We're already in the Multiverse

The space between us is smaller but the gap between our experiences is wider.

How can science fiction help?

Science fiction (SF) can give us fresh perspectives on dominant themes in our time.

It doesn't purport to portray eternal truths about the human condition. Instead, it promises to be like science itself, never staying put, thus lending itself to an almost cartoonish - yet easily digestible - transience.

The artistic image is not intended to represent the thing itself, but, rather, the reality of the force the thing contains.

-- James Baldwin

Golden Age

The 'Pulp' and 'Golden' Ages of Science Fiction (SF) produced a lot of adventures about heroes discovering superweapons. Alfred Bester, E.E. Doc Smith, Robert Heinlein, and Edgar Rice Burroughs are big names in this era. Let's be honest and admit that in many cases, that superweapon was being - like the authors - a white man.

Like it or not, this reflected the times. Technology in armoured, air, then nuclear warfare trounced German and Japanese imperialism. Alien lands with different-coloured people, different mores, and differences in wealth remained distant.

Notwithstanding that those disparities were founded or widened by some very familiar empires, colonialism itself was being changed by war and science and it seemed only a matter of time before enlightenment spread to the globe's darkest corners. A neo-colonialism if you will.

Reality was the objective rock upon which philosophies crashed to be ranked. Science and democracy were the enlightenment bridle and stirrups with which we harnessed reality to kick Nazi butt. Yee-haw. It seemed pointless to talk about alternative views when clearly the victors had achieved victory through better mastery of reality.

Of course SF was never that narrow even back then. There were plenty of stories that weren't 'Aryan kid zaps aliens'. More pertinent to this piece are the tales that do not assume that alienation is a far away place. WEB Du Bois' 'The Comet' explores how cosmic disaster can (fleetingly) overcome segregation. 

"Boldly go"

However, though such alternative stories were present, science heroism - or, as H.G. Wells called it, 'science romance' - was more prominent.

New Wave

Science is but one input into science fiction. Faerie folk tales and 19th century prose are otherworld stories transformed into SF through name-dropping Schrӧdinger's cat. 

Another input is events. SF combines science and fiction to characterise current themes, and can ultimately help the reader understand them. Hypocrisy and ignorance are incarnated into characters and worlds by Jonathan Swift and de Saint-Exupéry. Orwell infuses political cynicism into the land of Airstrip One.

Otherworlds and alternate realities remained separated from ours by technology, space, or time.

Then comes the cold war. And the counter-culture. And independence movements. And civil rights. All of which seem to be rejections of benevolent Western capitalist paternalism.

Quelle horreur

The reality of so much going on feeds the paranoia that nothing is as it seems.

Robert Heinlein, having written 'Space Cadet' in 1949, writes 'The Puppet Masters' in 1951 which shares themes of conspiracy with 'The Body Snatchers' (and later, 'They Live' and 'The Matrix').

'Virgin' Earthling vs 'Chad' Pod-monster

Hidden by sham, reality isn't just alternate but must also be sinister. Your work buddies could all be traitorous aliens or worse, Socialists. Real-life conspiracies like the Pentagon Papers and Watergate reflected and reinforced the paranoia.

Obsessing about whether perception matches reality is the trademark of Philip K Dick, in works like Ubik, A Scanner Darkly, and Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep.

He also forays directly into conspiracy in the rather optimistic Radio Free Albemuth.

Unsurprising then that Dick produced one of the most famous quotes on reality:

Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away.

Sounds macho as heck, so no surprise it's big among the Zerohedge crowd. On any given day, 'reality' cryptically refers to the folly of monetary policy, intra-racial crime, critical race theory, or nefarious global cabalists using these to distract us from harsh truths. (Reality as a diversion from reality by those out-of-touch with reality, who'da thunk it?)

They're not the first for whom veiled reality is apocalyptic. Nor are they the first to give it racial connotations. H.P. Lovecraft got there before it was cool.

"Shoggoth Lives Matter."

Not everyone was so gloom-and-doom.

In particular, the historically marginalised ...

An alternative to gender rigidity was celebrated by Ursula Le Guin in 'The Left Hand of Darkness', though you still had to use warp drive to visit that planet.

... and in forms other than novels.

Afro-futurism as an aesthetic can be as enlightening as long form prose.

"Where no booty has gone before."

While it may not posit an alternative present, it overlays buoyant Afro-centric pasts and futures.

"Utini!"

The West and the Rest

And while English-language SF debates whether reality is dark or bright, prominent works from the Communist bloc paints it as incomprehensible to humans. Far from alien contact being a meeting of more-or-less equals, Stanislaw Lem's scientist-explorers interact with alien life as bacteria may interact with organ secretions.

Liu Cixin's characters nudge into motion millennia-long schemes even their descendants will not witness. 

Insolubility on that scale is hard to tie up in third acts. Heroes don't return triumphant, they just haplessly slope away.

A Consensual Hallucination

Cyberspace. A consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators, in every nation... 

