ACFM - ACFM Microdose: Sci-Fi

Episode Date: September 28, 2025

After last week’s ACFM Trip to the Future, Jem and Keir reconvene to talk about science fiction. Is sci-fi a reaction to the “time-space compression” of the present? Is it inherently progressive? How did dystopian and paranoids visions of the future come to dominate sci-fi? Was Arthur C. Clarke an early acid communist? Find all […]

This is Acid Man Hello and welcome to ACFM, the home of the weird left. I'm Jeremy Gilbert and I'm here for this special microdose episode with my good friend Kim Ilbert. Hello. And we are going to be talking about a subject which is related to the subject of our most recent main episode. That is a discussion on the idea of the future. And what we're going to be doing today is we're going to be talking a bit about the history and actuality of science fiction, the fictional genre most obviously associated with ideas of the future and futurity. but Keir, I think this was initially your idea. So where are we going to start talking about sci-fi? I do this podcast so I can talk about all the things I'm interested in

and pretend that I'm working, as I've said many times before. And we've already done a podcast where we went through films about aliens, so we're going to steer clear a little bit away from that. I think we should sort of start by trying to give some sorts of definitions of what science fiction is, you know, where the boundaries are perhaps, although it's not always the most interesting, but like what holds it together this category of science fiction, perhaps even the history of the term,

you know, the history of the genre to some degree. So there are various offerings about what science fiction, what the core of science fiction is. Perhaps actually early sort of like definitions. We're all about literature, initially literature, obviously then goes on to be film and TV and etc., etc., but literature which deals with changes in science and technology and you know really science fiction probably starts you know around the end of the 19th century and into the 20th century of course

I have big precursors to that which we'll talk about later but you know during that time where there's this really big technological revolution going on when we have stuff like electricity etc and all these sorts of inventions which then go on to really quite rapidly change you know a way people live etc And you could sort of root it in that. And like early discussions about trying to name some of this stuff, people talked about scientifician, which isn't very good. Yeah, scientific fiction. And they were talking about people like Juven and H.G. Wells, etc., which will come on to.

But people have tried to talk in theoretical terms about what science fiction is, you know, in science fiction studies as it develops. I don't know when that develops, 70s, 80s into that sort of thing. there's this really famous sort of canonical definition of science fiction. It's from a theorist called Darko Suvin, it's from 1979. He said science fiction is a literary genre whose necessary and sufficient conditions are the presence and interaction of estrangement and cognition

and whose main formal device is an imaginative framework alternative to the author's empirical environment. So it's like basically this is a literature of cognitive estrangement. what do you think about that definition? I think it is. I've always thought that definition is so general. I mean, it seems like it could apply to a lot of things. Yeah.

I mean, there's a lot of literature of cognitive estrangement. Maybe all of modernism is about cognitive estrangement. And the imaginative framework alternative to the author's empirical environment, I mean, isn't that anyone who doesn't write about their own life? Isn't that just fiction? I think, yeah, I think you're right. I think you have to sort of expand on it a little bit. But, like, if you think about, like, so the estrangement bit is to distinguish it from, like,

realist fiction, basically. Sure, sure, but all of, but formerly all of modernism is trying to distance itself from. Yeah, no, no, totally. But, like, modernism, we can make this sort of distinction now. Modernism, in a large way, estrangement through style. Is that supposed to be a definition of science fiction, or is it supposed to be a sort of justification for it? Well, it's both. because I've always read that quote to be honest more as a justification for it

from a perspective within like American literary studies which is still should have deeply committed to the historic norms of modernism so basically basically it's saying oh all SF is basically modernist fiction therefore it's fine to study it yeah but yeah but I think you can make distinctions between like modernist fiction in that like the style of sci-fi quite a large amount of sci-fi just basically is really quite like banar. Yeah, yeah, sure, that's true.

Whereas, like, you know, the estrangement in lots of modernist fiction is like by using avant-garde style and by having, you know, it's sort of like a focus on cognitive estrangement through a focus on the form of expression rather than the content, something like that, I think you might, you could make some sort of distinction. I don't know whether any of that holds up, do you know what I mean? But I still think, I think it's worth starting with that. And you're absolutely right. I imagine quite a lot of this sort of literary studies is trying to make a justification for why it's legitimate to study it in university context, I should imagine. It's like quite a big impulse for that. But like one of the distinctions it makes then, you could sort of make a distinction, like the estrangement distinguishes it from realist fiction, perhaps mainstream

fiction. And then the cognitive bit is the bit, which distinguishes it from something like, well, according to Darko Suven, something like fantasy, basically. basically, like myth or something like that. And so here's, you know, the estrangement of fantasy, you know, the discontinuities of the present in fantasy, you know, they don't have a rational explanation to them. You know, the discontinuities are irrational to some degree. Whereas science fiction is, you know, there is some sort of continuity with the actual,

basically. Do you know what I mean? There's some sort of cognitive continuity with the actual, well, actually it exists. And that's some sort of distinction between science fiction and fantasy. I'm not absolutely sure that holds up, especially when you get into like weird fiction, you know, and China, maver and people like this sort of stuff. Yes.

But like it's a starting point, basically. Well, it is. It is. And also, I mean, I've known people want to make the claim. Actually, my old, my friend and colleague Debbie Shaw, in a cultural power politics seminar once made the claim that science fiction is inherently progressive and fantasies inherently conservative.

It's quite sweeping. Yeah, yeah, it's probably indefensible, really. I read this book by Carl Friedman called Critical Theory and Science Fiction. I'd be wanted to read it for a while, and I thought, I'll use this podcast as an excuse. As is my one, I quite often use these podcasts to watch a load of films I haven't watched as well. He's making this argument that, like, there's some sort of affinity between critical theory and science fiction, basically.

And so he says, like science fiction, like critical theory, insists upon historical mutability, historical changeability, material reducibility, a utopian possibility. So the material reproducibility, no, sorry. Reducability. Reducability. That's linking to the sort of the roots of it in science and technology, that sort of stuff. You know, and so he says, you know, a science fiction world is a world whose difference is concretized within a cognitive continuum with the actual.

So he's sort of saying that, basically, in some sort of way, science fiction is a bit like critical theory. It estranges you from the present so you can have a critical perspective on it. And inherently, that means that you get these other effects, like historical mutability and, like, you know, opening up of utopian possibility, basically, or that the future can be different to the present sort of idea. It's good that definition, I think. It works quite well. I think we'll have to problematize that later on, because that is almost like a claim that, like, science fiction is just through its form, it's inherently progressive, like Debbie was saying.

But then we have to account for like, there's quite a lot of right-wing science fiction and right-wing users of science fiction, so perhaps we could come to that a bit later. I think it's also just important to acknowledge that science fiction is a huge element of the culture now, in a way, it wasn't in the same way. I mean, maybe in retrospect it seems like it was.

Like when we were kids, it was seen as a really niche part of the culture, even though Star Trek had been really popular on the TV, you know the 70s is sort of golden age of the pulp paperback in genre fiction so horror fantasy detective fiction science fiction westerns they're all sort of hugely popular and then i mean now you can sort of look back on the 70s and you can say that star wars close encounters then et the very beginning of the 80s they really end up defining the science fiction blockbuster film as the definitive popular cultural form in a way we can get onto the question of whether star wars is is classifiable as science fiction.

Don't at me yet about that. But, I mean, it's something we've talked about on the show before with regard to fantasy, actually, that these things that were once sort of niche genre fictions, they're really kind of ubiquitous in the culture now. Lavish TV shows, like really popular book series, obviously in gaming. I mean, obviously gaming culture has something to do with this,

because isn't it, like, computer games are drawing on science fiction imagery from the very first, the very first computer games ever devised, I think it was a sort of asteroid game, wasn't it? The MIT Labs. And, you know, that's partly because, you know, Silicon Valley and pre-Cilican Valley, like, IT culture has kind of science fiction culture woven into it

just anthropologically, and as part of the cultural materials that people who were developing computing had around them, really going back to the 40s. So those are all reasons why it's an important thing to get into, I think. Yeah, absolutely, yeah, yeah. like the nerds have won is like a real cliche of the of the culture but it's also sort of like interesting when we get into it a bit later you know this idea that like there's been sort of

like science fiction fans being these alienated outside and nerds but there's been in science fiction fandom like at least a wing of of this idea that they are the ones who are forward thinking in some sort of way they're they're better than everyone else you know what I mean and it's a sort of trend which really fits with the present oligarchic like a sort of hierarchical sort of conception of our division in human kind you know really fits with our current oligarchic structure basically with the idea that you know there's only a very few people who are productive really productive and productive and productive of the future and that's these the Elon Musks etc and of course all of those

are like really well actually that's not too but like yeah Elon Musk is like drenched in science fiction he completely misreads Ian Banks' culture series which is actually a communist but like you know this idea of going to Mars et cetera

although they're also drenched in like fantasy aren't they because like you know Palantier for instance is a reference to Lord of the Rings and all that sort of stuff so perhaps my perhaps this line doesn't hold up that one yeah all that is true

all that is true I'd say from what I know about the sort of actual history the anthropological history of that class fraction of tech innovators really going back to like the MIT labs in the early 50s then they were really into science fiction they were into science fiction first probably and then Lord of the Rings

becomes like a big part of their sort of imaginarium in the 60s yeah that is true actually there was a famous hobbit dialogue tree game wasn't there really early in the 80s if you read that book hackers that kind of famous history of that scene like they're using like Tolkien names as usernames like in before the 70s

and stuff like this but but it's the but it's the pulp science fiction magazines that would have been the main kind of thing that they would have been reading like before that one of the other reasons you'd want to talk about sci-fi is because like one of the cliches about it is that you know science fiction is

it's basically a way to get a view on the present you know what I mean and it's this idea that lots of science fiction what you're taking you're taking sort of trends or technology or social trends, these sorts of things, and then extrapolating them to a sort of like, to the utmost, you know what I mean, to reveal what their full sort of potential in some sort of way. And so, like, you know, when we go through this history,

we're obviously going to be relating it to like the times, but it's also, it's not just that you get a view on the social history of the time where they're produced. It's also, you know, you're getting a glimpse into possible futures that never came to be, that sort of idea, I think. Yeah, that's right. Yeah, so, yeah. I mean, how people imagine the,

future at any given moment is a hugely important part of the culture. We should probably say something about our sort of relationship to this stuff as well. You know, when I was really young, my mum really liked like classic science fiction, like Asimov and Alphecy Clark. So we had those books around the house and there's some of the first books. I think the first adult books I ever read actually would have been Asimov and Arthi Clark books. And I sort of grow up, sort of thinking of myself up to my late teens, as being quite into something. fiction and knowing quite a lot about it. But then I also, I feel like I've only casually kept up with it for the past few decades. And I sort of, I sort of feel quite guilty about that. I feel like

I should have kept up with it more than I have. I think of you, rightly or wrongly, I think of you as having kept up with it better than I have. Yes, you're now going to reveal how wrong you are. But now we've covered Gilbert's guilt. We added another line to Gilbert's guilt. Let's begin the history. I mean, it's a bit controversial, isn't it, where you start the history of science fiction? Well, it is, isn't it? Because there are various tropes

which are often associated in people's minds with science fiction, like space travel, which do appear in some really early fiction. And so it's often the text that is often mentioned as being the very first piece of science fiction is a Latin, it was a Latin sort of short story or actually a sort of novella by Luke Hian of Samasata, it was a Syrian author writing, I think, when was it?

