare suggest the possibility that there may be something wrong with their beliefs. I sense a similar kind of reaction on the part of the detractors of Mundane SF: Don't you dare interrupt my dream with reality! Grrrr! In a way I can understand this kind of reaction; you might compare it to having the telephone ring while having sex.
But that's what the Mundanistas are saying: reality is calling and there are no sweet nothings like FTL travel or consciousness uploads to tickle your ear. DEAL WIT IT!
This is where I think Mundane SF has a connection to atheism: Like FTL travel, there's no credible evidence for the existence of god. And so like FTL travel, god should be left out of Mundane SF.
For over 20 years I've been very frustrated with SF simply because I know that what I'm seeing on the screen or reading in a book is implausible, impossible, or just silly. I wince when space ships make whooshing noises in outer space because there's no air to carry sound. For me the experience of SF falls to the ground with a dull thud when I realize what I'm reading or seeing can't work. If FTL travel isn't possible then Star Trek doesn't work either. I don't know how many times I've experienced this collapse of belief and told myself I might as well go read things like Lord of The Rings in place of SF because what I just read can't work. If I'm going off on a flight of pure fantasy I might as well be honest and dispense with the pretense of science. There's not enough room in a light sabre for all the power it needs so it might as well be a magical sword.
I wish that the detractors of Mundane SF would realize that for some people SF does not work simply because the mechanisms that make mainstream SF "work", dont. Instead these tropes ruin SF for poor ubelieving schlubs such as I.
And even if some of the may work someday due to advances in science and technology, I still find it irritating because it's out of my reach, so why bother? If we figure out a way to
Maybe another way of putting is Mundane SF is putting more emphasis on the Science in Science Fiction, while mainstream SF puts more emphasis on the Fiction. It's as simple as that.
Voltaire, your post applies to people who are against the premise of Mundane SF, but it doesn't apply to the comments above, which are from people who agree with the premise (we want Mundane SF to flourish) but are frustrated with the poor execution of the movement/polemic.
As for the analogy of evidence for God to evidence for FTL, it's a bad one. Even if you take What Scientists Know To Be Correct Right Now as gospel, there is evidence against things like FTL, whereas there is no evidence for or against the various gods and/or spiritual dimensions to reality that religious people believe in. This is the problem with atheism (I'm an agnostic, by the way, not a religious person), which is that atheists claim knowledge (that there are no gods, spiritual phenomena, etc.) without evidence supporting that knowledge, which is what they take issue with religious people for doing, so that atheism is just another religion. Only agnosticism acknowledges the lack of evidence either way. A proper Mundane SF would have to be agnostic. The idea that all ways of life that include belief in the possibility of experiences that have not yet been explained or precluded by science should be exlcuded from Mundane SF is ludicrous.
Again, this isn't an argument against Mundane SF, it's an argument against dooming Mundane SF to fail. Nobody is implying that the "rules" for Mundane SF are being imposed on all of SF; but they are being imposed on Mundane SF! And if you want people to join a movement, you need to not alienate everyone who doesn't subscribe to precisely the same narrow ideology that you do. There are fatal contradictions between the Mundane program and the worldview of its official proponents, and the people who Mundane SF should most want to attract are among the people most put off by the polemic thus far.
it's amazing how the text ", like atheism", can generate such an attack. I think poster goatchurch was just pointing out that people don't talk about atheism really in the science/futurology world, its just out there and is a very common belief within that niche of thought. Some thoughts from a speculative fiction fan...
1. Mundane SF wasn't "created" as a genre. It definitely seems to have 1) a moral element to its spawning and 2) to have spawned from a sense of responsibility that some SF writers had toward our species generally, and towards SF readers specifically. That responsibility can be broadly represented by the notion that through literature, people can be taught that this world is all we have and we need to act consciously toward shaping its future.
2. Science Fiction doesn't need anything. It's not going to die because there's a huge element of the SF-verse that is into tech-fetishism. Fads come and go, but people will always be writing about what could be, about what can be done, and about what next thing our species is going to do, create, spawn, etc.
3. Scientism is not the enemy of Mundane SF.
4. There is no unified Mundane SF movement, there never will be a unified movement, and there never should be a unified one, not in the sense that every blog reader who supports the movement should feel "at one" with every post on the Mundane SF blog.
5. Mundane SF is a genre organized around a few central principles, and does not need to be spread like gospel. It will have its supporters and its detractors, it will gather up and it will alienate, and it will split into factions. That's inevitable and if people don't like where it goes, start a new faction or something like that.
1. Tact and diplomacy have no place in a polemic.
2. Without a polemic, a manifesto and movement are pointless.
3. Why prune the sentence down to "like atheism" and remove the context? The sentence was "Mundane SF, like atheism, is so completely mainstream in science and futurology that it's rare that anyone bothers to mention it." That sentence, coupled with the rest of the post (the typical Mundane-SF formula of "Here's what some guy said at a talk and here's why we agree with him..."), gives the impression that the author of the post sees a parallel between atheism and Mundane SF (i.e. that they are both correct), does it not?
4. Which provokes the question, which still hasn't been answered: What does Mundane SF have to do with atheism?
Which provokes the question, which still hasn't been answered: What does Mundane SF have to do with atheism?
I think part of the point of Mundane SF is that we have a responsibility to recognize in our fiction the dangers our planet faces.
