There is also the human face of technocracy, wonderfully portrayed in Pohl and Kornbluth's "Gladiator at Law":
“Not that it matters to Us Engineers. Don’t think I take it personally just because I happen to be essential to the happiness and comfort of everybody in the city. No, Norvie, We Engineers don’t expect a word of thanks. We Engineers work because there’s a job to do, and we’re trained for it. But that doesn’t alter the fact that people are lousy ingrates.”
"At which point Norvie would cock his head a little in the nervous reflex he had acquired with the hearing aid and agree: “Of course, Arnie. Hell, fifty years ago when the first bubble-cities went up women used to burst out crying when they got a look at one. My mother did. Coming out of Belly Rave, knowing she’d never have to go back—she says she bawled like a baby when the domes came in sight.”
And Arnie: “Yeah. Not that that’s evidence, as We Engineers understand evidence. It’s just your untrained recollection of what an untrained woman told you. But it gives you an idea of how those lousy ingrates settled down and got smug. They’d change their tune damn fast if We Engineers weren’t on the job. But you’re an artist, Norvell. You can’t be expected to understand.” And he would gloomily drink beer."
... and so on, until 100 pages later Norvie beats him up.
Oh I have _got_ to read that again. I'd been thinking about Pohl/Kornbluth in general as a counterpoint to Golden Age but had completely forgotten that bit of Gladiator-at-Law (it must be two decades since i last read it).
There is a certain irony here, as one of the initial motivations for cyberpunk was the sense that the consensus future of mid-20th century SF was played out and they needed to develop new images of the future (which I presume is why Gibson was writing "The Gernsback Continuum"). The gritty, computer-dominated futures were very different from Asimov and Heinlein. But as it developed, the two merged, and created a consensus-future-just-with-AI-driving-it-instead-of-nuclear-power, and now we're back where we were forty-five years ago.
As a science-minded person I felt compelled to sincerely understand the arguments presented in this essay, any essay with “continuum” in the name has my attention. While I agree with the more obvious thesis that, of course, science is not the answer to all of society's problems, I'm still trying to figure out the real subtext of this essay. It’s my belief that societies that embrace science and technology eventually outcompete those that do not and I feel like history is on my side.
In that case we find ourselves on another continuum, somewhere between luddite and techno-optimist. Maybe the subtext of this essay is we want to embrace science and technology at least a little less than Silicon Valley? While Silicon Valley skews towards techno-optimism in a way that may have uneasily approached an embrace of fascism in this last election cycle, it seems the majority of America takes for granted the seeming miracles that science has produced over the past century.
In the end, maybe I lean towards embracing science and technology because, like entropy, it seems inevitable.
AFAICT, the essay is less about science and technology per se, but rather the direction of this technology if it had stayed true to the early 20th century ideas. A shorter version of the story "The Gernsback Continuum" is the meme, "Where are the flying cars [or jetpacks] I was promised?" Science and technology have changed directions, and in a good way, IMO. Unfortunately, infrastructure is relatively unchanging, so highways won't disappear, but will slowly fail if we don't use them due to a change in transport modes, yet also influence what and how alternative modes will be and how implemented. Who would seriously deny that electronic communication is a far better way to coordinate than moving meat bodies to the same location? I think robotic space probes are a better way to do space exploration than crewed missions, and certainly the only way to do long-term deep space missions with the technology we have. HAL9000 was right that he could do the Jupiter mission as well as the astronauts he was supporting. Current AI will eventually prove his point, even while human missions will still be argued by proponents as achieving more than any machine can.
There was sci-fi about bioengineering after WWII, but we can do it for real these days, and I expect rapid progress in this century. Post Gernsback, but within the "Golden Age" of sci-fi. Hopefully, it will be steered as a net benefit, and not a dystopia.
The only thing I'd add is that Gernsbackianism not only projects fictional accounts forward in a way that's hard to justify, but does so with a revisionist history of science that credits a lot of past achievements to the scientific method which are, in truth, awkward fits for its specifics. While there are plenty of examples of successes borne of systematic inquiry, there are also plenty of lucky accidents and intellectual jumbles--medicinal chemistry arising from the dye industry, the paring of Newton's mathematics from his alchemy--that don't fit cleanly into the plodding and only occasionally fruitful approach to which we eventually realized there was no satisfyingly organized alternative.
