on sci-fi
The other day somebody I care about sent me a story by Isaac Asimov called The Last Question.
A lot of people I really like happen to really like sci-fi literature. I've never really gotten into it myself.
And so while the story itself was interesting, I found myself thinking more about the /form/. About sci-fi itself.
People make it sound like sci-fi is about the future. But I don't think that's true at all. I think sci-fi is about the eternal present. Because sci-fi isn't about technology. It's about fears, conflicts, and concerns that - yes, will exist in the future - but have also have existed since the beginning of time.
Sci-fi always feels current because it's always still talking about the future (if you can get over the pedantry of the dates that authors often arbitrarily include). The things in sci-fi have either not yet come to pass or (in the cases of technology) have - and either feel obvious and natural.
Reading this story in particular, it's obvious that "a computer that can answer any question" was almost entirely theoretical back then (1956). That it does now doesn't feel spectacular. At least not to me. And Asimov's vision of the technology of the future doesn't seem out of place either. It seems inevitable. Whether that inevitability is real or informed by Asimov's vision of the future itself I can't be sure.
Sci-fi is about /possible/ futures. About imagined futures. And I think that maybe we've reached a point where all futures are imaginable. Where all futures are possible. Where we are so aware that we cannot predict or avoid any future more than the other.
The thing that I do find revealing is the /tone/ Asimov has about the future. Modern sci-fi's focus on technology seems to me to be focused on a world where things continue /as they current are/ as opposed to one where the world is unimaginably different to the one that we have today.
Maybe in Asimov's day an all powerful computer was something one could be ambivalent about. Today it's something almost entirely quotidian in our imaginings of near and distant futures. What we seem more concerned about isn't how dramatically things might change. But what the dramatic effect of them /not/ changing might be.