“Space. The final frontier. These are the voyages of the starship Enterprise. Its continuing mission … to boldly go where no one has gone before.” Star Trek’s opening words have a dual meaning: while the Enterprise explores new planets, Star Trek as an overall show explored new plot lines, tackling pressing social and political issues such as racism, LGBTQ rights, the impact of automation, and many others.
Star Trek won millions of fans precisely because it looked into the future only to shine a light on the present. However, this perspective is hardly limited to Star Trek, or even this century. One Lucian of Samosata wrote a work called A True History in the 2nd century that was anything but. Much ink has been spilt trying to parse the science fiction from the satire in the book, but it clearly commented on contemporary themes by looking into the future, like so many other works since then.
Helen Marshall’s The Migration, Audrey Schulman’s Theory of Bastards, and Ben Winters’ Golden State, all published within the last year, do the same. Each fills a certain niche in the corpus of modern science fiction: The Migration combines young adult fiction, horror, and sci-fi, Theory of Bastards actually spends a significant page count discussing science, and Golden State gives the classic detective novel a futuristic twist. Above all, each represents the modern tendency to shift away from ultra-futuristic scenes to instead explore time periods closer to our own.
Like fiction more generally, these books and other recently published science fiction works reflect the cultural and political context of their time period. Authors and creators use the innovations and technologies imagined in works of science fiction as tools to comment on contemporary angsts and worries, not to predict technology for accuracy’s sake.
Definitions, Novums, and Metaphors
Defining science fiction is often tricky. Britannica defines the genre as “a form of fiction that deals principally with the impact of actual or imagined science upon society or individuals,” while prominent Canadian sci-fi critic Darko Suvin defined science fiction by its use of “cognitive estrangement” created by what he called a book’s “novum.” The average reader probably would recognize a novel’s novum as its premise, the realistic change that the author imagines and the “what if?” questions that emerge from that change.
The Migration, Theory of Bastards, and Golden State all have novums, but the science part of science fiction in these three is iffy at best. It might be wiser to call these three novels examples of speculative fiction, which more broadly deals with things that have not happened but that could be. However, to make things more confusing, Britannica calls speculative fiction another name for science fiction; turning to the Oxford Encyclopedia for Literature does not make things much clearer. Perhaps the best solution to this definitional quibble is to ignore it: Each novum, let’s say, in speculative fiction reflects the political and cultural context of the time in which it was written, whether that novum is a specific innovation or a broader premise.
Essayist Tim Kreider agrees, declaring in The New Yorker that “science fiction is an inherently political genre, in that any future or alternate history it imagines is a wish about How Things Should Be (even if it’s reflected darkly in a warning about how they might turn out).” Particularly as science fiction writers have turned away from distant fantasy worlds, instead writing about a near-future Earth, it has become harder to see science fiction as anything but metaphorical or allegorical, or at least as some form of premonition or warning about dystopian futures.
Their respective authors set The Migration, Golden State, and Theory of Bastards in this near-future time period, with easily recognizable settings like Oxford, California, and Missouri, respectively, not Mars, Endor, or Romulus. Each novel addresses a different political or cultural anxiety: The Migration deals with climate change’s impending upheaval, Theory of Bastards criticizes society’s overwhelming reliance on technology, and Golden State, the most explicitly political of the three, tackles society’s complicated relationship with objective reality in an era of fake news and “alternative facts.”
Climate Change, Disease, and Protest
In The Migration’s near-future world, climate change has caused massive storms, and the world worries constantly about rising seas and rivers overflowing their banks and inundating cities. Amidst this world wracked by change, a mysterious disease emerges, echoing the Black Death and AIDS. The cause of Juvenile Idiopathic Immunodeficiency Syndrome — “JI2” — is unknown, and may be unknowable. As such, the plot unfolds in a world marred by upheaval which, as the book progresses, gets worse and worse, eventually creating “a massive crisis and a massive loss of life,” as the book’s author, Helen Marshall, told the HPR.