It was about the second century, I think, second or third century. And there's a book just called a true story, and it's just a kind of wild, quite surreal sort of fantasy story. I mean, it's more like swift sort of gullivan travels or something like that than anything else. It has a lot of satirical evidence and people fighting giant spiders, but it includes traveling through space and going to the moon, I think maybe to other planets and meeting, yeah, and meeting sort of aliens. So it's sometimes cited as the very first work

of science fiction, although it's not really, it's really, I'm going to say, it's really science fantasy. And if listeners aren't geeky, enough to know the difference. You will be by the end of this podcast. I mean, really, you start getting into definitions of science fiction when you want to define what it isn't. We should also mention that a lot of people don't like the term science fiction today. The popular term quite often is speculative fiction, which is broader in a way.

But historically, there's a differentiation made between science fiction and science fantasy, and science fiction in that definitional diet, science fiction is presumed to have some sort of a kind of imaginative relationship, indeed, to the present, even if you're just extrapolating from things that are happening now into some imagined, like, incredibly far future, or if you're imagining things happening in other dimensions, they get access through some technological means, then it's probably science fiction. But it's science fantasy, it's basically fantasy, but you know, you might have laser swords and spaceships. So importantly, for example, George Lucas, who created Star Wars, has always said

Star Wars is not science fiction. It's science fantasy, because it doesn't take place in an imagined future of Earth or anywhere. It takes place a long time ago in the galaxy far far away. And on Lucas's own account, you know, Jedi are really sort of space wizards. They're not using advanced technology. They're using psychic power. So that's part of the distinction. And from that point of view, a true story is not science fiction at all. It's science fantasy or sort of space fantasy. There's this other book when we were researching this. I knew about a true story already. I didn't really know about this one. It's a book called a book by, apparently it's a novel literally by Kepler, Johannes Kepler himself, famous scientist of the early 17th century,

really important like astronomer. And he writes a novel which, you know, it also features people sort of travelling through space or going to the moon or stars or stuff. The book is called Somnium. And all I know about it really is that we learned about it

when we were researching it. Apparently the famous American, so popular astronomer, Carl Sagan and Isaac Asimov, the great American science fiction writer thought that was the first ever. Sci-fi novel. I think because it's based on

Copernicus's discoveries about the solar system. So it does actually incorporate some actual known science into it so they classified that as science fiction so that that is interesting but as you'll as we can see there's a kind of persistent question all the way through as to whether there's really a hard distinction between science fiction and fantasy and whether there's really a distinction between kind of imagined science and magic in a lot of stories i mean if we want to take the history of sci-fi up to um i think we could call it modern times

One of the places you'd go to would be Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, which is published in 1818. You know, it is definitely fiction around the fears around science, basically, the discovery of electricity, etc., the possibility of reanimating corpses or even constructing bodies out of pits of corpses, etc., etc., etc. You could sort of read it as like it's a warning about science, or it could be that it's a warning about the failure to take scientific innovation, responsibly. I'll treat it responsibly and thoughtfully or something like that.

I mean, if you really push me on what kind of a novel is Frankenstein, I'm going to say it's a straightforward philosophical novel. Like it's not really, it doesn't really matter whether it's scientific premises of any validity. And it's a philosophical novel about the question of the nature of ethical responsibility, basically, in an atheistic situation, and it's in a context in which you can't rely on received tradition to tell you what is and isn't right all wrong. And so in that sense it is an Enlightenment, philosophical novel, basically. But it certainly

it is the case that, you know, the key inspiration for it is the very cutting-edge experiments with electricity that were starting to happen at the time. And the fact that people had found out you could get a dead frog to twitch its legs by running an electric current through it, which is quite startling to people. I think you also have to take

account of the fact that Mary Shelley wrote another novel, much less well known, called The Last Man, which is a dystopian novel set in the future. And I think between The Last Man and Frankenstein, you've got to say Mary Shelley is the first science fiction writer, basically, of modern times. It's interesting to note, though, like 1818 is Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, really early because, like, the next book we're going to talk about is 1871, which is 20,000

leagues under the sea by Jules Verne. And so Jules Verne is seen as like an originator of science fiction. Not all of his books are really science fiction. It's a little bit, are they science fiction? Have they got the former science fiction? 20,000 leagues under the sea, certainly has is, you know, it's about a submarine called an Autolus, you know, captain by Captain Nemo, you know, and at the time, you know, that idea that you could, you know, have a submarine which can go under the sea and be there for a long, a long time. I'm not sure. I think there might just have been the first inklings of like really primitive submarines at that point, but it certainly really is far-fetched science fiction.

And, you know, the underneath of the sea is obviously really, really mysterious place. Well, it still is today, to be honest, but they're much more at that. time that certainly is sort of science fiction then you have things such as journey to the centre of the earth which has been made into a series of absolutely terrible films over the years also a concept album by ritt waitman journey to the center of the earth thank god you don't have music on our microdosis might be weaving that in i'd forgotten all about that journey to the century yeah and there's a one where they go to the moon isn't Yeah, so you go to the moon, to the centre of the earth, and under the sea.

And like, yeah, actually, and like, you know, he's probably his most famous book is around the world in 80 days, which isn't science fiction. But it's like, you know, oh, isn't it amazing how fast we can travel around the world? They've all got like a much more of a geographical than a temporal sort of structure or something like that to them. The extraordinary voyages you can go on, you know, I mean, under the sea, to the moon, et cetera, et cetera. Well, they're also, it's interesting, isn't it? Of course, the great David Harvey, the great Marxist geographer of our time, one of them, he says that arguably the definitive experience of modernity is what he calls time-space compression. The biggest change in the way humans have lived is the way in which it becomes possible to communicate over distances

quickly and instantly and to physically travel over distances, quickly and instantly. The sense that that had already reached a point where it was presumably just going to keep going, that is what those books are all about. It's the beginning of these things seeming to be prophetic. Because obviously, like, Frankenstein didn't come true. But vehicles being able to go, like, into the depths of the, the uncharted depths of the ocean, people being able to go to the moon. We haven't been to the centre of the earth and met the aliens that live there yet.

Yes. No, I mean, I would like to go, because apparently there's all dinosaurs living down there, so it'd be really quite fascinating. Yeah, that'd be great. I'm surprised people haven't. make more of an effort. If they've got like a geographical sort of thing, then you could go to H.G. Wells, the time machine where you've definitely got this temporal dimension to science fiction, basically.

So that's 1895, right? Yeah, H.G. Wells, the British writer, Fabian socialist, novelist, yeah, extremely interesting figure, really prolific writer. He's still best known for the War of the War of the worlds that we talked about on the episode about eight UFOs and aliens and the time machine which is the first modern sort of time travel narrative you know he wrote lots of like non-speculative non-genre fiction just sort of realist social fiction set set in his own time i think am veronica his book about a kind of young a young woman to studying physics at university of london is i think is my favorite of those.

And I always try and recommend to people, HGL's short stories. He wrote a big collection of short stories, and they're really, they're really weird. They're really, very weird. Like, they're more weird than you think they're going to be. And it sort of puts in, to me, it puts an interesting light on the whole history of kind of weird and speculative fiction, like how many kind of strange, in some cases,

which are quite disturbing ideas, he gets into those. Because they're sort of horror, some of them are sort of horror. stories. It's probably worth saying a little bit about the time machine, though, because it does set up the sort of form of science fiction really clearly as in, you know, it's about, I mean, literally somebody invents a time machine and goes forward in time, basically. And you can see this extrapolation from the future thing, to some degree anyway, because he's predicting a huge terrible war, etc., etc., then he gets back in, and the time machine goes further running, and he ends up in this situation where the world.

the split between Morlocks and Eloy. And so they're sort of, the Morlocks are these sort of troglodyte's characters. And he meets these sort of almost elven-like Eloy. I think that's how you say it. Yeah, I've never been sure. No one knows. No one has ever known. Eloy.

Yeah, I think I've got a feeling it. It sounds better, doesn't it? I think it's Eloy, yeah. But he meets them and they're sort of like intellectual, etc. And he thinks that they must be the ruling class. And in fact, they're being preyed on by the Morlocks, etc., etc. And you could totally read that as like some sort of extrapolation or comment. on like inequality

by growing inequality and grow and classivise these sorts of things. In a way it's not classic science fiction for me. For me in a way it fits more in a tradition of books you could trace back to say Thomas Moore's utopia in the 16th century

that is basically making a very obvious commentary on contemporary society and policies using some quite heavy-handed sort of imagery and sort of fantastic imagery. I mean you're right, everything you've said about it is right. But it's trying to kind of hit the late Victorian reader over the head with the idea that if you don't address

the causes of social inequality, things are going to go bad. I don't think we can limit our definition of science fiction to things which are not heavy-handed. No, you're right. Heavy-handed, making heavy-handed political points does not disqualify it from being science fiction. You're totally right, you know. And it is, of course, it is science fiction. I mean, I remember even as a little kid being really disappointed because having read like classic golden age science fiction of course i was expecting some elaborate if completely hokey explanation for how the time machine was supposed to work like how you could travel through time and there's nothing there's no explanation whatsoever he's just made it he's made a machine when you're sitting here you go into the future

you just do that's a good point actually in terms of the cognitive estrangement sort of thing is there a cognitive link. It's a little bit space wizard, isn't it? Let's face it. Yeah, it is. I mean, it's in that sense. It's just a sort of narrative day with sex smashing the time machine in the book, the time machine.

Also, in a way that like the jewels, like jewels of earn, there's always some theory as to how it would work the thing that gets you to the moon or under the sea or under the air. Yeah, a large cannon. Yeah, exactly. You get shot out of a massive cannon to go to the moon. How else are you going to get there? Dickhead.

But, no, I mean, in the time machine, he doesn't bother with that. But it's partly because, you know, he's not really that bothered about it. He's using it as a speculative device to kind of think about visions of the future. I mean, the other Tate She Wells, it might be interesting to talk about, is the Islander Dr. Moreau. And it's sort of interesting because that is sort of like, he is trying to root that in some sort of, we would call it, we should call it science.

It was science at the time, basically, this, you know, a sort of reading of evolution. which is completely in Italy, you know, specious now. But a traveller gets shipwrecked on an island and, you know, there's a mad scientist there. Dr. Moreau's been doing his experiments. He's basically doing experiments on animals in this place called the House of Pain

where he's sort of like experimenting on them to try to accelerate evolution, basically, to turn him into humans in some sort of way. And they keep devolving back into animal behaviour and this sort of idea. He honestly thought that this was, this was, this was true, it was possible to do this. And it's sort of based on this idea that

evolution has like an end point, on that end point is human beings, do you know what I mean? Which is totally specious, like it's not. There's no end point of evolution. There's no teleology to it, you know. Well, if there is, as we've established on the other episodes, it's disembodied space consciousnesses,

communicating with us through you. Yeah, yeah. I'm cautious to advance now because of your famous Lysenko Gilbertism that comes out. My last thing, co-apologism.

But, like, I wanted to raise it because, like, one of the things with H.G. Wells, he's a Fabian socialist, et cetera. But he has got a bit of a, he's got a complicated relationship to eugenics, basically, of the eugenicism of the time. Well, it's true. Well, he was a eugenicist, sort of,

like a lot of the Fabians were. I think, although, I mean, one doesn't want to make any apologies for eugenicism, but I think it's important to understand that basically eugenics were so ubiquitous that, you know, there were people who were basically eugenicists, but they also, they weren't, they weren't racists. Like they thought, and they thought that if you had a sort of adequate program

of public works and a welfare state, then the kind of the undesirable aspects of human behavior would just get kind of bred out of the population. They weren't advocating for sort of for sterilization of anyone. They weren't advocating for any sort of a racist policy. So it is true that he was sort of eugenicist in the sense that he thought, like, you know, you should do part of what should lead you to choose some policies over others would be that it would be promote sort of racial hygiene, not in the ethnic sense, but just in the sense of, you know, the fittest, healthy, as cleverest people, having more children than the less so. I mean, obviously, in the end, like, you know, we know, like, you have to, you do have to, one has to remove all traces of eugenicism from one's thought. if one doesn't want to be in danger of heading down the road towards fascism.

