Did the Twenty-First Century Kill Near Future Fiction?

It is a commonplace to speak of twentieth century science fiction as having been dominated by pessimism and dystopia. The claim is not wholly baseless, but as I have been arguing since at least Cyberpunk, Steampunk and Wizardry it is at best an oversimplification that obscures and confuses much--with this the clearer because of what twenty-first century science fiction looks like. In the early '00s we still had the echoes of cyberpunk, which were far from depicting the grand old Future of rationality and technological and social progress an earlier generation hoped for, but still, a future in which, for all its failures, inequities and disappointments (and they were many indeed), civilization more or less held together for the time being at least, and modern life at least went on as technology advanced and new potentials opened up as technology advanced--not all of them appealing to everyone, but all the same, not stagnating either (certainly, to go by the vision in William Gibson's Sprawl novels, and even more pointedly, Bruce Sterling's Shaper/Matrix universe). Indeed, sometimes there were even hints of a better world ahead along more familiar lines--with John Shirley's only slightly updated reissue of his Eclipse trilogy seeing the horror of a third world war in the 2020s as NATO battles Russia in Europe and a xenophobic, high-tech fascism resurges across the West, enforced by privatized paramilitaries as fake news proliferates, but the good guys save the day in the end, while Ken MacLeod's the Star Fraction gave us, at the end of modernity's road, old-fashioned utopia in a world where, blessedly, Mises and Malthus and Freud were all wrong (as more would have acknowledged were they not so determined to dismiss utopia even when it hit them in the face).

But those echoes faded as the decade drew to a close, with science fiction writers offering anything and everything but a future in which, for all its failures, inequities and disappointments, civilization more or less held together and modern life at least went on. Instead we had eco-shocked post-apocalypse scenarios depicting catastrophe and reversion to a more primitive state of things by the few survivors, and flight from the future altogether in the form of sci-fi fantasy hybrids, metafictional play with past classics, and like. And so far as I can tell the writing of stories of futuristic civilization never recovered. For a world in which civilization held together and life went on seemed increasingly hard to picture under the blows that seemed to mount without end--and the way in which those in charge responded to them. The metastasization of the conflicts of many of the late twentieth century into a "forever war" waged on a global scale and in authoritarian "Kill list Tuesday!" fashion by, among much else, flying killer robots. The Great Recession that was in fact the start of a Long Depression, and the beginning of globalization's Great Fraying, if not Unraveling. The endless worsening of the ecological catastrophe, as elites showed complete indifference to present let alone potential suffering (with the output of solarpunk I have seen to date tending to fall short of its promise of optimism, all as the name of the subgenre itself testifies to the deeply unhappy sense that a reckoning with climate catastrophe about which there are few grounds for optimism at present in anything remotely like the existing state of affairs will dominate human life in the years to come). The COVID-19 pandemic, and again, elite indifference to the mass death that followed from it. And of course, the opening act of the Eclipse trilogy's conflict, as a Barry Goldwater-style incomprehension of the meaning of nuclear war actually seemed the norm for the political class all over the world.

Considering it one has to admit that not everyone took it all the same way, the fears of the left were not those of the right, etc., not least because the media machinery has so specialized in confusion and distraction, but all the same, at least some of it necessarily made an impression on any mind capable of extrapolating the future from the present. Indeed, if as David Graeber reminds us the fear of civilization's crashing down being imminent is as old as modernity, it all seems to have proven overwhelming. In that it seems we have come up against a Singularity--not the Singularity of accelerating technological progress that the post-cyberpunks of the '00s spent so much time and effort probing, but the Singularity of the crisis of human civilization and its systems in all its economic, political, social and ecological dimensions, without the technological miracles of that other Singularity looking as if they will come to the rescue, and in the process making those cyberpunk scenarios we once called pessimistic look like optimism by the lowered standard of the darker era into which the world has passed.