-- William Gibson, 'Neuromancer'

As the 20th century ended, the SF trend shifted to the polygon-filled cyberspace offered by Gibson, Neal Stephenson, and the Wachowskis, separated from a dystopic 'meat-space' by technology.

Picture a college-educated suburbanite keyboard-pecking on their home-tower PC, or during stifling office hours in their cubicle, laying down prose about a future beyond dial-up internet. Their words fuelled by the contrast between the mundane and the ideal.

But what worlds would arise from the lived experience of others unlike them? The immigrant worker. The 'inner city youth'. It never occurred to cyberpunk's inventors that their slang-heavy consensual hallucination would not be communal.

Forget the future, even the present isn't shared. But no one else seemed to get book deals. 

We are now waking up to the fact that there are more than just one of each virtual and real worlds.

These worlds aren't neatly separated by time or space. They don't branch like the alternate timelines of speculative fiction. They co-exist, overlap, and interfere like TV channels.

The 'Net' that-came-to-be floods me with uncle-level vaccine misinformation in the family WhatsApp group. That app sits right next to more collaborative Discord channels on my phone. Down the network stack, data packets carrying snarky re-Tweets jostle with those helping refugees brave state borders.

In meat-space too, realities overlay in plain sight. Cardboard homeless shelters line the cornices outside luxury stores.  

You don't need a space ship or device to visit these new worlds. Just walk down the street. What happens when you get there depends on who you are.

Supposedly impartial edifices of reality vary depending on your demographic. Your experience of a police traffic stop will likely be different if your skin were a different shade.

If you want to push back on this idea of a multiverse as being too subjective or divisive then consider that at the very least our reality is sundered between those who believe in overlapping realities and those who do not.

Or you could have a listen (and a laugh) to this guy:

Or watch the Baldwin - Buckley debate get neatly incorporated into the quality SF show 'Lovecraft Country'.

Not all budding authors can draw on white-collar suburban ennui to infuse into their writing, because they are excluded from such lives. 

Neo's faceless corporate drone-hood imprisonment would be seen by the numerous precariat as luxurious income stability.

"The '90s called. They want their job security back."

Let us not point fingers. To be unaware is human. We never see who doesn't get let into the building. All we know is that our key-card still works.

Make room!

Several real-world trends had brought us closer together.

Urbanisation, for one. Whether you like it or not, it's easier to do things like trade and collaborate while closer to other people. This means bumping into more people and thus encountering more people who are different.

Dismantling capital barriers distributed opportunity but also inequality. Globalised them, if you will.

Story-wise, tales of time travel and space travel resonate less because disparities are no longer separated by time or space. There are now only a handful of countries without internet access, and most of those are categorised as such solely because of censorship. Your Sherpa will probably have a newer model iPhone than you (while your childcare worker can barely afford their data plan).

Just because temporal and spatial barriers have dissolved doesn't mean all barriers have likewise fallen.

As mentioned before, your ticket past local gatekeepers will be your appearance and/or whether you have enough resources to compensate for it.

"You're talking about race and wealth, aren't you?"

Damn right I am.

"Shame on you for sullying the purity of SF with identity politics!"

"I am your non-gender-specific parental figure."

Dude, science fiction can use as background war and planetary destruction but not institutional disadvantage and racism?

Anyway, it's too late to be a snowflake about it, because such SF already exists.

H.G. Wells projected the consequences of class in 'The Time Machine'. But perhaps he had the decency to locate it in the far future, only subtly hinting that it was a problem today. 

Is Out There

In 1993 the X-Files primed us to believe that a shadow government was gunning for two all-American heroes.

The same year, Octavia Butler wrote The Parable of the Sower, an extrapolation of neoliberalism in which government austerity totally eliminates wasteful labour and environmental programs stifling national dynamism, much to the relief of the god-fearing middle class. To the heroine and her poorer community of colour though, this also removes the final buffers protecting them from unbridled exploitation by said middle class.

Like stories of interstellar derring-do, spine-chilling tales of conspiracies to turn us into a homogenised mass seem dated in light of society's widening, ever-more visible gaps. Radical equality? Huh, I wish. 

"Finally, Affordable Housing."

So much air time has been given to nightmares of expanding government that few thought about the consequences of shrinking government, even as governments cut social services in the real-life 1980s. That is, apart from the people who experienced the business end of such government retreat.

Minority Report

So what? What's new about disparity tales? There's plenty of literature written from a minority or disadvantaged viewpoint. Practically every second book my Mum reads is about some Asian lady simultaneously navigating racism and sexism.

"You go, gir ... uh."

This is where I distinguish between 'literature' and SF. 

Literature is mostly about how the world changes characters, SF and fantasy about how characters change the world.

As relatable as they are, the ladies of The Joy Luck Club never do anything beyond throwing an actual pity-party. In contrast, Butler's heroines may not be entirely likeable, but they overcome oppressive vacuums (perhaps because they're not entirely 'likeable') by creating communities, religions, and futures that do not replicate the hierarchies and inequalities of their persecutors.

You should be glimpsing something applicable right about now. Well, I have two ways to use SF to reach the high road, or rather ...