We know that now. But it's also important to understand that eugenics, in really general sense, eugenic ideas were so ubiquitous at that time that it was quite hard to get away from. I think, yeah, I think Miles would have objected, like, sort of the race science that goes on, they can go along with eugenics. And it's sort of interesting to think about the island of Dr. Moreau. And if we don't take it as just as literal, and you could sort of see it as a critique of colonialism, perhaps. I don't know, it's difficult, isn't it? Because it's like, it could be that he's arguing

that the animals or the beast folk, as they're called in a book, you know, the animals which have been accelerated to become more human-like, and then they're always devolving, etc. That could be an argument that's saying, you know, the inferior races of humanity basically can't be civilized. Or it could be that it's just perhaps colonialism is the house of pain, basically, you know what I mean? Perhaps the revolt of all of the beast folks who kill the they kill Dr. Murrow in the end, perhaps that is, you know, an anti-colonial revolt, I don't know.

I could be reading too much into it, but like there is a non-literal reading as well of the island of Dr. Moro. I'm not an expert on Wales's, like the details of the details of Wales's politics, but I do know that he was quite explicitly against, you know, he was against racist policies in the States, he was

basically kind of anti-colonialist. He was against notions of racial purity. Like he didn't think that the way to get eugenic success was like to segregate the races. I think he thought actually it would be better. It's better if people, the more miscagnation, the better to achieve your goal of racial strength.

So species strength would really be the way to talk about it. If he's talking about the race, he's talking about the human race. I mean, it's an interesting thing to think about, actually, I'm talking off the top of my head here now, really, but if I think back to what I know about the distribution of thoughts and opinions

on these matters back in that time the very beginning of the 20th century, it's yet another ratio on which, well, the only people who weren't at all into eugenics were amicists and communists, basically, like everyone else was into some version of it. And, you know, they were right. Who was right? The anarchist and communists. Oh, thank God for that. As always, on the right side of history. On HG Wells, it's like anti-colonialism. I know we talked about war of the worlds on their films about aliens or aliens on screen, whatever we called it, that podcast. That's obviously explicitly a, you know, it's that classic, the Martians come down and

subjugates Britain. How would you like it? How would you like it? Exactly, yeah. How would you like it if you were treated the way that we treat the Colonials is basically the sort of, you know, the message of the film? It's also good to know the name that was given in the early 20th century in the Edwardian period to the work of Jules Verne and H.G. Wells.

The term science fiction hadn't been invented yet, but it's one of my favourites. The term was scientific romances. Really? Yeah. I've always liked that. Yeah, yeah. Romance could sort of mean any novel, basically. Any prose, it could mean any prose fiction.

Let's move on to the popularization of science fiction, really, through the magazine culture of the... Well, when do the... the so-called, when do the pulp's begin? It's just after World War I, really, isn't it? Well, actually, there's this long-running magazine, which eventually becomes called Astounding Science Fiction, starts off in 1930, which is, and it's called Amazing Stories of Super Science, which is not a great magazine title, but 1930s really early. And that's in the context of what is still remembered as what were called the Pulps, and there were magazines, they were cheap paper magazines, printed on paper that we would think of

more of what you'd expect from like a kid's comic and they were called and yeah because they were made of this cheap pulp paper they were known as pulp the pulp magazines i mean the term pulp fiction it still sort of refers back to this era both of genre fiction and sort of sensationalist fiction that you would get um you get first in these magazines and eventually you would get in cheap paperbacks but you're not really you're not really getting cheap paperbacks until end of the 30s 40s I think. And it's still remembered in a way sort of specific genre and a particular era of publishing

history. And so the pulp magazines that's where people like HP Lovecraft and some of the early hover writers were publishing. And as Keir says, that's also, that's where the term science fiction first starts to be used. In fact, sci-fi is like the abbreviation of sci-fi, so it

comes out of the pulse, but not until the 1950s. Well, I wonder Astounding Science Fiction is interesting to talk about, which is this magazine, long-run in Pulp Magazine, it publishes, you know, Asimov Heinle and all these sorts of people and their first published work is there. And it comes under the editorship of this character John W. Campbell in 1933. And his sort of, his reign as editor is quite often described as,

or linked to what's known as the Golden Age of Science Fiction. And it's called that because you get the emergence of these of these absolutely classics like Asimov and Heimov and a little bit later I'll see Clark and this sort of stuff. But the thing with Campbell is that like he's notoriously right wing and he sort of like he uses his editorship to sort of structure science fiction. It has a big influence on it. And so in some ways it's like what he's interested in is like Pacey Action Stories

rather than intellectual like brain. teasers in the form of science fiction. But he's also publishing, you know, I've got a tendency to publish right-wing fiction. There is a right-wing trend in science fiction at this point, and it's sort of countered

by this group called the Futurians were a group of science fiction writers, some of whom are like communist, basically got a sort of like a link to the communist movement. They really? Yeah, yeah. I mean, I presumably you can trace that connection between a particular obsession with the heroic future and right-wing politics back to the Italian

futurist to their embrace of fascism. So, I mean, being really into rockets, rocket ships, and being a fascist, like, goes right back to the start of the 20th century. Yeah, it's always counterintuitive, because we always think, we've got off to think about conservatism anyway as being linked to, you know, defensive tradition on all these sorts of things. I mean, like, a lot of, like, right-wing science fiction, or right-wing, right-wing science fiction fans, like it's useful to spare your mind that there is this celebration of

like speed and, you know, the new, etc, etc. But quite often that is linked also. So there's a linear conception of history accelerating quickly. But quite often that's also linked to like a cyclical conception of history. In fact, what you're getting is, it is, you know, the return of like these big patterns, basically. Because what you don't want out of like a linear conception of history, which is accelerating quickly, you don't want to open up possibility too widely, basically, because otherwise, why would you need things? How could you defend contemporary hierarchies, basically, is what you'm saying, if the future is opened, you know what I mean? You have to close it down and you do it through some sort of cyclical conception of history. And you can sort of see that

in quite a lot of the Golden Age era where, like, a lot of the sort of like space opera or these, the big galactic empires, you know, they're rehearsing, like, tropes from, like, classical empires, like Rome and Greece and all that sort of stuff. Yes, yeah. The fact that there's all this sort of, like, right-wing sci-fi all there, particularly from the 1950s, but, like, you know, even still today, and, you know, even people like Ayn Rand, etc.

And, like, you know, Atlas Shrugge, you probably could say that's science fiction to some degree. Do you know what I mean? Yeah, you could, in a way, yeah. There's this sort of, like, this sort of, trend of right-winged science fiction. And it's sort of a challenge to this sort of like Darko Suvin, Carl Friedman, a conception that, like, science fiction is necessarily progressive.

Yes, I think you're right, yes. So it is a turner to that. There's this, I read this book, speculative whiteness. Science fiction and the alt-right, it tries to pick out this trend in science fiction, basically elitist trend that like, you know, basically some versions of it are the masses have like just got the wrong attitude to time.

The masses basically haven't, they're not future-oriented enough. They can't, you know, they can't do deferred gratification. They can't envision something very different from the present and then work slowly towards it. Only the elite can. Or in more racist fiction, you just, what you just say, like, there's just a racial predisposition amongst white populations for the ability to deferred gratification. long-term thinking, and the argument of that is sort of interesting, although completely spurious. It's like, oh, yeah, in northern Europe, you see, because of the winters, you have to do long-term

planning in order to survive. And for some reason, it was that moment, rather than any other part of history that got embedded in genetic, something like that. And one of the things that comes along with that is that, like, the aptitude for science fiction is inherently like white or something like that. And there's a problem there, isn't there? Because there's lots of black science fiction writers, which basically disproves your thesis. And so there's like, there's a trend of trying to, I don't know, suppress or claim science fiction for whiteness and for the white race, etc. And I just wanted to talk about this thing that I read in this white, speculative whiteners book about this. It's sort of like a game of gate for science fiction that happened

in the 2010s around the Hugo Awards, which, you know, the Hugo Awards are really massive, like they're probably the most prestigious science fiction award, but they're fan voted. basically around all different categories, et cetera. These right-wing groups called the sad puppies and the rabid puppies basically tried to do that thing where they rig to try to rig the Hugo Awards because they would get like a troll army and get like a loaded people to vote for specific books. And because everybody else is voting all over the place, they managed to basically, I think it's in like 2014, 2013, 2013, 2014, perhaps a little bit later.

they basically managed to get all of their nominations of right wing science fiction as the nominations basically and the interesting thing about that is that in the voting people completely refused that so the only options they had was right wing sort of like you know action-based sci-fi and so basically the overwhelming vote was to award no awards at all basically they they voted for no award to reject this sort of attempt to take over science fiction dumb or something like that. A little bit like the attempt by right-wing groups to take over the National Trust or something like that. You know what I mean by sort of something.

Sort of interesting. I only read about it last week. And you can sort of trace it basically to this idea of like, why would that be important to what? Like it was a little light bulb moment of why do they care so much about these trivial things like representation on TV, etc. And in some ways it's because they want to confirm the prejudices basically. of like, you know, that science fiction is inherently white.

Yeah, that's true. That's definitely true. And if we wanted to talk about right-wing science fiction, we could talk about Robert Heinlund. But let's talk about Isaac Asimov first. Well, he's an American writer, I think, from the East Coast, he really is the first, like, big star of science fiction. I mean, he starts off writing stories for the magazines,

but his books come to be, you know, very popular. and he writes this kind of epic this epic sequence of books the foundation series first one in 1942 by the way which was much earlier than I thought that's right yeah when we were researching this we kept going oh my god how early some of this stuff was

yeah so foundations of 42 and then he also writes a series of books a bit of stories and books a bit later about imagining a world with intelligent robots and imagining like how that would work and what robots with positronic brains would be like. Famously comes up

with the three laws of robotics. Yes. The three laws of robotics which would be he'd presumably be programmed into all robots which I can't remember

what they all aren't. I know that it basically means robots can't hurt people. Yeah. You must obey humans but not hurt people I can't remember. That's only two,

isn't it? There's probably a third one. Must not allow human or harm humans or allow them by inaction to come to heart. Oh yeah. It has to preserve itself

that I do remember. The robot has to preserve it. Provided it doesn't conflict with the first two. Yeah, yeah, that's right, yeah. And there's a lesser-known fourth one that you shouldn't eat fish on a Sunday. And then the foundation series is based on this idea, it's a very 1940s, very high forwardism, very, you know, ran corporation sort of idea, that if you study human behaviour, study the way societies operate on a sufficiently large

scale, you can actually start to be able to predict how humans are going to behave. Psychohistory, it's called. Yeah. But, like, psychohistory is really interesting. Because the foundation stories are like, it's basically, you know, this, Harry Saldon, that's his name, comes up with this sort of like mathematical formula

of social sciences, basically, which allows you to predict the future, 10,000 years into the future, basically. And this is, you know, the novel sort of spread of that huge sort of wave. And it's the story sort of about, you know, the fall of a galactic empire and it's replacement by this organisation, the foundation,

which is, what Harry Seldon sets up, he sets up two foundations, actually, because he knows that the first one's going to get destroyed, etc, etc. And in some sort of way, it's sort of a little bit like the rise of like a mercantilist class or something like that, you'd probably say if you wanted to think about it in those sorts of terms. But it's like a history is just mad.

