Science Fiction Literature and the Future

This English version was machine-translated from the Chinese original. Technical terms may require verification.

Many science fiction works are designed to be spectacular, large ships, AI, strong, complex brain interfaces, and civilized scales extend to the end of the universe, but after reading it, it's like reading a product launch. New technologies are being presented in one item and the world seems to be becoming more advanced, but the person remains responsible for showing the reader that the world view is valid, like the appendix in the design manual.

The questions in this article can also be addressedSci-Fiction *3、Saber's Clement.How the concept of a relatively close read together is developed in different contexts.

This, of course, is not to say that technical design is not important. Many good science fictions depend on a strong enough set to push out the real sharp question. The three laws of robots are not decoration, psychological history is not background, and the Dark Forest is not just a name.

The problem is that science fiction has not really started if it is simply stopped “there is a new technology here”. It is more powerful than that by pushing a technical, intellectual, institutional or environmental variable far enough to observe how human beings, societies and civilizations are forced to redefine themselves.

So I want to talk not about a complete science fiction, nor a list of works, but a rough timeline: what science fiction has been writing all these years, why it cares about different issues in different times, and how China's science fiction has grown different in its own historical pressures. And finally, I think, one more thing: today, science fiction is something else to write about.

This timeline is not intended to complement the history of science fiction, but rather to illustrate the many important shifts in science fiction that often come from putting new variables into the old order and looking at where the world began to transform.

From the new machine to the new world.

If modern science fiction is to be given a starting point, which is often quoted, Frankenstein is a good place. It does not write a technical curriculum for “how to make life”, but rather a question of responsibility after the creation of science: can the creator abandon the creation, whether the creation is morally responsible after social exclusion, and whether human beings are entitled to create a new life that they cannot live in. Science fiction is not just a wonder from an early age, but it is also asking: when science makes something impossible happen, old ethics are enough.

By the second half of the 19th century, Verna and Wells represented almost two creative paths that have continued to date. There are engineering, adventures, geographical expansion and technological optimism in Verna, and 20,000 miles under the sea from Earth to the Moon has made scientific knowledge part of the public imagination. Wells is more like a social fabler, time machine pushing class division into species division, World Wars exposes colonists to fear of invasion by stronger civilizations. One path believes that engineering can expand the world, and the other seeks to see what it will see after it expands.

In the first half of the twentieth century, and especially after the 1920s, science fiction entered the age and type of industry of magazines. The invention, space, robotics, alien civilization, future wars, have gradually become stable narrative assets.

By the late 1930s and 1940s, the golden age of science fiction had reinforced the image of hard science fiction and engineering rationality. It is concerned not only with “humans flying into the sky”, but more about “the world being disintegrated and restructured as it is with engineering”. The Asimov robotic story creates a rule paradox using the three laws, while the Base imagines society and history as a system that can be predicted by models. Technology is not only being exploited by human beings, but also explains and reshapes human society.

After 1945, nuclear weapons, the cold war, space competition, computer and control theory changed science fiction's problem consciousness; and after the 1960s, the ecological crisis further pushed science fiction's emotions to the other side.

Technology is still powerful, but it is no longer natural for progress. It may mean destruction, deterrence, system out of control, or a re-profiling of ordinary life by State machinery and technocrats. Scientific fiction began to deal frequently with limitations of collective survival, civilized boundaries, inhuman intelligence and human perception.

The new wave of science fiction from 1960 to the 1970s pulled science fiction back from outer space to the human world. It is concerned not only with spaceships, robots and interstellar colonization, but also with how awareness, language, gender, political systems and daily experience shape people. The Dark Left Hand and Nothing is particularly telling: science fiction can be seen not by larger ships, but by a different gender system or political organization, which makes it possible to see again what is called a “normal society” only one of many possibilities.

And then in the 1980s, Saberpunk dragged high-tech technology from the state engineering and the universe into the streets, companies, bodies and capital markets. The NeuroRover-style imagination tells us that the network does not automatically bring freedom and that information technology does not necessarily make people more complete. It may create corporate power, identity debris, body commodification and grey survival at the bottom of the city. Sci-fi lenses are moving from starboard windows to the end screen below the neon light, and the future is no longer clean and technology is no longer innocent.

By today, science fiction is hard to sum up by a single line. AI, the climate crisis, biotechnology, platform societies, memory economies, post-human beings, post-colonial perspectives, the global South and non-English-language science fiction are constantly changing its borders.

From this streamlined context, we see not the constant advancement of technology, but the constant progress, but rather the recurring problems of how technology changes the system, how it transforms people and how the boundaries of human perception are shaped by the new world.

Chinese science fiction is another modern type of stress.

The Chinese science fiction timeline cannot be simply written as "late imitators finally catch up with the world." It has been entangled with the problems of modern China from the outset.