This is arguably just another way of expressing the "low hanging fruit" explanation. But I do think it's a meaningful distinction: there was only really one defensible way to systematize discovery, and its output was never going to live up to optimistic projections that retrofit a bunch of other stuff into it.
This, combined with (as you note) a cheerful refusal to believe in the physical limits we'd discovered, set us up for almost inevitable disappointment in what science could deliver relative to what we'd once been promised. It's a shame that we have oligarchs who feel petulant about it.
OMG "With a slide rule in one hand and a dynamo in the other", worst Albanian Communism reboot ever. And "current-cy"! I have to say that these soi-disant "technocrats" don't seem to be much good at their task? If energy is to be *unbounded*, then by hypothesis it would be a very unsuitable money.
I am not terribly impressed by the way this essay casually dismisses Heinlein, Asimov, and Clark, and homogenizes Golden Era science fiction to make a point. It’s like reducing Western music to just a superficial discussion of Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms.
If you want to talk about a toxic work of science fiction and its deleterious effects on society, you might do better to dissect “Atlas Shrugged”.
If a technocratic “science is the answer to all our problems” approach seems troublesome, the current regime in Washington seems determined to stamp out all reliance on science.
People who preach the gospel of capital-S Science have promised to use science alone to solve problems of material deprivation and repeatedly failed to do so because they have refused to grapple with the political, rather than scientific, barriers to material prosperity.
I would certainly prefer it if they didn’t, but unfortunately those kinds of broken promises can turn people away from science!
I get this. The point of science fiction was the science. Joe Haldeman and Heinlein read each other's works and enjoyed them. Those two veterans had very opposite politics.
A sanity check for ideology's consistency is: What can you not do because of the ideology? Or does it boil down to "I do whatever I want and no one can stop me"
I like that style of SF. I'm rereading Niven currently. I have a book case full of that stuff. Yes, they are white male focused, painfully outdated tech (the tech is mostly the tech of the day, Metropolis had flat screens resembling movie theatre screens, 1960's Star Trek had CRTs, etc.). Hardly any female protagonist in sight (better these days).
It hasn't made me personally believe it as an inevitable future nor a desirable one or believe in 'tech would solve all'. So, are Heinlein, Asimov, Clarke, Vinge (two of the best space opera books ever written), etc. to blame? And in how far were these books not a driver of those techno-optimist beliefs but a reflection of them? Is harking back to them maybe comparable to MAGA's love affair with an imaginary 1950's?
And wasn't it mostly indeed a US SF phenomenon? Plenty of more sombre UK or even Eastern European (I invite you to read the 1960's Russian Crabs on the Island: https://ia801306.us.archive.org/0/items/CrabsOnTheIsland/15r.pdf, yes robots, tech optimism, but it ends not quite as paradise). And we had Vonnegut, LeGuin, etc.
PS. I ordered Burning Chrome. Thanks for the tip. No need for piracy :-)
The line about alchemy struck me. Did you know, the first time Hubert Dreyfus thoroughly critiqued a previous round of AI hype, his 1965 RAND paper was titled "Alchemy and Artificial Intelligence?"
Alfred Bester’s The Stars My Destination, also from the 50s, challenges a lot of this reading of technology and progress. It’s still one of the best descriptions of how technology divides, power concentrates, and inequality widens, all in the face of “progress.” I wish it was more widely read.
Accompanying the nostalgia for decades-old dreams is waking up to a world where non-Western visions of the future drive technological progress across many fields. So maybe it’s not only the failure to see past dreams through, but also no longer being the central dreamer of modernity, that shapes all this — and that ultimately we need to contend with.
Both SF and Silicon Valley need to get used to the idea that human space travel is never going to amount to anything more than tourism, over distances measured in light-seconds at most.