It's like, it's almost like a sort of like ultra-determinist sort of depoliticized, mathematicized sort of pseudo-Marxism basically where but without any intermacy or struggle do you know what I mean I could struggle and these sorts of these sorts of things yeah well I mean this was the golden age of planning there wasn't it this was the golden age of the planned economies the war economies Soviet Russia well the Soviet Union not to Russia but also the the adoption of Keynesian planning strategies by capitalist governments and even within the social science

This is the moment of the rise of functionalism. The idea that you can have a sort of disinterested, value-neutral theory of society, which doesn't really recognise internal conflict. It just recognises different elements of society working together like a well-oiled machine. So it's absolutely of its moment. I suppose it's like that is the extrapolation sort of idea, isn't it? I suppose that you're like extrapolate. What if those, what have these social sciences really?

really worked this really, really well. What would, what would be possible? I suppose it's that sort of exploration of that sort of foundation. Yeah, I think it is. Yeah, it is. So, and it's all quite optimistic as well, isn't it, as in love? I mean, it as in, it's, I mean, this and the robot stuff is, it's mostly basically optimistic. It's imagining a kind of technological future, which is broadly benign. He's not a dystopian writer at all. And I think that's probably one reason it's so popular. This is one of the moments I realized, I should have look this up. Shouldn't just admit to the listeners, I've not done the research, but I don't, I don't know what his personal politics were, Asimov. I know Michael Morkok accused him

of being a Stalinist, but Michael Morkok, card-carrying anarchist, accused every other science fiction and fantasy writer that wasn't his personal mate of being ideologically impure at one time or other. So I don't know if it's true. If he was a Stalinist, yeah, I don't think so. Moorcock in the 70s or 80s would have caused anyone a Stalinist who was like vaguely, vaguely, you know, linked to the CPUSA. I see he was the chair of the American Humanist Association, notorious Soviet front. So perhaps he was. There's something sort of quite dialectical materialist about that notion in a way, that notion of a benign determinism being possible. We should move on to talk about Robert Heinland because.

We should. I don't think Robert Heinle was in the Communist Party. It was like a notorious. Yeah, I don't think he was either a card-carrying member or even a fellow traveller of the Communist Party, of the USA or anywhere else. Yeah. No, I mean, he is notoriously like a right-wing, right-wing libertarian. Again, more, well, mate, I never really read Heinlein.

And as I said, it was a huge moment in my life as a teenager, and I read a couple of these quite famous critical essays by my book. or Warcock, where he basically accuses everyone, like all the other fantasy writers and all science fiction writers of being right wing in different ways. And one of these famous essays is called Starship

Storm Troopers. And he just has Hindling Down as a fascist, basically, like a kind of militarist. But I just don't really know. Yeah, yeah. I mean, so like what he'd be referring there, well, is Highland's most famous story in that sort of

Starship Stormtroopers? sort of mode would be Starship Troopers. In fact, have you ever seen the Paul Verhoen film about Starship Troopers? If you watch that film straight, it is like a fascist film. It's depicted in a fascist society and they go off and they're basically exterminating inferior races of insects, etc, etc., etc., etc. But like the film is like a really over-the-top satire of that, do you know what I mean? Yeah, I remember lots of people debating the film, the general line was that it

it's actually a sort of liberal satire of authoritarian militarism. And what I'm not clear about, actually, because I know Heinen is often referred to you as a right-wing libertarian, and right-minibutarians also don't like authoritarian militarism quite often. So in the book, in Starship Troopers, is he actually in favour of authoritarian militarism and celebrating it, or is he just sort of mocking it? I'm not sure, basically. I'm not sure.

Do you think I've read, Robert How much of a geek do you think I am listeners? I have read a little bit of Robert Heinem. But there's one, like there's a famous, famous story of his called, or infamous, I should put it, Farnham's Freehold, and it is like 1964, and it's notoriously racist, basically. The story is like, it's set in a future society in which is a black ruling class

and a subordinated enslaved white class. And the black ruling class have a, you know, they run a sort of welfare state, et cetera, and it's all completely dependent on the productivity of the white slaves. You know what I mean? It's like, it is clearly fascist, basically, that story. But you can see it's like fascist in that sort of linked to the libertarian sort of strand. Because that's, you know, Ayn Rand sort of Atlas Shrugged is that it's not,

it's not got that racial aspect to it overtly. But like, you know, it's that thing of, you know, the doers, the producers are a tiny, small, tiny elite. And like, democracy means that they get pushing. down, etc. So they go on strike and everything falls apart, etc. So it's that, you know, you can see there's a link there, which is, it's overtly racist, overtly fascist, but fascist of a libertarian kind. Okay, that's Robert Heinlein. Don't think we're going to say much more about him. No, let's move on to Al-C-Clark,

a much more interesting character. After C. Clark, indeed. If, um, of the, the so-called big three, 1950s science fiction giant, Asimov was a Stalinist and Hainin was a fascist, then Arthur C. Clarke is the British acid communist. It's Arthur C. Clark, who in books like his 1953 novel, Childhood's End, imagines that if humans do end up having contact with alien species, then those alien species being more evolutionarily and technologically and socially advanced than us, are obviously going to be enlightened beings,

sort of space Buddhists who are going to help us, you know, on our way to Nirvana. I'm not sure at what point Arthur C. Clarke himself became a practicing Buddhist, but he was one, I think for most of his life. I know the story, as I understand is he was a British writer.

He moved to Sri Lanka in the early 50s. I think he may need to do scuba diving. And whether he became a Buddhist in Sri Lanka or not, I'm not sure. But it's a theme in quite a lot of his writing, a sort of Buddhist cosmology. And certainly a Buddhist philosophy of human existence, along with the general assumption that, well, any kind of creature that

can travel through space is going to have a more revolve consciousness than our current day earthbound humans and is therefore going to be in some sense enlightened. And this is a theme that runs through, for example, the stories that go on to inform the great classic science fiction movie, Stanley Kubix 2001, a space Odyssey. and it informs a lot of his, it informs a lot of his writing, actually. Really interesting writer. I mean, also a utopian writer, really, like Asimov.

It's interesting to think about this, because we haven't mentioned George Orwell's 1984, have we? We skipped over that, which could well be regarded as a science fiction novel, and it's clearly a classic of dystopian fiction, but they are both writing utopian fiction of different kinds, Asimov and Clark. And you certainly can,

If you want to be really critical of them from a sort of radical perspective, you can. Because whether it is the space aliens teaching us all how to meditate or whether it is the functionist sociologists from the University of Chicago, like learning how to plan human society on an interplanetary scale, then one way or another, their visions of the future, that are visions of a future in which the paradise has been delivered, you know, not through class struggle and political action, like by some other means, if you see what I mean.

I'm not sure that's totally fair of, obviously, Clowder. Because he does, he's like, he's explicitly anti-capitalist at places, and he's sort of... He's anti-capitalist, but I think he's a proper hippie in a way. He thinks what's going to bring down capitalism is like, you know, meditation and aliens. Well, he's probably right. I have a quote here, he says,

he said, the goal of... of the future is full unemployment through automation, obviously. The goal of the future is full automation, full unemployment so we can play. That's why we have to destroy the present political economic system. Now, admittedly, he might be aiming to destroy the present political system by deep meditation. Yeah, tune in, turn on, drop out, wait for the aliens. Tell them we're ready. A Buddhist wing of the Pasadist movement is very acid coming.

I mean, the other thing about, obviously, Clark, that's sort of famous about him is that, like, he's really into that sort of predictive thing. You know, he predicts geostationary communications, satellites, etc. And, you know, all sorts of stuff, all sorts of stuff that he predicts comes true, basically. He's, like, really, really interested in that sort of, like, the cutting edge of science and where, or technology. Yeah, well, let's hope the rest of it comes true. Yeah, I'm pretty sure it is. That would be great. That would be fantastic. I've done a quick psychohistory study, and I think it will.

That would just be such a weight off. If the enlightened space aliens turned up, that'll just be such a relief, man. We wouldn't have to be bothered it. What would we do all day? That would make a great story. It would make a great story or film would be, in which that happened.

We're just consumed by angst. We've got no purpose in the world because the aliens have come and ended scarcity and inequality. taught everyone how to meditate. What are we supposed to do? What are we just like, what are we supposed to do? Just like play Dungeons and Dragons or something.

That is what he's suggesting. He says, yeah, full unemployment so that we can play. Well, one of the books I want to talk, I wanted to mention later on actually is an Alistair Gray book, which precisely sort of imagines that. It imagines that in a true post-scarcity future, the only thing to do will be lower pain. There's that book by Bernard Soutes that I've mentioned

when we talked about games, you know, called The Grasshopper. And his whole thesis is that if you remove the realm of necessity, that what we'll do is play games. And he defines games as the overcoming of voluntary obstacles. And so that is what you, yeah, that is a, I think, that is what I'm after. Yeah, you're right. Yeah, you're right. We'll find stuff to do.

Gardening, do a lot of good. We'll get into gardening. Yeah, it's probably not a problem we really have to worry about. I'm sitting here, I'm worrying. I'm worrying. What if it happens? Like, what are we going to? Yeah. That's the anxiety we don't need to have.

I think it's interesting to reflect, isn't it? Because they are all sort of utopian. And I think Heinlein, in a way, is a sort of right-wing utopian, because he imagines a shiny future of big guns. But there is obviously, there's a strong strain of dystopian science fiction in the 50s. Like the American writer Ray Bradbury, this most famous book is Barenheit 451. 451, supposedly being the temperature of which books will burn. I would have thought they'd have burned at a lower temperature than that.

I never really understood that. But anyway, it's a book about a dystopian society in which people are burning books. That's a bad thing to do, according to this liberal. No, it is a bad thing to do. And he's a really, Ray Brabri, really interesting, often thought of as the, you know, the sort of the cool alternative to the geeky big three, even in the 50s, I think, because a lot of his stories are very weird. They do veer into supernatural fiction, weird fiction, almost horror sometimes.

You should also say he was like a POW in Dresden during the bombing and Firestorm Dresden, which it informs his Fahrenheit 451. Oh, wow, wow. And then sort of, I always think of his British equivalent as being John Wyndham, the author of, I think today his most famous book is Dave of the Triffids. He also wrote, he wrote the Midwitch Cuckoos,

which became the movie Village of the Damned. And both of which are, they are sort of formally science fiction, but they're also horror, really, I think. They're sort of science horror, I'd say they're science horror, actually. Yeah, totally. He's got ones which are really explicit horror. There's one, I can't remember the name of it I read ages ago

where there are just there's these sort of like octopus things that are coming out, this huge octopus coming out of the sea and it's like it's just straight sort of like horror horror fiction. Yeah, right, right. And of course, I mean, at the other end, we've talked about the different scene, science fiction and fantasy, but there's also

I mean also horror. The gap between science fiction and horror is a bit blurry sometimes. I mean, HP Lovecraft often features kind of adians. Horrible adians. Really horrible adians coming to work. So that's going on. That's going on in the 50s. So there is this strain of dystopian fiction as well. It's worth keeping in mind. And it is interesting to reflect that utopian fiction is

much more, is actually much more popular up until the sort of the 70s, I think. You know, it's interesting that when we, when we put on our ACFM live event a few months ago, and we did this consciousness raising workshop about the future, one thing we wanted to do is find some clips of films about the future. So I found a bunch of clips of science fiction films from the past few decades. And it hadn't even occurred to me actually when I was doing it, that they were all sort of dystopian in character. And this is something that somebody pointed out in the session. But I think a lot of people hadn't even really noticed because we're so used to the idea the depictions of the future are necessarily dystopian. And this is pretty much a consistent

norm from around the 70s. But that's because from around the 70s is when people stop believing the future is going to be better than the past. And we've sort of Even when we were preparing the notes for this, actually, we talked about this. And normally when people talk about this, they just say, oh, well, of course, dystopian fiction is more popular because there's more drama, there's more suspense. But it's not necessarily a given, because those big three, the big three science fiction writers of the 50s, when we're all not writing dystopian fiction. 2001, actually. I mean, 2001, a space odyssey is really, sort of utopian, ultimately. So it's not even true that there isn't like utopian vision to the future.

