The Last Astronaut Author David Wellington on the Most Important Decision Every Science Fiction Writer Must Make
By now most fans of science fiction will have heard the absolutely true and vital argument that science fiction writers do not attempt to predict the future. That’s impossible, especially given the pace of technological progress in the twenty-first century. Instead we extrapolate existing technology and trends to comment on what’s happening today, here and now. It’s a great argument, and it tells you a lot about how to read and enjoy sf.
It’s also… kind of not true? Maybe not for all of us. Some science fiction writers absolutely love to predict the future. We work very hard at making correct guesses about what’s to come. We want to be like Arthur C. Clarke, who kind of sort of invented the communications satellite. Or William Gibson, predicting the enormous—and lightning quick—changes coming with the rise of cheap computer power.
The Last Astronaut
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The Last Astronaut
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Paperback $19.99
For my new novel, The Last Astronaut, I tried to imagine the future of NASA in the era of commercial spaceflight. I looked forward to the year 2055 when an alien object enters the solar system. How ready would we be for first contact? How would NASA respond to such an epochal find? In my book, I imagined a world where climate change and economic pressures have led to NASA having to abandon the astronaut program altogether, to focus on just sending robotic probes to far worlds. They’re forced to call Sally Jansen, a former Mars program astronaut, out of retirement to handle this new challenge. I did a ton of research to help me describe the world of 2055, but in the end I had to make an educated guess as to what that world will be like.
For my new novel, The Last Astronaut, I tried to imagine the future of NASA in the era of commercial spaceflight. I looked forward to the year 2055 when an alien object enters the solar system. How ready would we be for first contact? How would NASA respond to such an epochal find? In my book, I imagined a world where climate change and economic pressures have led to NASA having to abandon the astronaut program altogether, to focus on just sending robotic probes to far worlds. They’re forced to call Sally Jansen, a former Mars program astronaut, out of retirement to handle this new challenge. I did a ton of research to help me describe the world of 2055, but in the end I had to make an educated guess as to what that world will be like.
My job was complicated by setting the novel so near in the future. One of the first decisions—and certainly one of the most important—any science fiction writer must make when starting a new book is to choose when the story will take place. Is a writer’s brilliant idea best served by feeling like it’s ripped from tomorrow’s headlines? Or is it a tale from some distant age of the future, when humankind barely exists as we know it today?
The decision changes just about everything about a story. It even changes the process of writing it. If a story is set in the next few decades, say, the writer needs to do an enormous amount of research. They’ll need to understand the real world institutions and events that will shape their plot. However, if the story takes place more than, say, a hundred years from now, the writer will have to do extensive worldbuilding—that is, they’ll have to shoehorn in the necessary exposition to explain how this future differs from the present, and how the characters relate to new technologies, new social circumstances, and so on.
A writer’s characters will be very different, as well, and how they’re drawn will change. Near future characters need to feel relatable. Real. Readers need to know who the characters’ favorite bands are and where they grew up. We need to know how the hero felt about the last presidential election or the last war their country fought. Again that means more research, and often interviewing people with experiences different from the writer’s own. Far future characters will always feel a little broader, a little more one-dimensional, because readers lack those common referents with them. That’s not necessarily a bad thing—broader characters often feel larger than life, and their adventures can be more thrilling, but it’s a tradeoff.
Of course, no matter how hard a writer works at their prediction, they will always fail. This is one of the central dilemmas of science fiction—no human being can predict what’s going to happen anymore, even five or ten years down the road. It might seem like writing far future stories could help avoid this problem. After all, you’re not predicting how social media is going to shape our self image in the 2040s—instead you’re imagining how cheap cloning will redefine identity in the 26th century. You won’t even live to see your prediction be proven wrong.
Yet when we look back at how various science fiction writers’ predictions have aged over time, it’s clear that the writers who chose this seemingly easier path suffer the most. Most science fiction writers from the mid-20th century just assumed there would be a nuclear war, and humanity would have to claw its way back from the brink of extinction. Almost none imagined how the sexual revolution would change the world. Plenty of authors from even the ’70s and ’80s predicted that by now we would be living on Mars or commuting in flying cars. These obsolete futures can be charming to read now, but they’ve lost their predictive value altogether.
Safer, perhaps, to write about the near future. To write about the ways broad artificial intelligence will change our political systems, or how driverless cars will create a new nightmare for insurance companies. Almost all science fiction writers these days tackle climate change on one level or another—it seems to be a safe bet that regardless of your politics, global warming is going to continue to make headlines for the next few years. Of course, writers of near future tales run the risk of being scooped, of missing the thing that was just on the cusp of changing. William Gibson used to call this the “CNN Effect,” the feeling a writer has of being on top of things right up until they turn on the TV and see the latest breaking story that changes everything. (It’s a little comforting that such a great futurist’s terminology is itself already dated.)
If you’re a writer looking to tell a science fiction story, in whatever form that might take, there is no more important decision to make than this. It should be the first thing you think about, and once you choose the timeframe of your story, you should stick with it. But beware! Watch out for the many pitfalls that await you. And be sure that you know how this decision will change every element of your story.
For the reader—maybe cut us a little slack, huh? Recognize that the game of predicting the future is a tough one, and give us credit for doing our best. Of course we’re going to get it wrong. That’s just a foregone conclusion. If you’re feeling charitable, point out to your friends and fellow readers that we’re just reflecting the present in the dark mirror of the future, that we’re commenting on current events by way of extrapolation. For some authors, it’s absolutely true. For the armchair prognosticators like me—well, it gives us a great excuse when we’re inevitably proved wrong.