That we will not be saved by the rapture of the nerds....nor the rapture of the Christians....nor any other supernatural force.
We're on our own. Living with our ecosystem or dying with it.
In that respect I think that a criticism of the supernatural is just as Mundane as its criticism of magical science---neither superhuman AIs nor dieties are going to save our bacon.
We must do it ourselves.
I don't understand why people seem to think that science must be diametrically opposed to belief in God. While I don't subscribe to the idea that we crawled out of the swamps and eventually developed beyond the level of chimpanzee, I fully believe that God has allowed some natural selection to occur. To quote a certain nun singing in a movie, "nothing comes from nothing." Is it plausible that the energy for the Big Bang came from an omnipotent Being? I think so; where else could it have come from? Think of how much matter we are talking about! Galaxies and galaxies worth of matter and the athiests say it came from nothing?
Also, all scientists are not athiests, or even agnostics. I personally know a physics professor teaching at a University of CA campus who is a Creationist. In my opinion, we do a great injustice by pigeonholing people into slots where they don't belong. It puts people who don't fit into the assigned hole on the defensive and it allows sweeping assumptions to be made. IMHO God is anything but mundane!
I don't understand why people seem to think that science must be diametrically opposed to belief in God.
The scientific mindset isn't, in and of itself, opposed to the belief in God. It is, however, contrary to scientific attitudes to believe things we have no rational basis for thinking true (and belief in dieties falls into that category).
If we lived in a world where God regularly sent angels to earth to publicly give his Word and allowed our loved ones to visit from beyond the grave and tell us about the afterlife we who tend to demand evidence before believing things (that is, those of us viewing religious claims with a scientific mindset) would consider theism and supernaturalism in general to be scientifically verified.
Unfortunately, though, the world we observe appears exactly as one would expect if the supernatural didn't exist.
Is it plausible that the energy for the Big Bang came from an omnipotent Being? I think so; where else could it have come from? Think of how much matter we are talking about! Galaxies and galaxies worth of matter and the athiests say it came from nothing?
Nontheists don't have to assume the Big Bang came from "nothing" (I certainly make no such claim). Our Big Bang may, for example, be only part of a vastly larger physical reality. We simply have no evidence regarding what preceded the Big Bang. The scientifically sound attitude is not to assume it came from nothing (nor from God) but to continue to investigate the question until we find out and admit, in the meantime, that its one of the many scientific questions currently unanswered.
Also, all scientists are not athiests, or even agnostics.
I've never known an atheist or agnostic to claim otherwise.
Scientists, after all, are human and can be as irrational outside their narrow scientific pursuits as anyone else.
:)
In other news, heavier-than-air flight won't ever happen, and we'll never do anything with atomic energy. Look, the supposedly grand claims of Kurzweil and company amount to next to nothing on the cosmic scale. The energy and matter required to provide abundance and happiness to all of us would hardly register. If you enjoy wallowing in perceived insignificance, view things that way. The potential for AI and nanotechnology to bring about human dreams of plenty in no way makes this outcome less likely. The truth is, creating a paradise for us naked apes wouldn't be such a monumental feat. To the laws of physics and the universe, we're simply not that important.
The truth is, creating a paradise for us naked apes wouldn't be such a monumental feat.
If we were rational beings it wouldn't be. Unfortunately, human psychology gets in the way.
I've never seen so much anonymity on a blog before...
anyway, mundane SF just sounds like a poor rebranding of hard SF, and its hardly a new genre. I'd argue that some of Asimov and Lem would fit into this category but would never label them as mundane. And since SF, the good SF, is about ideas coming up with and writing about things which haven't and may never happen is the fun of the exercise and the pleasure of reading it. Both authors and readers should have a little sense of humour.
Are we aware that mundane means boring? According to my dictionary "lacking interest or excitement"... so I'm going to say I'm against this movement, I'm all for things being of interest.
Not to go on too long but there's room for all kinds and the world doesn't really need another manifesto. Let the internet provide all the niches we can desire.
'that couldnt really happen' must count as one of the most boring and asinine comments one can make about any story.
turns out you cant travel in time , there's no life on mars and invisibility is unlikely to be developed any time soon. HG Wells still wrote some cracking stories which had more to say about the human condition than any fifty 'realistic' works of fiction you could list.
science is a wonderful thing of course, but I'd far rather be entertained than be technically correct any day, to paraphrase slartibartfarst.
I'd suggest that if you cant enjoy something because its 'scientifically inaccurate' (as far as you know, that is) the problem lies with you, not the work in question.
Dave Lewis
Does Mundane SF have to be near future?
I have a story in which there is no FLT, no AI, no aliens, no time travel, no Singularity, no flash and bang of any kind. But there is a time, millions of years of it, and that alone is to transform the human race. Can a story set 2 million or 20 million years in the future be considered Mundane SF?
My impression was no; the stylistic requirements of Mundane SF are near future.
What happened to Mundane-SF?
Was it but a conspiracy to sell that issue of _Interzone_? The lack of posts leaves me wondering... if the mundanistas are as serious as I am, about the potential of SF to deal with real problems in a realistic way. Far as I can tell, they either died out for lack of interest or abandoned the SF label and this site altogether.
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'Rapture of the Nerds'? I'm far more interested in, and frightened by, the millennarian, apocalytic, escatalogical and soteriological nature of the environmentalist movement - yet another political religion for athiests. The horrors of the 20th Century have clear taught some people nothing.
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