How SciFi missed the point

Ray Bradbury once said that he didn't own a computer, "because I already own a typewriter, and I don't need another one." This sentiment from one of sci-fi's canonical masters, of a computer as a glorified typewriter and calculating machine, perfectly illustrates just how blind and short-sighted so much of science fiction was. To see why one needs to look no farther than Britney Spears.

Britney Spears made a sorry spectacle of herself a few days ago at the VMAs, and what's worse, she did it in front of a net-savvy, plugged-in audience, which meant an incident that a few years ago might have blown over after momentary embarrassment within a certain audience - how many people actually watch the VMAs, anyway? - becomes a broader cultural event. There is no greater evidence for this than the remarkable fact that I, who must be about the last person to be interested in what happens in Britney Spears' life, have not only seen the spectacle myself, I've also seen that video where a sobbing Britney fan comes to her passionate defense. Sure, my exposure to the whole fracas only comes out to about 10 minute of video at most, but this is still far, far, far more Britney than I thought I would ever encounter in a 24-hour span.

This is hardly a unique insight. Political pundits have already observed how the Internet has the effect of magnifying a politician's gaffes - former senator George Allen's "macaca" moment being the oft-referenced example of this - and it's long been accepted that the convergence of cell-phone cameras, a rabid audience, and YouTube has brightened the spotlight on celebrities to a blinding glare. Nor is, I think, my broader point at all novel - that the Internet has, in fact, changed everything. It allows incredibly niche, tiny subcultures to network and form communities and harnesses the long tail of consumer demand. At the same time it gives the "mainstream" culture a pervasive vehicle of transmission so that even individuals who are doing their best to tune out have difficulty escaping its presence. (I skimmed thread titles about Britney in the off-topic forums at some sites I lurk, and was formally introduced to the entire affair via an article at Salon.)

Nevertheless, I bring up this admittedly not very original point that "The Internet Changes Everything" for a reason. For one thing, I think it is frequently underestimated just how much information and communications technology has Changed Everything. In terms of cultural impact, the Internet is equal to radio and greater than television, the telephone, and the telegraph. It has completely reshaped how an entire generation interacts with each other and the broader culture, and by doing so, it has changed the lives even for those who might have little use for the Internet at all. An elderly Virginia citizen who has never touched a computer, for example, has nevertheless been directly affected by YouTube and the role it played in George Allen's re-election failure. (I could perhaps even point to Bill Clinton's impeachment, which certainly altered the trajectory of this country and the world, as a product of the information age - it's questionable just how big the Lewinsky Affair would have been had Drudge not trumpeted the story early, as it's precisely the sort of story that the "respectable" media of the time was hesitant to publish.)

From time to time people have wondered what exactly happened to "the future" - by this they mean the wonderful technological advances promised by futurologists and science fiction writers decades ago. Where is the life promised by the Jetsons? Where are our moon bases, our flying cars, or personal robot servants? But these are mere trappings, fetishes of technology. The astounding advances in communications technology has already ushered in a completely different world. But our science fiction writers have almost entirely missed the point. Science fiction has largely been what I call "industrial" science, by which I mean it is fixated on technology you can see and touch - lasers, spaceships, robots - while failing to realize just how significant this electronic-mail thing was going to become. But the first world is post-industrial. A better car, a faster spaceship, would hardly affect our lives the same way that the Internet has.

Ultimately I think the problem was that the canonical science fiction writers, and certainly "hard" sci-fi writers, were and are pretty terrible sociologists - it is a "soft" science after all. The Isaac Asimovs, Raymond Bradburys, and Phillip K. Dicks of the world were far more interested in the gee-whiz technological wizardry of their futures than in the social impact that advancing technology would have. In fact, going back and reading their work it's often amusing just how anachronistic their "future" societies seem: if it weren't for the cool technology laying around, many of those stories could just as well be set in the pre-feminist and pre-counterculture postwar decade.

I don't mean to indict an entire genre, of course, just the amusing failings of the older, stodgier, "I don't need a fancier typewriter" Bradburys of sci-fi. Cyberpunk certainly suggested that there was more to the future than jetcars and moon bases, and Cory Doctorow, probably the most important sci-fi writer today, is almost entirely a child of the Internet. My point is that any science fiction that claims to be relevant today must, like Doctorow, account for how information and communications technology has and will affect our lives. Otherwise you're just playing with spaceships and lasers.

Jodi Picoult - My Sister's Keeper

As a way to get myself in the habit of writing regularly, I'm going to try to post regularly to this blog over the next month or so. I've done a lot of media consumption (and subsequent reflection) this summer, so there's plenty of material percolating: stray thoughts on a book I just read, responses to what I see on TV, pretentious ideas occupying my higher brain functions as I distract myself with a video game. Having a rather high opinion of myself, my natural impulse is to turn to someone and share these stunning insights aloud, but all too often there is no audience readily available to witness my piercing observations. So I'll write them down instead.