The Technocracy movement briefly promised to be a real challenge to the mainstream political parties, with uniformed activists and a rejection of electoral democracy, but otherwise dissimilar to European fascism. King Hubbert, famous for the Peak Oil hypothesis, was a prominent member. When I looked at it a few years back, the remnants of the movement were still around in Canada. Here's a 2018 article https://www.canadashistory.ca/explore/politics-law/the-last-utopians
Following the principle that sometimes, to drive out an intransigently fixed bad idea you need another idea that meets many of the same emotional needs, I wrote this alternative almost-techno-optimist vision that I've found helps me have much more productive conversations with Gernsback-Continuum-type techno-optimists than I could have before I wrote it: https://blackthornhedge.substack.com/p/the-wet-route-to-the-stars
I think it does "escape the Gernsback Continuum" on its own terms, but whether it works well enough to help many others out of it as well... that seems too soon to tell. It's at least been good for my friends and family.
The reviewer at TheS Space review looking at just Becker's position on space is rather opposite to yours. He takes Becker's pessimism about space as a strawman argument that it can NEVER BE ACHIEVED, rather than it cannot be achieved with the technology we currently have.
Science fiction has changed over the last 100 years. Verne was pro-science. Mary Shelley against unbounded science. US science fiction was generally very different from the UK, although space flight was common to both. After the techno-optimism of the 1960s, we have the pushback in the 1970s, as well as the New Wave. Both Orwell and Huxley both wrote dystopias, with Huxley's Brave New World a very biotech dystopia. Both the fantasy (Star Trek, space opera) and the dystopias, and everything between has been explored in Scf-Fi. Video sci-fi, especially from the US tended to be either fantasy or horror, with little that was more realistic about possibilities. US science and tech tv tends to be very "Isn't this marvelous?" in tone, with no sense of potential problems. It can be a relief to watch the UK "Black Mirror" series, as well as episodes from the British "Out of the Unknown" sci-fi series in the 1960s and 1970s, not to mention the "Quatermass" shows (tv and movies), and the short-lived "Doomwatch".
Tech Bros mostly seem to be caught up in the US sci-fi of their childhoods, with Musk's rockets looking like Chesley Bonestell rocketships of that era. As an ex-denizen of Silicon Valley, techno-optimism was generally in the air as one would expect from an engineering culture. Is it any different from the great engineers of the Victorian era? But most engineers don't believe in the fantasies of Star Trek. It is the super-wealthy who lose grounding and believe they can do anything if they put their minds to it, and the little people don't block their brilliant creations (very Ayn Rand).
Sci-fi has little to do with it, because if it did, then avid readers would not believe the unalloyed techno-optimism of these unmoored people.
From Gay Money to ‘God’s Wrath’: Praxis CEO Melts Down
How a Gay-Funded ‘Tech Utopia’ Turned Into a Bigot’s Apocalypse
"Some of the most powerful people in tech pledged half a billion dollars to fuel a dystopian fantasy that has culminated in a fire-and-brimstone rant against a Pride parade."
There is also the human face of technocracy, wonderfully portrayed in Pohl and Kornbluth's "Gladiator at Law":
“Not that it matters to Us Engineers. Don’t think I take it personally just because I happen to be essential to the happiness and comfort of everybody in the city. No, Norvie, We Engineers don’t expect a word of thanks. We Engineers work because there’s a job to do, and we’re trained for it. But that doesn’t alter the fact that people are lousy ingrates.”
"At which point Norvie would cock his head a little in the nervous reflex he had acquired with the hearing aid and agree: “Of course, Arnie. Hell, fifty years ago when the first bubble-cities went up women used to burst out crying when they got a look at one. My mother did. Coming out of Belly Rave, knowing she’d never have to go back—she says she bawled like a baby when the domes came in sight.”
And Arnie: “Yeah. Not that that’s evidence, as We Engineers understand evidence. It’s just your untrained recollection of what an untrained woman told you. But it gives you an idea of how those lousy ingrates settled down and got smug. They’d change their tune damn fast if We Engineers weren’t on the job. But you’re an artist, Norvell. You can’t be expected to understand.” And he would gloomily drink beer."
... and so on, until 100 pages later Norvie beats him up.
Oh I have _got_ to read that again. I'd been thinking about Pohl/Kornbluth in general as a counterpoint to Golden Age but had completely forgotten that bit of Gladiator-at-Law (it must be two decades since i last read it).