Marshall thrusts the book’s protagonist, Sophie, into the midst of this chaos. Her younger sister, Kira, has been diagnosed with JI2, and later dies of complications from the disease. Later on, though, Sophie realizes that JI2 does not kill its victims but rather transforms them into otherworldly nymphs, forcing Sophie to come “to a decision to embrace … radical change that initially seems terrifying to her and to everyone around her,” Marshall said.
As such, an undercurrent of dissatisfaction with the system permeates the novel. Sophie and her friend-turned-love interest Brian realize by the end of the book that the government and the medical authorities are making things worse rather than better through their responses to JI2. Riots break out, and the protagonists discuss how to take things into their own hands. Doctors and medical experts on the disease have lost trust even though they disseminate fundamentally correct information, echoing expertise’s loss of status in our own society. Faith in the system has collapsed.
This lack of faith mirrors recent youth climate protests. In both the book and the real world, a largely young population feels like world governments are not doing enough to fight a problem or are actively mismanaging a crisis, thrusting scientific issues to the political forefront. Youth climate activism has peaked, and many of Sophie’s thoughts echo the perspectives of these young climate leaders: the government simply does not have the willpower to deal with the impacts of radical change. Despite this, Marshall does not consider the novel an anti-establishment novel, merely a warning against the dangers of inaction.
Indeed, the importance of tackling climate change lies at the center of the novel’s key takeaways, and was Marshall’s purpose in writing the novel. “We really need to figure out how to take action” on climate change, Marshall said. “It’s my hope that speculative fiction can help us do that by at least familiarizing ourselves with the discourse around climate change and these problems.” By raising awareness of climate change’s potential impact and linking that impact to recent outbreaks like Ebola and Zika that sparked fear worldwide, Marshall warns the world that it must take action.
Technology, Bonobos, and Sex
Theory of Bastards, which won the 2018 Philip K. Dick Award, also takes place in a world racked by climate change. Heat waves plague the world, and asthma has become an increasingly serious problem. But it is dust, not water, that forms the protagonists’ climatic enemy. Schulman notes the devastating impact of climate change, but she does not use it as a tool to discuss climate change in itself — instead, it functions to illuminate humanity’s complicated relationship with technology.
Schulman’s novel follows Frankie Burk, a MacArthur Genius Grant-winning researcher who posited that women cheated on their husbands to secure an evolutionary benefit for their children. She has now moved on to study mate selection in bonobos at the Missouri-based Foundation. In the middle of her bonobo research, a massive dust storm hits the Foundation, triggering an extensive technological reevaluation.
Frankie and her research assistant, David Stotts, stay behind to help care for the bonobos, but the technology that their society had relied upon fails. Frankie’s BodyWare, with “Lenses” evocative of Google Glass and the Siri-like “Bindi” program, had never really worked in the first place, but the dust storm forces her into survival mode — without technology. Elsewhere in the book, Schulman depicts technology in a negative light, showing adults too preoccupied with their Lenses and “E-musement” to actually pay attention to the world around them.
Schulman sees her novel as a clear indictment against the perils of technology. “We’re supposed to be so smart and capable,” she told the HPR. “We’re able to make iPhones and Google Maps, but at the same time, we’re unable to migrate across town without directions.” This critique appears quite prescient in an age where everyone seems glued to their screens, unable to perceive the world around them, like some of the characters in Schulman’s novel. But Schulman shows how humans can flail and struggle when some exogenous force snaps this link, and how human society can degenerate without it.
This critique parallels broader critiques of technology: A famous article in The Atlantic provocatively asked, “Have smartphones destroyed a generation?” Meanwhile, Schulman subtly critiques the constant presence of tailored advertising by slightly exaggerating it, as the Bindis, planted on everyone’s foreheads, serve as a form of prominent and constant product placement, she told the HPR. Overall, the innovations Schulman imagines serve to critique contemporary society’s reliance on technology, not to provide a model for a society moving forward.
Some broader narrative choices also reflect broader cultural patterns. Of course, Frankie is a strong female protagonist in a literary world dominated by men, placing her in a growing category of female protagonists in literature. Frankie’s research reminds readers that women, too, have agency in sexual relations, that men do not entirely control dating and sex. In this sense, the book reflects trends in fourth-wave feminism, with its focus on women’s empowerment, and the #MeToo movement, which is fundamentally about women reclaiming agency in the face of sexual harassment.