I'll start with a book I read this past week, Jodi Picoult's My Sister's Keeper. Picoult has found one of those subjects both very relevant to real life yet fertile with dramatic potential that all writers and wannabe writers (like myself) wish they had thought of themselves. Anna Fitzgerald is conceived for the express purpose of serving as a marrow donor for her leukemic older sister, Kate. Prior to implantation, her embryo is genetically screened from a batch to be a perfect bone marrow match. Moments after her birth Anna's precious umbilical stem cells are whisked away to reinforce Kate's beleaguered immune system, and as she grows up Anna undergoes numerous operations, shots, and transfusions to prevent the lethal relapse of Kate's leukemia. Her parents love her and don't like to call her a "designer baby" but that is, effectively, what she is: Anna was selected and born for a purpose.

This scenario has in fact been seen in a number of families with a leukemic young child, which is part of what makes My Sister's Keeper such a potent novel. Picoult gives the narrative a jolt by opening with Anna, age 13 and unwilling to serve as a kidney donor for Kate, filing legal papers for medical emancipation from her parents. The subsequent legal controversy and family dysfunction propel the rest of the plot.

My Sister's Keeper was a enjoyable and brisk read - I might even go so far as to call it a "page-turner" if that phrase didn't have vaguely pejorative connotations - but still, I can't say I'm entirely satisfied with it. Ultimately I believe my disenchantment can be traced to the central emancipation plot. Picoult takes a scenario of enormous emotional complexity and dimension only to reduce it in order to make it fit a rather facile legal controversy. The life of a "typical" family with a designer donor baby is quite fascinating enough; there's no need for the author to contrive a rather outlandish legal gesture to inject some drama into the family dynamic. A more understated exploration of the unarticulated pity, obligation, and even occasional resentment of a typical donor/recipient relationship would probably have been far more provocative than what Picoult gives us here. Indeed, the overt recrimination and conflict the Fitzgerald family experiences as a consequence of Anna's dramatic decision is, if anything, quite familiar to us from other stories or own lives.

This impulse to "add the drama" is sadly evident throughout the book. Like many Picoult novels, My Sister's Keeper is resolved with a court case in the fourth act, but along the way it acquires one overwrought, contrived subplot after another. The older brother acts out by committing acts of arson which are then investigated by the fireman father. Anna's lawyer has a service dog for some unnamed disability that he's too proud to voice aloud. The court-appointed guardian ad litem still bears emotional wounds from a tumultuous high school romance with Anna's lawyer. Anna's mother is also an attorney and represents herself in court, cross-examining the father when Anna's lawyer calls him as a witness. (This produces perhaps the most cringe-inducing moment in the novel when the mother plaintively asks the estranged father, "When are you coming home?") These subplots leaden and encrust what is actually a very well-conceived relationship between Anna and Kate, who engage in movingly familiar rituals of sibling affection and bickering even as they together confront their extraordinary and unfamiliar challenges.

Unfortunately the relationship between Anna and Kate receives perhaps the least attention in the book as Picoult abandons it in order to pursue her many dramatic contrivances, and also to withhold information from the reader for a big reveal in the fourth act that is nevertheless rather predictable. There's also a second heavy-handed twist in the final pages that resolves everything a bit too neatly. My Sister's Keeper is being adapted into film - Nick Cassavetes, of The Notebook, is attached to direct - which does not surprise me; with its many twists, reversals, and romantic entanglements it is an exceedingly theatrical book - which is to say, unlike our less dramatic actual lives.

None of this is necessarily to imply that My Sister's Keeper is a bad book; it's far too well-written for that. The book brought me close to tears more than once - though on those occasions I couldn't shake the impression that I was being manipulated, as when a film produces a baby in peril or turns up the melancholy violin soundtrack. I might wish that Picoult treated her subject with a lighter touch and restrained herself to a purer, smaller story, but I must concede that she demonstrates tremendous craft with the story that she does choose to tell. I should also concede that I have the sort of jaded pomo taste that sees authorial contrivance everywhere and is predisposed to dislike Picoult's grander treatment of this subject in favor of a sparser, more minimalist approach.

In the end I guess my feelings about the book come down to this: my copy of the book came in a very effete teal-and-peach pastel, with a cover photo of two tank top-wearing girls leaning against each other that resembles something from one of those faddish tween chick-lit "Gossip Girl" books. I like to pride myself the kind of progressive, educated person who is above arbitrary social constructions of gender and superficial masculine vanity, but I have to confess that when I was reading at the coffee shop I surreptitiously kept the book flat against the table surface, or read from underneath the table like a guilty elementary student. If, like me, you can't quite get past the cover, then the florid melodrama that obscures the fascinating central dilemma in My Sister's Keeper will probably prove an equally discouraging obstacle. Whether that's a failing of the book or of myself, I don't think I'm in a position to say.