Late at dawn, science fiction is often mixed with translation, rewrite, political novels, scientific enlightenment. Leung Kai responded to modern national imagination with future political novels, while Lu Xian translated and rewritten the introduction of scientific novels. They also care not just about the beauty of novels, but about how science enters language, national imagination and national imagination. The future of China, the travel of the Moon, the machinations, all of which are more urgent questions: how a society in crisis can become a modern State.

During the civil period, science fiction did not continue with the slogan of enlightenment. Cat City is a good place to put it here. It does not necessarily meet the expectations of later-style science fictions about technology, but it uses Mars as a source of political fables, ethnic anxiety and civil sarcasm. In other words, Chinese science fiction is long overdue, not just scientific worship, but also antics, charades and social criticism. This is closely related to China ' s national situation and the environment in which Chinese nationals live.

The early science fiction of the Republic often has the function of teaching subjects, readings for young people and building the future. Many of the works, influenced by Soviet scientific literature, emphasize scientific knowledge, socialist construction, youth education and an optimistic future. It is not necessary to say so easily that it is “literaryly inadequate” and more precisely that it carries different functions: science fiction is expected to serve the universalization of science, to convince readers that industrialization and modernization are a tomorrow.

After 1978, science fiction recovered with the “Scientific Spring”. Yip Yong-yeol, the Little Spirits Traveling the Future, has become a sign of recovery, continuing the popular imagination of future lives. The death light on Coral Island, for example, brings together scientific inventions, international competition, doubts and ethical issues. At the same time, the identity of science fiction is unstable, and it is both encouraged and contested. The 1980s Chinese science fiction was not a simple golden age, but a re-launch of excitement, experimentation and contraction.

From the late 1980s to the 1990s, Science Arts/Scfied World, the Galaxy Award, translation input and the reader community have collectively shaped more conscious types of literary domains. The authors Wang Jinkang, Han Song, Ho Yai and Star River have influenced this background. China’s science fiction is beginning to become increasingly aware that it is not just a science-push tool, but also a theory of ideas, civilization, ethical dilemmas, and realism.

The great symbol of the twenty-first century is, of course, Liu Zhonghing, and especially the Triangular. It woven great engineering, cosmic scales, competition for civilization, technological reason and historical trauma, and it also allowed Chinese science fiction to enter wider world discourse. But the Triangulars do not represent the whole of Chinese science fiction. The dimness and institutional sense of Han Song, Wang Jinkang's interest in life science ethics, Hao-Chou Hyeong Fang's treatment of spatial stratification and stratification, Chen Zhui-Hong Tsai's writing of globalization, electronic garbage, body and capital are all indicative of China's science fiction.

If the world science fiction often grows anxiety from the industrial revolution, imperial expansion, the cold war, and information capitalism, China science fiction is faced with another set of problems: How the late-effect countries imagine the future, how science truly enters society; whether the wounds of modernity are redeemed or new; and how the great collective works squeeze into the individual's specific destiny. It writes about the future, and about the desire, fear and misunderstanding of a society about the word “future” itself.

And that is why today's question is not just where technology can be upgraded, but what kind of social structure it will enter and which historical experience will reinterpret.

The future is not just a technical wonder.

Today, when you write science fiction, you can certainly continue to think about the human society after the technological singularities. AI, brain interface, digital immortality, genetic editing, controlled fusion, longevity medicine, space colonization, are still subjects with great imagination. The problem is that the stronger the technology, the more the technical parameters cannot be written.

AI may not be “magic” but rather how labour is revalued, how judgement is outsourced, how education and growth paths are compressed, and how platforms are reallocated with model capabilities. The real sharp point of the brain interface is perhaps not how high the bandwidth is, but who is entitled to access, what memory is readable, what emotions are optimized and who is less trusted because they are unwilling to share neurodata.

Longer life skills are not just “human life time”. If the previous generation is late in dying, inheritance, marriage, career advancement, intergenerational contracts and political representation change. Climate adaptation is not just about the centimetres of sea level rise, but about which cities are protected, where they are abandoned, who is eligible to move and whose homes are counted as affordable losses. Platform societies are not just algorithms that recommend, but rather how people are classified, sequenced, graded, hidden and recalled.

Science fiction is not about technology that strikes society in a one-way direction. Technology can change society, and society can transform technology. Capital, the State, the law, the family, culture, religion, local customs and resistance of users all transform a technology into something different. The most important question for future technology is the consequences of the entry of powerful technology into the real system: How it was absorbed by the old system and how it created new cracks within it.

To look for stories that never happened.

Science fiction doesn't have to look forward forever. Human society has evolved too quickly over the past few centuries, and every successful path has eliminated many of the possibilities that have not occurred. Industrial capitalism, nation-States, fossil energy, modern companies, colonial systems, universities and laboratory systems, patent systems, printing and mass education, once they become a reality, will lead us to believe that this is the only way in the modern world.