And the chasm between Frankie, who grew up on the East Coast, and the Midwesterners who populate the Foundation is obvious from the beginning of the novel. She is “stuck up about it, too,” Schulman commented, confirming that this plot point reflects the growing chasm between urban and rural in today’s politics.
Truth, Lies, and Speculation
Golden State, finally, takes place in a mostly urbanized world, but one devoted entirely to the truth. In order to protect the Objectively So, this world’s commonly accepted reality, the state has made lying a crime. Novels refer to factual accounts of the deeds of the state’s heroes, and the only people permitted to speculate are, well, Speculators, tasked with rooting out “anomalies” in the Objectively So. Everyday citizens record and archive the minutiae of their daily lives to create a record of this Objectively So. “Imagine if everyone [lied],” the main character, Laszlo Ratesic, explains to his trainee-turned-partner Aysa Paige. “Imagine the danger that would pose, how quickly those lies would metastasize, and the extraordinary threat that would pose to the world.”
This novum is a direct reaction to the untruths of one Donald Trump. “What really kicked off my thinking about this book in particular was, there was a whole incident when the Trump administration had been angrily insisting that the crowd size at the inauguration had been the biggest ever,” Winters told the HPR. All the recording in the novel “is a direct response to the feeling in the air in our age of social media and cable news in constant bickering over not just opinion but reality,” he continued. Laszlo’s statement aims directly at the bull’s-eye of contemporary angst surrounding the president’s constant propagandizing.
Set against this backdrop, a roofer falls to his death, but Laszlo soon discovers that more exists than meets the eye. By the end of the book, he unravels a tangled web of high-placed officials who have distorted the truth, who have started to live their lives off the omnipresent Record. At the end of the book, Laszlo realizes that some things in the “Objectively So” are untrue, and some truths have been hidden from the “Objectively So.”
The book’s themes revolve entirely around questions of truth and untruth, with echoes of George Orwell’s classic 1984. “I do think that ultimately I’m warning people against trusting too much of what they’re told, but also warning them against not trusting enough of what they’re told,” Winters said. The political context of “fake news” and “alternative facts” looms large in this message: The public cannot believe everything the media tells it, but believing nothing creates a climate where a common reality can no longer exist. As such, the novel feels like a condemnation of the Trump administration and its checkered relationship with the truth.
The constant recording in the novel seems, meanwhile, to offer a clear critique of the surveillance state — but it also reflects other political contexts. “A few years ago, there was a widespread call for dash-cams and body-cams on the police as a suggested solution to the rash of police violence against African-American communities,” he said. “It always struck me as a less-than-ideal solution,” he continued, and that came across in the novel: Constant recording could not help to solve the roofer’s mysterious death or the plot against the Objectively So.
Dystopias and Cultural Pessimism
Undoubtedly, the rise of dystopian near-future literature — books like these three — challenges certain truths previously held in the speculative fiction genre, which seemed to operate on the assumption that writers would imagine utopian worlds with technology they thought would better mankind. As such, contemporary science fiction has lost much of the predictive aura it once had. “At a fundamental level, we hope it’s not predictive,” said Marshall, author of The Migration.
Indeed, dystopian literature has previously found popularity in eras with deep-seated political, cultural, or economic resentments, such as during Hitler’s rise to power amidst the Great Depression. Pessimistic literature corresponds with a pessimistic cultural environment. Star Trek: The Next Generation proves the inverse: of course it was optimistic, filmed in the 1990s amidst Western jubilation surrounding capitalism’s victory over communism and the generally booming economy. As such, today’s proliferation of dystopias reflects our generally pessimistic cultural atmosphere, filled with doom and gloom about climate change’s impending effects or backsliding political institutions.
Even if some critics believe that science fiction should not be read as metaphorical, they cannot deny that political and cultural trends have influenced the creative process. Themes like truth, climate change, and technology remain ever-present in the current cultural milieu, and one cannot isolate science fiction from the context that surrounds it.
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