We've become, but we, we, in our postmodern, post-hope, post-future age, like, don't want to hear, don't want to see about the ideas about a positive future, but they did in the 50s, they loved it. Those were the big guys then, but today, if you look at Hughes had their stories and books made into films and TV shows and made and remade and kind of really entered into the culture, like Dave the Triffith is probably much more familiar to a lot of people than anything. that Asimov did. So in a way, and I think that dystopianism has made them kind of relevant to people later on. It's just sort of an interesting one that did the triffids, we've talked about

them already, haven't we? But basically, them plants that can move, basically. Well, I didn't. I just assumed everyone knows what a triffid is, of course, it's a walking plant that can kill you. Yeah, yeah. And at the same time, as they're about, there's something happens which blinds

most of the human population. And so it's sort of portrayed as a meteor shower, though in the book it's actually, they're suggested it was like a human weapon that went off basically and misfired. And like, you know, in the book as well, the Triffids are like the product of human bio-experimentation, basically. So it's almost like a science warning thing

rather than a natural disaster sort of film. No, it is that, yeah, it is very, much that, yeah. And then, well, if we get into the early 60s, we can also get into another, like, classic piece of British dystopianism from the, I mean, I guess arguably the greatest dystopian novelist in the English language, JJ Ballard. And the really extraordinary piece of work actually, in 1962's novel, The Drowned World, imagines a world in the future in which the polar ice caps have melted. Because I gave this to my daughter to read recently.

And then I was thinking about it. I was thinking, wow, it's wild that he was like imagining that, like before people were talking about climate change. So what is the scientific cause of it in the story? And I looked it up and I can't remember. I think it's some change in the earth to tilt or it's sunspots. Yeah, it's definitely not climate. It's definitely not greenhouse gases.

But obviously it's super relevant. I mean, it's almost sort of a realist narrative in that it's just, as far as I remember like not that much happened I can't remember what happens in it it's just like well people are doing stuff in this round world I'm sure there is a story actually but the story itself didn't really impinge itself upon my consciousness

but what one recalls is the extraordinarily evocative sort of miz-en of the you know what it's like like living in this world where people people live on boats and there are kind of swamps everywhere it's a lot less dark than his more political

like more obviously sort of satirical sort of dystopia's writing would become later on. But Ballard is really important and is obviously, it is often thought of as like initiating what came to be known as the new wave in science fiction. But another set of writings which you could also see is sharing something of the spirit of the 60s new wave would be the writing of Stanislaw Lem. So I think you should talk about that for a minute. Yeah, well, I mean it's interesting because this is going on in the UK and in the US and some degree in Europe or like French, French science fiction has got a separate sort of culture to some degree. But in the Soviet Union there was, you know,

in the 60s and 70s there was like really interesting, really speculative, thoughtful science fiction being made. So we could talk about Stanislore Lem's Solaris from 1961. And we talked about the film Solaris and we talked about aliens on screen. It's an incredible story in which we've discovered this planet it's covered by an ocean and that ocean is sentient basically and then some scientists get sent up to try to study it

and like basically their what seemed to be their deepest desires come true on it and they're horrific and so the main protagonist his wife turns up, his dead wife turns up, sorry, and he kills her. That sort of idea of like what if we got, what we

wanted, we truly desired and then it was awful. Like you could, there's a similar sort strain in another Soviet era, science fiction novel called Roadside Picnic by the Strugatsky brothers. Arcadi and Boris Strugatsky. Tarkovsky made the film Stalker based on roadside picnic. It's basically this idea that there's been an alien visitation in this zone and it's left, it's just distorted the world. There's all sorts of weird things there. And then these people call stalkers there, the people who go in illegally into the zone and

can't bring these sort of artificial. facts back, basically, but in the middle of the zone is this sphere, this room in which you could have anything you want, basically, all of your desires come true. And once again, when somebody gets in there, it all goes horrifically wrong. Yeah, it's a bit of a Lacanian, it's a bit of a, you know, Soviet Lacanian, isn't he? Maybe it's not the case for everyone anymore, but for somebody like our generation, it's still the case of the word science fiction, it immediately conjures to my mind. or spaceships, robots, shiny stuff.

And that is the sort of the so-called hard sci-fi of Heinleyn, and Asimov, to a lesser extent, in a way, Clark. Maybe Clark doesn't really belong in that group, actually. But you could also say, just based on what we've been talking about, there's always been this other current. It goes back to H.G. Wells. Maybe it even runs through Arthur C. Clark. It certainly runs through Bradbury and Wyndham in the 50s.

I mean, it runs through a lot of the kind of weird tales, as in some of the other pulp magazines in the 30s and 40s. It's a tradition within which probably the distinctions between different genres are not very clear, in which a lot of the time, whether you're talking about magic or whether you're talking about ghosts or whether you're talking about computers or aliens, then these things are being used as devices to generate a sort of fiction of ideas in a really interesting way. And you can entirely see why people start using the term speculative fiction, really,

for that whole tradition, because it is, that is a good term for it, I think. And then as you get into the 1960s, certainly in the Anglesphere, in Britain and the States, there's quite a self-conscious movement to have something that refers to itself, really, as the new wave in science fiction. The key figures are Ballard, in Britain, Philip K. Dick, in the state, Brian Oldis, Michael Moorcock, who is a sort of genre-spanning writer, and it's Michael Moorcock and Brian Oldys take over this magazine, which is, I only learned when we were researching this.

It had actually been around for years before they took it over. In 1966, and it's a magazine called New Worlds, 1966, high point of social democracy, Harold Wilson wins a landslide, England wins the World Cup, and the Arts Council are giving out money to experimental science fiction magazines to be edited by hippies. New World is really kind of cool. It's a really, I mean, it specialises in kind of more weird, more formally experimental stuff that

belongs to this speculative tradition. And I would say it's sort of one of the birthplaces of cyberpunk. I mean, that's not the term people are going to use till the 80s, but stories that feel a bit more sort of cyberpunky start to appear. We had in our house now as a kid, like one volume of stories from New World, which was a bit too weird from my mum's taste. I remember she's saying she didn't really like it. I loved it. I read it and read it and read it. And I didn't, before I knew anything, I must have read it when I was like eight or nine, I think. And before I had any sort of cultural reference points, it was like years later, I would realize, though, this was like Michael Mawcock was involved with this. In the 60s and 70s, actually, those writers, people

like Mawcock and Ballard, they would get sort of serious recognition as writers of experimental or fiction. They won some prizes. They got really well reviewed in like the broad sheet press and the guardians. So their project to get the way the idea of science fiction away from the sort of, you know, grinning utopian geekiness of the 50s and to turn it into something a bit darker, a bit more speculative, a bit more literary, a bit more experimental, something sort of in tune with the avant-garde of the 60s and 70s. I mean, it was very successful, a very successful project, and they really did sort of set out the terms. And that was the context within which Philip K. Dick would come to be this really big figure. Like,

when I was a teenager, Philip K. Dick was really quite obscure. He was like a sort of cult writer. Like Asimov and Clark was still much better known, much more famous. I mean, today, I would be, I would be surprised amongst our sort of younger listeners if there were many people, if there were more people who had heard of Asimov or even Arthur C. Clar than had heard of Philip K. Dick, because he's a sort of canonical figure now, had a huge, has obviously loads of his stories and books that have been made into movies, obviously most famously Blade Runner. But Philip K. Dick, you know, it's a bit like the Velvet Underground. You know, Philip K. Dick wasn't, like, doing his entire life, like he sold really few books.

He generally was seen as being a complete commercial failure, like a total commercial failure. as a writer. I'm not sure if he actually was writing in New Worlds, but I know that people like Aldous and Ballard and Morkot really saw Philip K. Dick, a sort of fellow traveller, a sort of comrade. And Philip K. Dick from the 60s onwards is writing these really weird stories, like a lot of which do, and they do anticipate themes that would come to be seen as typical of cyberpunk. They include kind of alternative histories, like the man in the high castle. They're set in a kind of parallel history where the Nazis of one World War two. Yeah, I mean, the other thing people might have seen or heard of is like things such as

a scanner, a scanner darkly, etc. Well, a scanner darkly, which he published is in 1977 is my favourite science fiction book ever written. I don't know. Maybe after a drowned. Maybe, I don't know, Bellards in a category of his own, maybe. But Scanner Darkly is just, scanner darkly is one of those books. Like, if you've got no, having no interest in genre fiction is not an excuse for not having read a Scanner Darkly. It's a seminal cultural text, and it sets out a kind of aesthetic, a kind of vibe template

for kind of dark, paranoid cyberpunk, which has been just so impactful. I mean, it's a story. The Scanner Darkly, I mean, it's a fantastic literary device. I mean, it's set in a, it's, I would say, if you're talking about the shift from what's classic sci-fi, hard sci-fi, is it sometimes called to cyberpunk?

Then in some ways, the shift is often just that cyberpunk is imagined to be taking place in a less distant future to sort of classic sci-fi. So it's not imagined to be taking place in a future in which humans have colonised the galaxy.

It's just taking place in a future in which robotics and computing have become a bit more advanced than they currently are. And maybe human, maybe there's space travel between around the solar system, but not so much, like, faster than light travel

things like that and so Scanner Darkly is in that sort of context but it's also this kind of noir story about a special agent, a cop basically, an undercover cop who's been investigating drug dealers

but his deep cover is so kind of effective and that he's kind of, I think the idea is he sort of forgot who he has to actually forget his real identity for a period of the operation and then the book is starting, starts just as he's like recovery, trying to recover his actual identity.

But it's very much in that sort of like drug paranoia mode. And like, yeah, one of the things you'd associate with Dick is that sort of like paranoid mode of writing. And like if you think about it, that is, you know, one form of like estrangement from the present is that sort of like paranoid estrangement. Famously, Dick had a sort of breakdown. He suffered from mental health problems. He took a lot of drugs as well. But he suffered from mental health. health problems for his life, but there was a famous incident in 1974 where he felt he had a visitation, basically. The story goes, I think he was like, he'd been given some drugs because he had a tooth out, and then somebody delivered, this woman, this young woman delivered a parcel

to his house, and she was wearing a sort of like a fish necklace, a sort of Christian fish necklace. Yeah, and he realized that that was a message from anadian consciousness. Well, basically the sun glinted off it and like he said he was struck by like this pink beam that he realised was intelligence and taking him over basically.

Yeah, a pink beam of light from space or something. Yeah, yeah. He tells that story in his 1981 book Varless. Yeah, I mean he makes that that's what he met, the book he makes out of that experience. That is really weird. I mean, I don't know if it's really science fiction because a lot of it is about his

experience. Like a lot of it is about Gnosticism is about the historic implications of the discovery of Gnostic texts in the 1440s. Why are people fascinated by Gnosticism these days? Really, it is an interesting question. It has become very true. Yeah, but Gnosticism and conspiracy theory, and you can see that other form of estrangement, do you know what I mean? Perhaps not cognitive, I don't know. Well, no, it is sort of cognitive, isn't it, basically, that whole conspiracy theory.