The High Castle

Actionable 1: Read more SF 

I'm not saying skip other fiction. Well written literature stretches our empathy muscles. But if you stop there, you'll think that all you need to do is feel. At worst, you could train yourself into fatalistic hand-wringing about how mean the world makes us. 

SF also tickles the problem-solving areas of our brains. Yes, characters need to be relatable enough to keep us reading, but they also need to solve puzzles in their world (which may be allegories of puzzles in ours).

We need to be reminded of our agency as well as our empathy.

Of course, there's the problem of how our agency is directed, which brings me to ...

Actionable 2: Read more SF by non-white, non-male, non-secular, non-straight authors.

"Bruh, why don't you just say 'minority authors'?"

Because minorities in SF authorship don't neatly map onto minorities in the wider community. The global population is at least half female, and there is a greater proportion of people whose actions are informed by faith than the proportion of SF authors whose faith informs their writing.

Because we live in different realities with different problems requiring different solutions.

Also because 'historically marginalised' sounds too indirect and big-wordy.

We don't live in the post-war golden age, where the strongest Enlightenment ideals and pew-pew guns win.

We don't live in cold war paranoia of a faceless, nameless plot to render all of us equally faceless and nameless. The world concealed by cabalists may actually be more liveable (albeit more colourful) than what we are familiar with.

"Remember when we solved Racism?"

We don't live in pre-millennium-bug dystopias where even underclass super-predators can afford to attend grimy rave parties with cutting-edge implants. Our middle classes can barely afford suburban commutes and prescription meds. The creativity unleashed by deregulation was less inclusive than predicted. 

Clinging to old stories about navigating non-resemblant futures only serve to make us disappointed with how the present turned out.

Homies still be salty about not getting hoverboards.

When outcomes don't meet expectations ... hoo boy.

Morgan Housel writes in 'The Psychology of Money':

The Tea Party, Occupy Wall Street, Brexit, and Donald Trump each represents a group shouting, “Stop the ride, I want off.” 

The details of their shouting are different, but they’re all shouting—at least in part—because stuff isn’t working for them within the context of the post-war expectation that stuff should work roughly the same for roughly everyone.

Hurt feelings are not the only danger. Frustrated expectations could reinforce stubborn adherence to solutions inspired by fantastical narratives, even though the worlds inhabited by those narratives no longer resemble our own.

Much like how everything looks like a nail to someone with only a hammer.

But we're not solving injustice by issuing police starship-trooper tech with which to get 'tough on crime'.

We will not resolve electoral disenchantment by doubling down on digging to expose a conspiracy.

"Stop the Steal is Out There"

Inequality will not be ameliorated by insisting that it's a myth. By maintaining that 'resources' - today's Star Trek replicators (or cutting-edge street bio-tech) - are available to all demographics, or that personal choices are the real problem, rather than the circumstances forcing their selection.

Yeah, yeah, insert quote about insanity being the same process expecting a different result.

But let's be (slightly) more compassionate. Repeating the 'same process' doesn't signify a failure of cognition, but of imagination.

Your expectations will never resemble reality if reality doesn't resemble what formed your expectations.

For different solutions in different configurations of worlds, you need different thinkers.

Lack of faith disturbing

"But ... but ... we already did that." comes the protest. 

SF has a proven track record of inspiring us with fantastic stories and diverse settings. After all, we opened our minds in turn to space opera, brain-washers, and street samurai.

Then we stopped.

It's like SF is a banquet, and after the Western-style main course we pushed back from the table and said we couldn't digest any more.

We stopped seeking new imaginary worlds, choosing instead the comfort of familiar voices.

But how well can mainstream authors really tackle new issues, particularly ones involving the marginalised?

Heinlein's 1964 'Farnham's Freehold' describes a futuristic black hegemony which, instead of Afro-futurism's playful expansiveness, inherits the colonial framework of subjugation. And while Afro-futurism invents stylistic if not historic links to past African and Egyptian empires, Heinlein's negro kingdom arises from nuclear war, with no culture predating modernity. "They would do the same to us" seems to be the message, and thus background is a cover for the author's own outlook, however well-meaning. 

I don't want to be too judgemental. It is difficult for any author to resist the temptation to do the same.

You can take the boy out of concocted fears of reverse racism, but you can't take the concocted fears of reverse racism out of the boy. 

"What did the Romans ever do for us?"

Nothing wrong with having favourite authors. It's natural to want to read more of what resonates. 

But try to add some new names to that list. 

Vary your imagination's diet by varying who you read.

Now I am setting out into the unknown ... There is no shortcut; it has to be gone through. 

--Madeleine L'Engle

Awareness is growing that present day is marked by overlaid realities, demarcated more by race, class, gender, and wealth, than by time and space.

Overlapping realities has not been the lived experience of the historical SF authors demographic.

And while it helped us navigate the tumult of recent history, mainstream SF is less able to help us in the present than are works from authors of less mainstream backgrounds.

It is tempting to return to old unknowns, but there is also merit in seeking out new unknowns.

Find these authors of difference as if your future depends on it.