This isn’t a novel, but the second volume of a contemporary annual design publication called the Task Newsletter, a project by Emmet Byrne, Alex DeArmond, and Jon Sueda. I include it here because Issue #2 is devoted to “Mundane Science Fiction,” a controversial recent sub-genre popularized and manifesto-ed by the writer Geoff Ryman. This blog (and its author) is so habitually ensconced in yellowing 60s sci-fi paperbacks that the issue of Mundane SF had somehow completed avoided its radar.

This issue of the Task Newsletter is radically designed and packed with fascinating material, including a great excerpt from the collaboratively-written new novel PHILIP (and an interview with one of its authors) as well as reprints of all the images from the Voyager Golden Record. However, it’s the first article, Mundane Science Fiction: Another Article About the Benefits of Exercise (link to full article online), by Kate McKinney Maddalena, that I’d like to take to task (so to speak).

In brief, Geoff Ryman sees canonical science fiction as being escapist, comparing it to an “adolescent desire to run away from our world.” This, in turn, provokes a dismissive mentality towards the home planet, which, coupled with fantasy for more fruitful worlds, “can encourage a wasteful attitude to the abundance that is here on Earth.” Unlike its spacefaring, forward-thinking counterpart, “mundane” sci-fi places its stories in the near future, and avoids unreasonable — or, in Ryman’s terms, “unlikely” — technology. Simply: no fantasy. The emphasis is, rather, on creatively developing solutions for the actual problems which face us on Earth. In the words of the much-attacked Mundane SF Manifesto, “the most likely future is one in which we only have ourselves and this planet.”

I agree that Ryman’s “mundane” appellation serves as a useful category for an already-existing genre of science fiction (that heady triad of postapocalyptic/utopian/dystopian, which, as Maddalena points out, already fulfills much of the tenets of Mundane SF). And I see a kind of tragic, humbling poetry in the “only us, on this planet” future. However, like many of my hard-nosed, territorial geek fellows, I buck against Ryman’s use of the word “unlikely.” According to Ryman, interstellar trade is unlikely. As is contact with extraterrestrial intelligences. And alternative universes. And faster-than-light travel (“wish fulfillment fantasies”).

Many, including Maddalena, have asked, “Unlikely to whom?”

I demand, rather: “Unlikely when?”

Are we so trapped in 2009-era Terran existence that we cannot see the longer scheme of things?

Flying in a plane is mundane — and yet it wouldn’t have seemed so to Jules Verne. Nor to H.G. Wells. On a recent flight, I gazed out the window at a magnificent vista of sky, surveying tiny points of light through a haze of sunset-silhouetted clouds. I didn’t find it difficult to imagine myself gazing out of the window of a spaceship, surveying a “mundane” landscape of planets and interstellar dust with the same impassive boredom as I reserve for the view from my window seat on Delta. The only difference between my moment and a distant future in which someone like me might be as blasé about space travel (or whatever) is simply time. A good point, raised here: if this Manifesto had existed 50 years ago, how accurate would its science fiction reflect today’s world? Often, it’s the wildest, least likely prognostications that come to pass — not that the point is to be predictive.

Science fiction’s great advantage is that it’s been the only genre to consistently work with massive time-scales. Even if a story takes place over only a few hours, the very leap from the here and now of reading and the there and when of the action can be humbling, perspective-shifting. Great thinkers like Stewart Brand encourage us to think of time as a “long now” as an ecological and social gesture in order to foster our involvement in the future, pitting our current “faster/cheaper” mindset against “slower/better” thinking; science fiction writers have been doing just that for over a century.

We feed the future with speculation just as we move towards it. And are we to assume that writers will not continue to speculate? Science fiction writers in the year 2050 will be imagining the year 3000, and so on. It’s a living, breathing tradition which interacts with the very culture it critiques just as the culture catches up with its prophecies. I can only assume that this will continue forever — if not for hundreds, maybe thousands of years, pending a complete paradigm shift in literature, which I find unlikely.

Geoff Ryman disrespects this tradition (and completely misses the point of it, I think) by only seeing a few points on the greater sci-fi timeline: the now, and the slightly later, still-corrigble now. What about the Long Now? The 10,000 years in the future in which humanity will continue to tinker with, damage, repair, and write about our planet? I like to think about myself as part of an unending chain of persons reaching millennia into the future (and the past); long-term speculation activates my role in this chain, helps me think of myself as part of the greater “We” that is humankind.