I don't know the future. Not personally anyway. But I hear it’s bright. Lol.
My internal monologue trolls me like this whenever I am invited to think, talk, or write about – gestures vaguely in the direction of ‘later’ – the subject of the future.
These questions began with relentless frequency after my work became associated with the term Gulf Futurism in the late 2000s. This phrase came from a blog I wrote called The Gaze of Sci-Fi Wahabi. It was born partially out of my experience as a teenager in Qatar. Fossil fuel, gender, techno-dread, and body horror would have been among the hashtags. It was the product of a crucible year spent on Kodwo Eshun’s Aural and Visual Culture course at Goldsmiths. There I gorged on a rich diet of critical theory, video art, music history, and pretentious post-lecture pub chat which left me more bloated than Tetsuo at the end of Akira. I was bursting with ideas. I never intended the blog to be read as widely as it has been. But I have left it on blogspot unchanged, for posterity…whenever that is.
Anyway, so began a brief and unwanted career on the futurist panel circuit.
This will sound familiar to artists, writers, scientists, or really anybody whose work provokes a sexy frottage between ‘the now’ and 'the later’. Mix in hard science fiction aesthetics or reference certain beloved sci-fi classics and you are bound to receive similar requests from cultural institutions, podcasts, universities, and, most tellingly, corporations. Usually for little or no compensation. Typically attended by very wealthy people. These events sometimes felt violent and almost always felt pointless. Who was I talking to? Was anyone listening? It took an argument over the Oxford English Dictionary with a techno-optimist for me to quit. That year they were removing ‘cygnet’ from the OED in favor of inserting ‘bitcoin’. His argument went something like, ‘I’ve never seen a cygnet. Why do we need a word for it?’ ‘Well have you ever seen a bitcoin?’
After that I was done. I went into a deep period of mourning for the future. At first, I thought it was a millennial thing. But it’s not.
And here I am again. In the middle of the end of one world, writing my opinion about this ‘future’ I keep hearing so much about in exchange for a little coin. And the question I’ve been asked is essentially: How can sci-fi help us rewrite the future?
Well, what if we consider speculative fiction as a tool for that instead?
To me speculative fiction includes policy, code, grant applications, lines on maps, budgets. I could go on. This kind of fiction is the realm of possibility. And in novelistic fiction of all kinds (pulp, historical, erotic, crime, fan, etc.) what is possible is always more important than what is probable. Which is why storytelling – and writing more broadly – is a basic processing technology humans developed to convert fantasy into reality.
I have not written science fiction. As a rule.
I made this decision after my first job writing coverage for a movie script. It was for an adaptation of Octavia E. Butler’s Clay’s Ark. One of the hardest sci-fi books in her oeuvre.
To write coverage of a script you have to strip it down to its component parts. Outlining act breaks onto the story’s skin like a surgeon plotting the path for a scalpel. All the joy and love were being drained out of me as I dissected the organs and broke the story engine down into scrap.
That was over a decade ago. Since then, I have stayed away from my favorite genre, and I specialize in historical fiction for the work I do as a screenwriter. I think of researching period drama as time travel. And it feeds my art practice, which remains future-focused. They say, ‘Study the past to see the future.’ And that feels like important work to me.
I look back at the question I’ve been posed:
‘How can we think of a break with science fiction’s literary past?’
I push my glasses up my nose and ask,
‘Well, have you tried turning the Prime Radiant on and off?’
If you know the reference: cringe.
If you don’t: The Prime Radiant is a device used in Isaac Asimov’s ‘Foundation’ series. It’s actually just a glorified projector but the point is, it predicts the future by applying mathematical statistics to past events in history and to human psychology. All of this happens in a conference room full of shadowless ‘psychohistorians’ who make color-coded revisions to the equation which measures and attempts to minimize future negative fallout from the algorithmically determined ‘plan’.
Basically, change the plan, change the future.