You have to event this, this, you know, baroque sort of worldview, basically, to sort of, like, make these connections, etc. Anyway, let's not get into conspiracy theories, even though I do like talking about. But it is another form of estrangement from the present, basically, and that's one that really opens up into a right-ring discourse. And Philip K. Dick, I mean, obviously he writes the story that ends up getting to be the inspiration for Blade Runner, and it really contributes to the whole kind of emerging dystopian.

cyberpunk imaginary, really important writer. Are we going to talk about Frank Herbert? Here's my line on Frank Herbert. I've never read Dune. I'm not going to. You can't make me. I have read Dune and loads of those when I was young.

But let's not talk about it. I mean, it's sort of interesting, but like basically, I don't think we can leave them out of it. It's space fantasies. But we do have to talk about Ursula K. K. Le Guin. Ursula K. Le Guin, the sainted, Ursula K. Le Guin.

Because it's like, it's a really important moment in the emergence. Or, yeah, emergence, re-emergence of feminist science fiction. If we think that, like, you know, modern science fiction starts with Mary Shelley, etc. You'd probably start with the left-hand-of-darkness, although I've read The Dispossessed more recently, and I'd rather talk about that. Well, left-hand of darkness comes out in 19609. I mean, the left-hand of darkness imagines a planet, a society, in which individuals don't have fixed genders. Gender isn't binary, and individuals don't have fixed genders.

It's just as you would expect. He's very well executed. She's a very good writer. Ursula Kadegren, she's probably best known for her children's fantasy series, the Earthsea books, which are also famous for being, just in terms of literary style,

just a cut above, you know, the vast majority of fantasy genre fiction. She's certainly a much better writer than Tolkien, just in terms of being able to turn a sentence. her feminist science fiction is very well known and the left hand of darkness is as interesting as you would think a novel written in 1969 by a very talented writer about what it would be like to be in a society

without fixed genders, you know, right B. It's really a classic and I think in some ways given contemporary themes in sexual politics is like a more essential reading now than it ever was before so that is one of the books on today's list I would say you've really, even if you've got no interest in science fiction. Yeah, that and the Heinlein Farmer's Freehold, whatever it's called. Let's talk about the dispossessor.

Well, it was a really big book for me when I was sort of, you know, I don't know, 16, 17 or young sort of like budding anarchist. Because, well, in fact, it's the dispossess, which has got a subtitled an ambiguous utopia. But basically, it starts off by portraying a sort of anarchist utopia on this moon of an air. is a sort of an anarchist utopia, there's no coercion, etc. It's like egalitarian, etc. But the moon hasn't got many resources on it, so it's really austere, etc. And the moon revolves around this planet called Uras, and the planet is divided between like a capitalist half and a sort of authoritarian socialist half. I think you'd probably call it that. And it's like mirroring the sort of Cold War situation. And the story is that this,

genius mathematician called Shavec. You know, he has to leave this utopia, travel down to Uras because he's inventing, he's done this like in mathematics to invent faster than like communication. And interestingly, Luguin's parents were sort of, I think they were anthropologists, but anyway, they were friends with Robert Oppenheimer,

and Lugin has made it clear that, like, Shavec is based on Oppenheimer. They're sort of, like, quite a, and worldly sort of, like, genius, sort of thing. But anyway, I just want to talk about it just briefly because it's that thing of like, when you portray utopia quite often, you know, basically

you have to leave it. Shavik leaves the utopia in order for him to be able to see both like the, you know, to appreciate the utopia but also see its limitations basically and those limitations that in some ways they're resource based limitations etc. You raised this thing before

which is like it's almost a cliche of like yeah, well where's the drama in utopia? And quite a lot, quite often with these, where people Our portraying a utopia, you know, it is about when you leave the utopia. You butt up against a non-utopian world is where people go for the sort of drama. Well, yes, I think at this point we finally have to mention Samuel R. Delaney. This is the first writer we're mentioning who isn't white. Samuel R. Delaney, a black American writer, I think gay as well.

So outside the outside is kind of heteronormacy of white male world of conventional science fiction in many ways. He's obviously he's a key iconic figure in the history of Afrofuturism. Dalgred is a really extraordinary book. It's very much in the vein of a book, well, which, I mean, yeah, it's always classified as a science fiction novel, but it's also kind of quite surreal, it's quite formally innovative. It's using the kind of imagined setting of this future world and this city and this future world as a way of engaging with all kinds of themes. about, you know, self-hood, being in the world, etc. Really sort of, really sort of extraordinary piece of work. And Delaney, genuinely, is this really,

is a really sort of amazing writer. And I think he's one of the figures he really, you can always sort of point to if anybody's questioning whether science fiction, quote, unquote, or speculative fiction is serious. He's a very, very serious writer. Should we step away from serious writing and other novel, let's just talk about some other form like TV, etc.,

because you have to mention Star Trek, don't you, which is a really interesting phenomenon, set up as almost like a utopia, sort of multicultural, sort of liberal utopia in the original series of a multicultural crew, et cetera, which is really quite unusual for the US TV of that time. When we were little kids, when we were little enough, like Star Trek still seemed like the most futuristic, modern thing on TV, didn't it? Like, even though it was made in 1966, we weren't even bored. I mean, there have been lots of a series since, and so, like, Star Trek the next generation,

God only knows when that was. In the 90s, I think, wasn't it? Yeah, the 90s. Well, Star Trek, as a sort of cultural institution, is very, very weird. Because, I mean, exactly the same thing pretty much happens with Doctor Who in this country or on a smaller scale, because it's a smaller country. But Star Trek, they made the original series. in the late 60s. I think it ran through several seasons. People always talk about the original

series. I think it ran through multiple seasons. So there was a bunch of episodes. And by the 80s in the States, there was this history in the period of the rollout of cable TV, where if you had cable TV in the States, most of the dozens of channels to which you had access were actually just local stations from around the country, which would show a lot of the same shows. and I remember like being a kid in Atlanta in their very early 80s and then when I would go for holidays sometimes around the mid-80s to see family you could watch Star Trek like several times a day basically if you if you wanted to so it was really easy to just have seen all of Star Trek

and like you sort of it's more partly why that original series is still so ubiquitous as a reference point but it was seen as something from the past and there was this obviously there was the whole cult the kind of massive fandom, one of the original kind of media fandums of original nerddom. Yeah, exactly, of Trekkies, who didn't like being called Trekkies, they called themselves Trekkers.

But it was really seen as something that everybody would have watched every episode of Star Trek by the time they were 12. It was just sort of assumed. And then, like, to be really into it was just kind of weird. But then it comes back, it like, they get this kind of, it gets this lavish remake,

it's laverish sort of relaunch of the franchise in the early 90s. It's actually 18. 88. And then it just keeps rolling and it just never stops. It's like huge. It's a huge thing. And they kept making the movies as well. When the movies were regarded as quite hit-miss. Actually, very interesting actually because

the original one, Star Trek and the motion picture, was regarded as sort of a bit of a failure because it wasn't very commercial. It was very high concept and it was very much in the vein of a sort of new wave science fiction. And Arthur C. Clarke as well, very sort of cosmic, what if a space probe became sentient and became a kind of benevolent intelligence that could fuse with humans.

And then it was once they started making rollicking action adventures, but influenced by Star Wars, that the franchise was seen to really have kind of commercial legs again. I mean, one of the interesting things about the next generation is that, like, in that, the utopian aspect of Star Trek comes out a bit more, basically, because one of the themes in it is they explore the repelior.

So the replicator, basically. So the replicator is you can replicate anything, except that's the way they get their food from. Because that just means you're in a post-scarcity situation. You know what I mean? And there's a couple of episodes on Star Trek Next Generation where that sort of explored is a famous episode where somebody from the capitalist US of the 20th century

is woken up from time state, some stasis or something like that. I can't quite remember. And just can't get his head around it. And he's going, well, what do you do all day then? And so we explore our personalities, says Captain Picard and all that. Explored the potentialities, et cetera. Actually, they go around space and a ship, exploring, fighting. Especially in the original service series, having sex with alien women.

So that's what we do in a post-guessy society. But there is a sort of like, you know, there's a critique of capitalism and at least some of those next generation episodes. Yeah, it's true. Yeah, it's true. I think it is, I mean, it's sort of extraordinary to think about what a cultural phenomenon it was. I mean, as you've said,

it was seen, it was very much seen in the late 60s and early 70s as a radical television because people understood very clearly that presenting a vision of the future in which the crew is multi-ethnic and racially segregated.

And the women officers on the spaceship, even though they are clearly subordinate to the men, and they are expected to walk around in skirts that are so short that you would be, your company would be shut down by the authorities for telling women they had to dress that way today. Rightly so. Despite that, it was, by the standards of the time, the female characters were seen as being like incredibly like equal to the men,

almost equal to the men, like autonomous and important. And this was all seen as a sort of a vision of the future in which the Civil Rights Act had kind of done its work. and so it is and it is you know it is it is kind of really interesting in that way and it's also it's a story about again and again a lot of the theme of the story is like well what if what if we're the aliens what if we're the advanced race you know what if we're the ones with the higher consciousness

because a lot of it is about them encounter I mean they're supposed to be this kind of frontier ship exploring you know the edges of the known civilized galaxy and kind of encountering all these planets where people haven't, they haven't yet made contact. Because that's, I mean, you know, the key kind of UFO fantasy is the idea that the aliens are going to come and contact us,

whether that contact is good or bad, and it's friendly or not. And this is kind of reverses that. This is like, oh, what if we, the humans, are actually like the most technologically advanced species, and eventually, like, we build spaceships, and we're in the UFOs. We're out there encountering all these other creatures.

I don't think that's quite right of Star Trek cosmology, because it's, we invent some sort of space drive. I can't remember where it's called. And that's the signal for the aliens to come and discover us and incorporate us into the Federation. So they are more advanced. And we, we, I think it's primarily the Vulcans, isn't it, basically the most advanced to bring us up.

Yes, I think so, yeah, yeah. Well, I mean, you would know more about that than me, you. Live long and prosper, Jeremy. So that's, um, And the other big TV franchise of the 70s, which comes back, you know, really only in the 21st century, having been a kind of underground geek cult for decades, Doctor Who, we decided we're not going to really talk about Doctor Who much because Doctor Who is, I think, is really sort of space fantasy. It's not really science fiction. The sonic screwdriver is a wand famously, so we can see. It's a magic wand. Yeah, it is. I mean, the Time Lord is a Jedi. So let's not talk about Star Wars either. But let's just go and talk about 2008 just for five seconds because it was a huge comic for me.

Well, it's a huge deal. I think it's well established and it's a huge deal, 2008, the comic. And I think I've mentioned before on the show that like once, you know, it's sad to think about it now, but like Mark Fisher and I wanted to do a podcast together many years ago and we came up with ideas for episodes. And the one he was really excited. The idea I came up with he was super excited about was 2008. I said, we should do a thing about how 2000 AD anticipated so many, both historic, actual historical themes and kind of fictional themes. So it's not just you, it's huge, it's huge.

It's basically a sort of science fiction anthology sort of series, but it's got these huge, these running series which have been going. So like Judge Dredd is like the cornerstone comic, and it's been running since issue two of the comic, 1977, I think. set in, you know, 100 years in the future, something like that, I think I can't quite remember. What happens with 2008 is that they invent this Mega City One, this, this, it's like a, it's a post-apocalyptic society in which what exists are not nations, but like big, huge, sort of city states.