But science fiction can look back and ask: What would happen to human beings if certain technological backgrounds, intellectual traditions and social organization were to lead to another path in the course of the year? This is not the same as the random history. Not simply asking, "What happens if a war changes results?" or getting modern mobile phones to the ancients in advance. More interesting is whether there were sufficient technical, organizational and conceptual conditions at the time to support the growth of another modernity.

For example, how can a society organize industrial production if it does not develop modern corporate systems, but is combined by a large technological community of clan finance, networks of trade unions, water engineering, local public opinion and examination systems? In such a world, a craftsman invents new machines and is not confronted with investors and patent offices, but with a joint trial of clan debt, membership in a trade union, local water responsibility and examination origin.

If printing, education and intellectual property were to be shaped by another system, would the scientific community have different structures of authority? Would cities, wars, colonization and labour discipline be completely different if the energy transition did not rely overwhelmingly on coal and oil?

The meaning of this is not to show off the historical brain hole, but to liberate the real world from the “single answer”. We are accustomed to seeing as inevitable the path that has taken place, but science fiction can remind us that history is indeed a series of possibilities that have been filtered out. Looking for science fiction in the past is re-assembling the social elements that already exist and looking at what we can see if human beings move in different directions.

Social science can also be science fiction engines.

Natural science is science, but social science can also provide an extrovertable mechanism for science fiction. It is not that writing social issues automatically becomes science fiction, nor is it the writing of economics, sociology, political science terms into novels. What is really useful about social science is that it interprets the fabric of human society and thus provides the means to construct the world.

Economics can write incentives, allocations, credit and risk pricing. If a society securitizes maternity, education, health care and even family responsibilities, the fate of the person is rewritten by the rate of return and the probability of default. The conflict is not “so advanced in financial models”, but in the case of a family wishing to have a second child, it must be proved that the child will not become a public burden in the future.

Sociology can write about class reproduction, identity labels, social mobility, urban spaces and stigma. A person who wants to flee the birth class finds that “movable” is itself a resource allocated by the system, and that is a strong science-fiction conflict. Political science and organizational theory, in turn, can write about national capacity, bureaucratic processes, indicator management and technical governance: The real horror story is not necessarily AI's evil rule, but that each sector has chosen the most compliant, least-risk option, and finally pushed the whole thing to disaster.

Similar mechanisms can be provided for anthropology, communication and law. When foreign technology enters a society, it does not necessarily transform it into a standard modern society, or may be reabsorbed by a network of sacrifice, inheritance, debt and kinship; the future may be free of the truth, and even every word can be technically proven true and false, but society still struggles for “what truths are worth seeing”; AI, who is responsible for the acts generated, and how groups without legal personality can prove that they have been harmed, can be central to the novel.

Whether it be the illusion of social science or the future of natural science, the true story is still to be found in the specific person: who is empowered by this mechanism and who loses his choice, who misconstrues the rules and who bears the consequences after they function properly. Science fiction and realism are concerned with people, and the difference is that science fiction, through a changed world, pre-empts the contradictions that have not yet fully developed in reality.

Even without a new and bright machine, some institutional mechanism itself can be a point of difference in science fiction.

End

So, what else can science fiction write? The future of human society?

It can also write about stars, ships, alien civilizations and super-smarts. Human curiosity about the distance and the future will not disappear. But it can also write more closely: how the platform defines labour, how the algorithms are credible, how the law defines personality, how schools define potential, how families define responsibility, how cities define who is worth staying, and how the State defines what risks can be sacrificed.

It can even go back to the past and look for the possibility of systems that are overshadowed by the path of victory.

Even without the dramatic technological wonders, science fiction can grow from new technological variables, hidden historical circuits, sophisticated classification and governance mechanisms. Because science fiction is not just looking for a new machine, it is also re-establishing the normal order that has long shaped us.

Sometimes the story is not written in a laboratory, nor in outer space. It may be a set of rules that work in a stable manner, that are inclusive and that may even seem reasonable. What science fiction does is push the rule a little further, so we can finally see how it is changing people.

Verna is my favorite science fiction writer, but I can't write that article.

This section of the paper draws on the Marriott B video:"The SEAL Award Science Fiction" - The Zero Rules.。

References and extended reading

• The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, ChinaThe Chinese science fictional development network is being used to check the Chinese science fictional development landscape.
• The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, New Wave: To complement new waves and typologies.
• The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, Cyberpunk: To supplement the type of background of Cyberpunk.
• Britannica, Science fiction: Alternative societies: To complement the social system's imagination and alternative social traditions.
• JSTOR Daily, Chinese Science Fiction Before The Three Body Problem: To supplement the Chinese science fiction background before Triple.