Even though it’s a fictional device, the US military tried it as an idea with Project Camelot (full name: Methods for Predicting and Influencing Social Change and Internal War Potential) in the 20th century. While in the 21st century having a Prime Radiant is basically what every start-up and authoritarian government wants: to know and prepare for what the next thing is.
(bcc corporate wank tanks that feed off cherry-picking artists’ brains.)
The intention is the problem. It is colonial greed. It’s raping and pillaging possibility. Look at the internet. Understand history. Understand the future.
So, a break with the canon feels short-sighted in my view.
Behind the question of a ‘break’ with science fiction’s past I hear the suggestion that there is a problem with science fiction’s present. If anything, it’s a hauntologistical one.
A lot of science fiction is written by writers who don’t live in the present but only read sci-fi of the past.
The best living science fiction writers that I know stay close to the roots of the genre: They are active observers of the world and the time they live in. That’s why climate fiction is one of the more interesting things to have happened, not just in speculative fiction, but in literature more broadly in the past few years.
So, back to observable scientific phenomena like the cross-pollination of a musk melon and a mini-gourd, or the horizontal gene transfer of super-gonorrhea, or the parthenogenesis of a female hammerhead shark, or the parasitism of a lilac-drunk nematode.
If we were less worried about breaking with the past, and borrowed the adaptive strategies of our current cohabitants on earth, it would be a wilder and more imaginative time. And that feels urgent to me. To diversify the stories being propagated and seeding in the wild.
Before she wrote Wild Seed Octavia E. Butler wrote these words down at the bottom of a page of college ruled paper: ‘So be it! See to it!’
This document proves to me that the causal nexus between a desire and its reality is writing it down. Which is why: Be careful what you write. Be mindful of who you write about. Be sensitive to who you are writing for.
And that’s something to which the canon of speculative fiction has not been careful or mindful or sensitive. Because the Western concept of what makes ‘a good story well told’ is drama. Drama by definition involves conflict and while that’s a really big problem when writing for people’s entertainment, it’s an even bigger problem when it comes to speculative writing of any kind, be it history, legal policy, or 2050 masterplans.
I think about this every time I end up in a staring contest with a blinking cursor.
And then I remember, I don’t know what the fuck I’m on about.
I ain’t the first to think these things and I hope to hell I won’t be the last.
And as we slide deeper and deeper into the worlds of the ‘Parables’, ‘Foundation’, 1984, The Matrix, Brave New World, Blade Runner, or The Hunger Games all I can think is: Get me the fuck off of this timeline.
It’s mostly old white men who wrote us into this mess. Now the rest of us gotta write our way out of it.
So, yeah! Reboot the Prime Radiant!
Turn off the overhead projectors! Shut down the memory banks!
It’s very dark. It’s very quiet.
There’s only you.
Present.
In the present.
Here. Now.
Sophia Al-Maria is an artist, writer, and filmmaker. She is represented by Project Native Informant, London.
Conversations: Rewriting the Future: Science Fiction and Contemporary Art takes place on Friday, September 24th at 3pm with Sophia Al-Maria,Rasheedah Phillips, artist, Black Quantum Futurism, Philadelphia, moderated by Mónica Bello, Head of Arts, CERN
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Full-bleed images from top: 1. Sophia Al-Maria, taraxos, 2021, at Serpentine x Modern Forms Sculpture Commission.Photo by David Tett. 2. Installation view of Sophia Al-Maria, Beast Type Song, 2019, at Tate Britain, London.Courtesy of the artist, Anna Lena Films, Paris, and Project Native Informant, London. 3. Installation view of Sophia Al-Maria, Mirror Cookie in ilysm, 2018, at Project Native Informant, London.Courtesy of the artist and Project Native Informant, London. 4. Installation view of Sophia Al-Maria, Beast Type Song, 2019, at Tate Britain, London.Courtesy of the artist, Anna Lena Films, Paris, and Project Native Informant, London. 5. Sophia Al-Maria, Beast Type Song (video still), 2019. Single-channel video, 38 min. 2 sec. Courtesy of the artist, Anna Lena Films, Paris and Project Native Informant, London.