And Mega City One is this huge, huge, sprawling city. They had this sort of idea, and Judge Dredd was sort of based off, you know, the idea of Dirty Harry and all that sort of stuff. Those sort of, like, those sort of things. And it's like, it's a satire against sort of, like, like, you know, or it developed into a satire against sort of like fascist cops, really, to be honest. It's like a fascist society. Well, my, I mean, my read of it, this conversation I had with Mark years ago that he got really excited by, it was me saying, and it wasn't, I don't

remember, we was literally, we were just like wandering around the street somewhere, like drinking a coffee or something. And I just said, remember Judge Dredd? And I don't know why I was thinking about it. I was just thinking, like, Judge Dredd really anticipated the whole dynamic of neoliberalism. Because it was both, it's both about a cyberpunk world in which the state has more or less disintegrated and everything is our lives are controlled by hyperconsumption and mega corporations but also what are all that remains of the state is this completely arbitrary like authoritarian apparatus like i am the law so it is like it is the sort of you know it's both sides of the hyacian coin if you like this is incredibly authoritarian like it's this

authoritarian form of state in which there doesn't seem to be any real sort of democracy or If there is it, everybody knows it's just nothing but a sham. And there is no real rule of law. There's just a kind of persistent form of authority, which tries to maintain some kind of order. And then there's just everybody else just going mental all the time, just everybody's just wasting all the time on insane fans, like driven by various forms of consumerism.

Turning themselves ugly and stuff like that. I've realised, actually, I had issue two of 2000 AD. I didn't think I'd issue one. I had issue one. And it had these stickers in it, these like bionic man's, do you remember the bionic man stickers? I stuck, I was only, I stuck them to my arm and, like, I couldn't get them off. One of the things that happens with Judge Dredd is that, like, they have to invent what this city looks like, particularly Carlos O'Squera is one of the central artists in, like, developing the Judge Dredd sort of thing. And they come up with this vision of a city where people live in these huge city blocks.

so like massive tall skycraper which have like 30,000 people in them and people live quite a lot of their lives inside the block, do you know what I mean? That sort of thing and then it's got like the roads are on several levels you've got flying cars and all this sort of stuff 1982 you get Blade Runner coming out

I'm absolutely convinced that like the imagery of Blade Runner which really sets the sort of like the image of a future city you're really really influenced by by Judge Dred and that sort of like vision of a city-scape. Yes, I've always assumed so as well. I've always assumed so. Although I remember the very, the first time I went to, uh, downtown Tokyo did the bit with all the

little, with, where there's loads of flashing light and then there's these little bars and stuff. That was also just really reminiscent of blazer and I remember thinking, oh, what, Ridley Scott just realized how weird this would look to a Western audience. You could just, just show them pictures of this and with us, with a blimp in the sky and it'll look like the future. But I think, I think it's the combination of that and the 2000-A-D-R is what creates that image. I mean, the one thing to say about Blade Run as well, or that cyberpunk sort of, because if we went back to, if we went back to novels, etc., we'd mention William Gibson's new Romanceer from 1984, which is sort of like the first cyberpunk.

It's the novel for which the term cyberpunk was coined. Yeah, but it sets up this image of the future. We were talking about it before. We might have already mentioned it, actually, that. you know, it's basically the image of the future that we basically sort of can't escape that cyberpunk image, basically. Gibson coins the term cyberspace

and he imagines a world in which expert technicians will go into cyberspace, which will be this kind of virtual realm created by computer networks. And, I mean, what he imagines is something that hasn't really happened and that people in Silicon Valley are still always trying to make it happen

because they really want it to. and which is somehow, you'll collect electrodes up to your brain and that will let you, your consciousness directly enter the virtual networks of cyberspace and all that doesn't happen. But if you take that for sort of a metaphor, like for a world in which everybody just spent an awful lot of time in the virtual space of the internet, then it absolutely anticipates what's happened. In a way, I mean, Gibson is really very typical of, you know,

what indeed what came to be called the cyberpunk, but which you can see anticipated in the writing of people like Philip K. Dick. So Neuromancer, it's about that. Neuromancer is set in a world in which, yeah, indeed, there's like, there's a bit of space travelled, but only to like satellites that orbit Earth, maybe the moon, I can't remember, but no further than that. That's really one of the themes of that sort of near-future sci-fi, as it sometimes called. And, but one of the key, one of the key things in Blade Runner,

And this is there, it's there already in some Philip K. Ditt writing. It's there in Judge Dredd. Is this idea that in the dystopian future, there doesn't seem to be any discernible state, really. There's a police, but the police seem to almost openly just work for corporations. And the institutions of civil society have been replaced by corporate institutions. And I used to do a lecture for undergraduate students about the shift from modernity to post-modernity and from Fordism to post-Fordism. And I'd say if you really want to understand

the shift taking place, you just have to look at the dystopian visions of the future before the 70s. So you can look at Fritz Lang's Metropolis from the 1940s, or you can look at a clockwork orange from the late 60s.

And they all have, what they all imagine, just as in Orwell's 1984, they imagine a future which is dystopian because the state has become too powerful. and then by the time you get to Blade Runner which is only like a few years later it's like the opposite

but what really makes this seem so dark and scary is well where is the state there isn't even a state there just seem to be these corporations and cops that basically work for them that's really indicative of the way which science fiction is always responding to the things going on in the culture and the society and it's really interesting I mean this is

I mean Philip K Dick is sort of is presenting in some of it not all of it but some of his writing is already sort of seeming to intuit that that's the way the world is going by the kind of late 60s, really well before the kind of neo-moment of real neoliberal ascendancy. And I think it partly is an awareness of that. That is one reason why critics start to take science fiction a lot more seriously, actually, from the sort of mid-70s onwards,

because I think people who are really paying attention to this stuff start to be aware that actually the science fiction writers really do seem to be, anticipating social, economic, political trends, like, in a way, like, you know, that's quite kind of accurate, even though the way, it's not that the actual specific visions of the future they present come true, but in terms of getting the general idea, in terms of what is the direction of travel from where we are now into the future, they're often very accurate in that sense. In terms of this theme of science fiction and, you know, literary fiction, you know, really sort of blurring into each other, or rather the hard distinction between them

disappearing, I mean, a really important episode in that history is the publication of Russell Hoban's Ridley Walker in 1980. That is, and that is a book which, well, it's sometimes considered science fiction, sometimes not. It is set in an imagined future after a nuclear war. It is a sort of post-apocalyptic fiction in that sense, but it's, it's a sort of post-apocalyptic fiction in that sense, but it's famous really for not having any of the sort of, any of the sort of beautiful poetry of J.T. Ballard's vision of a drowned world. Or it doesn't even have the kind of adventure fiction excitement of Day of the Triffids or of Mad Max films or something like that.

This is a world in which, you know, the sheer absolute bleakness of a world after a nuclear war is kind of just relentlessly demonstrated to the reader. So it's a world in which just nothing has survived of human culture. Humans have tried to kind of put back together some kind of a culture after the nuclear apocalypse, but it's a really crap culture. There's nothing really to like about it. It's just inferior to what was destroyed in every way. And the general quality and tenor of human life is just obviously inferior.

And so there's no, there's like, there's no fun SF stuff. Like nobody has psychic powers from the mutations. There were no aliens saving us. It's just like relentlessly bleak. So it's an interesting test case because it is set in the future, but it's a future which is, doesn't have anything that our world doesn't have. It just lacks stuff.

So whether it's science fiction, I don't know, actually. But it is in, it is sort of continuous with these various dystopian. fictions from the time. The same might be said about Margaret Atwood's 1985 novel quite recently made into a popular Netflix series, The Handmaid's Tale. Again, Handmaid's Tale is often referred to as an example of feminist science fiction. You know, the Handmaid's Tale depicts a future America in which actually the United States as a country no longer exists. There's been some kind of civil war. And then

in the imagined country, like a fundamentalist sort of Christian anti-feminist regime is in place. But again, it is dystopian and is set in the future. That is more often definitely classified to science fiction, actually, even though when you think about it, again, there isn't anything in that world that isn't in our world. There isn't any cool stuff. I mean, it's been interesting to, sort of,

I mean, it's probably, it's interesting to contrast that, actually, with a 1978 novel by von der McIntyre called Dream Snake, which is also set in the future, but it's really sort of science fantasy, and it's also set after a nuclear holocaust, but this woman is a kind of healer who has a dream snake, which is a kind of shamanic healing snake. I mean, that won a Hugo Award,

it won those of science fiction awards. It was really praised by Ossia de Clayne Laguin, and that is often talked about as an example of feminist science fiction. It's interesting because it is sort of science fantasy, I think, but it's usually classified as science fiction. But it does have a cool thing in it that doesn't actually exist in our world, which is like a woman who can heal people with her psychic powers and her magic snake. That sounded a little bit of fantasy to me, I must admit. Yeah, understandably. That is from 1978, and it is sort of, by the first half of the 80s, I mean, I think in a way, like Ridley Walker is

partly responding to versions of post-nuclear apocalypse fiction like Dream Snake, because Ridley Walker is sort of famous and notorious for just not offering you any of this kind of cool psychic stuff that you released getting some visions, some ways in which people imagine a post-apocalyptic future. It's just relentless. Then there's a couple of books that we want to talk about from 1987. I think I really should mention Octavia Butler's book, Dawn, which is the first book in his Xenogenesis series, that's a really interesting book, again,

trying to think about what it would be like for humans to communicate with aliens and Octavia Butler is a woman of color, one of the first women of color to become prominent in science fiction. It's a classic of Afrofuturism. I think we will, one day we will do a whole microdotal episode about

Afrofuturism, right we. And we've got a lot to cover today. So I'm going to say the Deuton Genesis books are really, good. I'd read them after Dalgren, but now you're going to talk about the great British contribution to utopian science fiction from the same time, aren't you? Yeah, so this is the culture novels, the culture series of novels by Inem Banks. And the first one is from 1987, you're right, yeah, consider Fleavers. And he writes these series of novels up until the

last one in 2012, the hydrogen sonata, and then he dies, basically. That's quite young. Ian Banks or Ian M. Banks in his science fiction writing. They're like this. So this is sort of the, the culture novels are set in the far future, and it is a, it is a utopia, basically. This is a post-scarcity world. It's a world in which non-scarcity is presumed to lead to sort of cooperation, basically. And it's a world in which there are AIs called Mines.

It's incredibly powerful AIs. But instead of like a, instead of like AI is in the sort of terminator fiction, you know, the AI is going to take over the world and kill humans. In fact, you know, in the culture novels, the AIs or the minds, you know, they see that, like, that, you know, the full expression of themselves, etc., would, you know, is aligned with the full expression of, like, of non-artificial lives, basically. And so the AIs do all of the, they sort of like do a lot of the planning, the coordination, etc. Each spaceship, you have these huge spaceships that people live in, you know, we're containing hundreds of thousands of people, and each spaceship is run by one of these AI minds. He invents these orbitals, these huge orbital structures which have sort of like, you know, sort of their own atmosphere, et cetera, all these sorts of things in space.

Each one of those is run by an AI, et cetera, et cetera. And like all sort of utopian fiction, you know, you have to find the drama. And so most of the stories focus on this organization called Special Circumstances, which is a sort of almost like semi-secret organization. But basically, they handle interaction with people outside the culture with, like, non-egalitarian worlds. And so a lot of it is that, it's a bit like that, the dispossessed, the Shavit leaving Aner's, etc. It is that thing of, like, when it butts up against non-egalitarian societies is where it sort of gets interesting. I found really, like, fantastic, the player of games, which is this thing of, like, you know, what would you do in Utopia?

