Long
ago and far away -- I mean before Lucasfilm -- "science fiction" -- or at least
one clique within that fractious literary conversation -- had the temerity to
call itself "speculative fiction." That speculum wasn't meant to be
Stendhal's mirror of the world, but for a while I saw it that way. As a young
reader in the 1960s, I was less interested in other worlds than in some accounting
of the one I lived in, how it got that way, and what it might become in my adulthood...say,
around 2001.
The dominant naturalist mode of U.S. fiction didn't have much
to say about that. It was missing a huge part of the picture, and that part
was science and technology. A few writers of "serious" lit were all along making
odd moves counter to the naturalist hegemony, in content or in narrative mode,
but by and large it was the SF genre, faintly disreputable and with nothing
to lose, that had the monopoly on glimpses into the secret history of the world
then coming into visibility. All those distant worlds and
futures were really just the present moment viewed through night-vision goggles.
Now,
with a computer on every affluent desktop, technological saturation is a commonplace
and science is the property of all writers. In the 1960s John Updike and Philip
K. Dick were incommensurable. Now there's virtually no divide between Harry
Mulisch's The
Procedure and J.G. Ballard's Super-Cannes,
both set in a present that, not long ago, would have looked like SF. The
engines of the night are fully visible.
My novel Radiance
is a look at such a present, in which social history has been superseded by
something else. At the inception of this present, on the mesa of Los Alamos
in the 1940s, there was a social order; the Manhattan Project could not have
functioned without it, without the extraordinary charm and grace of Oppenheimer,
without the shared background of the scientists. Physics was then a very small
world, like a small town. It was a community that brought into being that which
abolished community. I mean more than just the atomic bomb, which exposed like
an X-ray an entrenched reality -- the absolute and indispensable centrality
of science and technology in the political and economic world.
What's
new? States have always funded technology for military use. But after the bomb,
state-sponsored technology changed from an option to an urgency. Immense amounts
of money and talent had to be poured into it; therefore, fortunes of power and
of money would be made at it.
This
new world, which was more or less invented in elite laboratories and think tanks,
became quickly and inevitably a global reality. Quickly, because of that sense
of urgency, and the money. Inevitably, because of the secrecy imposed by the
elites, and the disinterest or disenfranchisement of the governed. (According
to Richard Rhodes in Dark
Sun, by 1994 the U.S. had spent about four trillion dollars on nuclear
weapons and their delivery systems. Atomic
Audit, edited by Stephen I. Schwartz, puts the figure at $5.5 trillion.)
This
technological reordering disrupted and dismantled older ways of life in every
part of the globe, by threatening to project this unexampled force, by the proliferation
of weapons, and by the consumer technologies and markets spun off from such
unprecedented spending. From aircraft to personal computers to the software
that runs on them, virtually every high tech industry owes its fortune to this
massive peacetime commitment, made by the USA and matched by the USSR, to military
R&D.
Philip
Quine, the hapless U.S. government scientist at the center of Radiance, is
a pure product and example of this disruption. Although he is at the heart of
this new order, he is a displaced person, a man without history. He has no particular
past, he commits to no future, he barely has a present that isn't determined
by acceleration, uncertainty, crisis, and damage control. Instead of a history,
he has technical documents, goals and guidelines, legacy code, off-the-shelf
hardware. His science is one of instrumentalism and use-value rather than of
truth-value. As such, it needs to be sold like any other product in the marketplace.
And here, it seems to me, is the USA's unique contribution to the history of
military R&D, and fertile ground for a novelist: the conjoining of marketing
and technology, which reached an apotheosis in Ronald Reagan's 1983 hawking
of SDI, a technology so speculative that his closest advisors hadn't heard of
it. Even SDI's proponents asserted, years later in the rubble of failed claims
and broken promises, that the strategy all along had been to bankrupt the Soviet
Union, not to shoot down its missiles.
And
so it still goes, long after the Soviet demise, through rounds of new enemies
and justifications and marketing strategies. Science fiction has ceased to be
a revelatory literary genre, and is now writ directly upon the world in white
papers, funding legislation, cost overruns, boom-and-bust IPOs, environmental
impact reports, foreign policy. The legacy of debt, toxicity, and blowback we
have only begun to reckon.
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Feb. 4, 7:30 pm
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Tues., Feb. 12, 7:00 pm
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Feb. 28, 7:30 pm
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Newtonville
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March 14, 7:30 pm
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