You play games and the story is this guy who has to go, he's one of the best gameplays in the culture. And there's this society, a non-egalitarian society, in which the leader is chosen through games and he has to go and intervene and play this game, etc. Everybody who loses the game dies, etc. Anyway, they're sort of space opera, but they're hugely sort of influential

with an idea of what the future is. Notoriously, Elon Musk is really into the culture novels. And it's really, really misunderstood them. He's got the complete wrong end of the stick because they are portraying fully automated, automated luxury communism. Put it that way. One of the other ones I wanted to mention

is a series by Kim Stanley Robinson, who's a science fiction writer who was a student of Jameson's, you know, basically quite a real Marxist and a Marxist science fiction head. He wrote this Mars trilogy, Red Mars starting in 1992,

and then you have green Mars and blue Mars, and they're basically, about the colonisation and terraforming of Mars. I mentioned that in relation to the culture novels because once again, these have been a big influence on Elon Musk and his conception of going to Mars, etc. But what goes on in the Mars trilogy

is basically a long, long history of 187 years of the colonisation of Lars, but it's not just that. It's not the colonisation in terraform, And it's also like this whole political dynamics go on where, first of all, it's a colony of the Earth, et cetera, and they try to have a revolution. It fails. There's a catastrophe on the Earth. You know, and then they have a second revolution, and they basically set up a democratic socialist Mars, basically, and then come to hedging, Gemini's Earth. One of the interesting things about that is a fantastic, I really recommend people reading those novels are really great.

But one of the interesting things about that is, you know, in 2015, Kim Stanley, Robinson writes a book called Aurora. It's about a generation ship. So this is a famous dispute between me and Jeremy about interstellar travel. It's about interstellar travel on this ship which takes generations to get there. People live for generations on this generation ship and they finally get to this planet that they've been aiming for. But when they get there, people start dying from all of the microbes that they can't even detect in the atmosphere. And they find out that colonisation isn't possible. And they basically turn the ship around and come back to Earth, basically. That's the night.

novel, that's Kim Stanley Robinson sort of renouncing his Mars trilogy, you know, and it's part of a move that you can see in his trajectory in which he's saying like, no, let's forget about going to other planets. We've got a good one at home. We've got this one called Earth, and we're destroying it, and we need to save the Earth, basically. And you can see, after that novel, he does a series of novels. There's one I can't remember the name of about a drowned earth and then you know he's he in 2020 he writes this book called the ministry of the future which is his you know how do we deal with climate change but you can see how his concerns basically changed from this utopian like planet colonisation to we need to deal with like what's going on

on this planet yeah and he is now he's now regarded as a sort of institution in the states he's no he's arguably like the most popular like explicitly socialist I was going to say I was going to say fiction right everything he might be the basic I mean he might be the most popular, explicitly socialist, you know, artist in any field, actually, in the States, like right now. It's hard to think of, I can't think of any, I can't think of any musicians or visual artists or filmmakers who are that, who are that explicit in their Marxism. There's loads of books we could talk about, Jim, but I think we should probably draw it to a clues. Let's have some concluding thoughts and then.

Yeah, so we've only done science fiction up to the early 90s. We have. We have. I mean, there's other stuff we could talk about. I've recently read, oh, well, a couple of years ago, another trilogy by a writer Anne Lecky called the Ancillary Justice Trilogy, the first issue's, ancillary justice. And then once again, it's like, it's based on, it's based on this idea of AIs,

but the AIs in this novel are basically inhabit human bodies. They have to, you know, basically if somebody's captured as a prisoner or something or condemned to death, their minds are forced out by artificial intelligence minds who are called ancillaries and who are all connected up to their ships at their part of, etc. And the whole sort of like the story through the trilogy

is about this empire, this huge galactic empire which is run by this emperor and Adamiani but it's so big that she has to have multiple synchronized consciousnesses on different bodies all around the empire. And there's all sorts of stuff goes on and you realize after a while

But in fact, basically this, the protagonist Breck, who's one of the last ancillary on this ship, ancillary justice, which got destroyed. He said he's been caught up in a war between two different instances of the emperor who've basically got separated and different minds, different conceptions of how the empire sorts of goes. Yeah, well, that is really interesting. And I think when we were trying to think about what forms of science fiction

seem to be really typical of the 21st century. I mean, the theme of AI is obviously really persistent. It's become a persistent theme in movies like X-Maschina, her minority report. It's been a persistent theme in movies since the late 90s, really. And it is really interesting to think about that because to a certain extent, I think when we were thinking about this whole history,

We were really able to identify, I think, a pretty clear distinction between, if you like, Fordist and post-forwardist science fiction, which is basically the hard science fiction of the golden age of the 50s, the rockets and spaceships and robots. And sort of cyberpunk, really, the science fiction of the post-forwardist epoch, kind of post-industrial. That kind of schema doesn't really, I mean, it's always going to be too simplistic. It's obviously not going to, it's never going to exhaust the possibilities of what's going on. I think there's a couple of, and one of the issues here, there is that, well, I would say, I mean, I would say broadly, I've said this in some of my academic writing that we're in, we're now, we're no longer at all in the phase of post-fraudism, we're in the phase of platform capitalism. But then in many ways, the themes of platform capitalism, which are, as we, as we're increasingly seeing, they are the, they are themes of, or everybody losing themselves in a virtual world, and the problems raised by the possibilities of artificial intelligence. Those are themes which are already there.

They're already there in cyberpunk. I mean, they're arguably already there even, say, in Asimor, like worrying about what robots are going to be like if they're sentient or if they can simulate sentience. And at the same time, another one of the key themes running through science fiction at different times is dystopian visions of the future and fears about what might happen. if certain tendencies are allowed to exacerbate themselves.

But again, we can see that sort of different dystopian visions of the future have kind of cropped up again and again in the history of science fiction. You know, whether it's the idea of the world having been devastated by a terrible war, or whether it's the idea of some kind of environmental catastrophe, or whether it's the idea of a kind of authoritarian, a kind of return to authoritarianism after some sort of collapse of liberal democracy. it's not so easy really to map all those themes

onto particular historical phases because you can arguably see those as cropping up very early on in the history of science fiction, all of them, and you can see them keeping returning right into the 21st century.

So if you look at a kind of popular piece of science fiction of recent years that I did really like, which is the Expans TV series. The Expans, based on a set of books based themselves on a role-playing game a tabletop role-playing game campaign

I think that was run the early 2000s and the expanse you know it's sort of a near future sort of cyberpunky things set in a world in which people from Earth are exploring the solar system the implication is things on Earth are quite bad because there's too much capitalism

it also it borrows a bit from the Kim Stanley Robinson books because there's this sort of implication that Mars is a bit more socialist and earth and but then there's there's these themes of contact with aliens and one of the and the contact with aliens brings people into contact or rather with alien technology and the alien technology is sort of sentient and it seems to be some sort of some sort of super AI nanotechnology so in a way the theme that all of these themes are still sort of persisting I think it's quite hard to identify any theme in 21st century science fiction that wasn't

there at all, like by the early 70s, actually, which is not like to condemn or to criticize anything. I don't know what, I don't know what to infer from it. I mean, maybe it is the case that, you know, in an era of political retreat for progressive forces, you know, our, our capacity to imagine a future, which is completely different from any future that's been imagined before, you know, it does, it does contract, it does retreat a little bit. Maybe it is a symptom of the fact that we're at the level of politics at the level of class relations if not on the level of technology there hasn't been a lot of progress for the past 50 years I think it does make it sort of harder to imagine a future that hasn't been imagined before at all because although

there is there's really good science fiction being made right now I think I've mentioned the the work of ted Chiang on the show before he's a contemporary science fiction writer writer writer's speculative fiction who does really good work you could point to some of the speculative fiction of China, Mayville, a great comrade of the British left, like a great writer, although probably best known for his sort of steampunk fantasy, but still

wrote, I think, one of the best English language novels of the 21st century, the city and the city. So there's great work being done, but it is quite striking, I think, that there are not visions of the future, which are totally novel, are they, really? Yeah, but

it's also that, if you think about, like, you know, the sort of The aesthetic that dominates science fiction films and so forth, it really is stuck, do you know what I mean? It's not just the vision, it's like the aesthetic and like, you know, the conceptualisation of the future. It's still cyberpunk, isn't it? It's still stuck in a cyberpunk thing.

No, it does. Because I showed my kids Blade Runner for the first time, like a few weeks ago, and it doesn't, and it's still like I've been saying this about Blade Runner. I was first saying this to students in the mid-90s, look at this think about how this doesn't look dated even now and isn't that weird and that is still true in 2025

like it's still it really doesn't look dated the thing that dates it if you're looking really closely is the lack of CGI but also CGI still is so shit that it doesn't actually look better you know it looks I mean the reaction of my daughter was like

how do they make it look like this there's no CGI and it looks amazing I say yeah CGI still doesn't work basically. It just, you know, it doesn't actually work in the same way that AI doesn't actually work. So, and there's something here is, there's something going on here about how capitalism itself can't really imagine a future for itself anymore. You know, capitalism itself can only, you know, it's still stuck in the same, it is still stuck in the same idea of what the future's going to look like. The futures, and there, there is something really important here.

There's something really importantly because one of the themes that we've talked about is the way in which some of the best utopian fiction involves like visions of the post scarcity future and I said I'd come back to and mention again this Aleister Gray novel that's the Grey's not thought of as a science fiction novel

but it's 1994 novel a history maker but this is really just a sort of comedy novel but that's set in an imagined post scarcity future in which it's become a big social issue that men in particular are really bored so they have to basically

just do loads of larping or they'll go crazy but there's all these visions of the post scarcity future. And I mean, part of the issue is that at some point in the 70s or 80s, certainly it's by the 90s, like with the use of IT, we reached a point at which it clearly was technologically possible for the whole world to be having a post-scarcity future. You could make a reasonable case up until sometime in the 60s or 70s that the technology is not really there yet. You know, the socialism can't really work. You can't really do a planned economy. Like it doesn't

really work. You can't make that case. You can't make that case. anymore. You can't make the case. Now, what should CHAPT be doing? What should this AI be doing? Obviously, what it should be doing is figuring out the planned economy for the whole world. If that's what they should be doing with it, not just telling students out of right, you know, plagiarized essays or something. So we've reached a point in history at some point in the past few decades where everyone can sort of intuit, yeah, yeah, the stuff is all there for us to have a real, for us to create a society where everyone only has to work a few

hours a week and we can all have a good time and we could automate a lot of the rest of it and we could all just have fun but and at that point capitalism it can't really even imagine the few it can't allow us to think about the future properly it has to just sort of keep keep to just keep shutting down the future so we get this endless kind of dystopianisms we don't get utopian fiction we don't get utopian movies at all because they don't want us to think about that we just really get this kind of this way of thinking about the future from Hollywood in particular in which well the Holly if you think about the future at all it could only be worse than the present because the present must be presented as the best of all possible worlds because they don't want

us to think about the value and actually you know actually it's bullshit that we haven't got a kind of post-scarcity future is bullshit that AI isn't being used to create the intelligences that make the culture possible in the Ian M. Banks novels it's you You know, it's bullshit that they're not working on, that they're not using 3D, the combination of 3D printing and AI to create like replicators for the whole world so that we can all just have a good time all the time.

That's bullshit. And so that does, it creates this kind of distortion in our ability to actually imagine a future. Because in a sense that all those futures have been imagined and they are now possible. They're no longer just speculative. They are now possible and they're still not letting us have them.

They're doing everything they're, can to stop us having them. And that is a different historical moment to be in than the one that people were in up until, even up until some point in the 90s, when the idea of a fully automatable future was like a nice idea for the future, but it wasn't really there yet. In fact, now we're in a world in which that world is plausible. It is possible. And the only reason we haven't got it is political rather than technological. It's also sort of notable that what utopian fiction there has been, has come from explicitly left-wing writers such as Ian M. Banks and Kim Stanley Robinson. And in fact, you know, what the porpocy of writing about the future

means that even those explicitly left-wing visions have been adopted or colonised by people such as Elon Musk. Yes, exactly. All they can do is parasitize and distort what actually left his visions of the future. Let's leave it there.