I remember Belly Rave ("Belle Reve") but nothing else about the book.
There is a certain irony here, as one of the initial motivations for cyberpunk was the sense that the consensus future of mid-20th century SF was played out and they needed to develop new images of the future (which I presume is why Gibson was writing "The Gernsback Continuum"). The gritty, computer-dominated futures were very different from Asimov and Heinlein. But as it developed, the two merged, and created a consensus-future-just-with-AI-driving-it-instead-of-nuclear-power, and now we're back where we were forty-five years ago.
As a science-minded person I felt compelled to sincerely understand the arguments presented in this essay, any essay with “continuum” in the name has my attention. While I agree with the more obvious thesis that, of course, science is not the answer to all of society's problems, I'm still trying to figure out the real subtext of this essay. It’s my belief that societies that embrace science and technology eventually outcompete those that do not and I feel like history is on my side.
In that case we find ourselves on another continuum, somewhere between luddite and techno-optimist. Maybe the subtext of this essay is we want to embrace science and technology at least a little less than Silicon Valley? While Silicon Valley skews towards techno-optimism in a way that may have uneasily approached an embrace of fascism in this last election cycle, it seems the majority of America takes for granted the seeming miracles that science has produced over the past century.
In the end, maybe I lean towards embracing science and technology because, like entropy, it seems inevitable.
AFAICT, the essay is less about science and technology per se, but rather the direction of this technology if it had stayed true to the early 20th century ideas. A shorter version of the story "The Gernsback Continuum" is the meme, "Where are the flying cars [or jetpacks] I was promised?" Science and technology have changed directions, and in a good way, IMO. Unfortunately, infrastructure is relatively unchanging, so highways won't disappear, but will slowly fail if we don't use them due to a change in transport modes, yet also influence what and how alternative modes will be and how implemented. Who would seriously deny that electronic communication is a far better way to coordinate than moving meat bodies to the same location? I think robotic space probes are a better way to do space exploration than crewed missions, and certainly the only way to do long-term deep space missions with the technology we have. HAL9000 was right that he could do the Jupiter mission as well as the astronauts he was supporting. Current AI will eventually prove his point, even while human missions will still be argued by proponents as achieving more than any machine can.
There was sci-fi about bioengineering after WWII, but we can do it for real these days, and I expect rapid progress in this century. Post Gernsback, but within the "Golden Age" of sci-fi. Hopefully, it will be steered as a net benefit, and not a dystopia.
I thought this weirdness of connections with Elon Musk's grandad, technocracy, and other goings on would be of interest to you.
https://www.cbc.ca/newsinteractives/features/joshua-haldeman-elon-musk-saskatchewan-tech-utopian-conspiracist
Really excellent.
The only thing I'd add is that Gernsbackianism not only projects fictional accounts forward in a way that's hard to justify, but does so with a revisionist history of science that credits a lot of past achievements to the scientific method which are, in truth, awkward fits for its specifics. While there are plenty of examples of successes borne of systematic inquiry, there are also plenty of lucky accidents and intellectual jumbles--medicinal chemistry arising from the dye industry, the paring of Newton's mathematics from his alchemy--that don't fit cleanly into the plodding and only occasionally fruitful approach to which we eventually realized there was no satisfyingly organized alternative.
This is arguably just another way of expressing the "low hanging fruit" explanation. But I do think it's a meaningful distinction: there was only really one defensible way to systematize discovery, and its output was never going to live up to optimistic projections that retrofit a bunch of other stuff into it.
This, combined with (as you note) a cheerful refusal to believe in the physical limits we'd discovered, set us up for almost inevitable disappointment in what science could deliver relative to what we'd once been promised. It's a shame that we have oligarchs who feel petulant about it.
OMG "With a slide rule in one hand and a dynamo in the other", worst Albanian Communism reboot ever. And "current-cy"! I have to say that these soi-disant "technocrats" don't seem to be much good at their task? If energy is to be *unbounded*, then by hypothesis it would be a very unsuitable money.
I am not terribly impressed by the way this essay casually dismisses Heinlein, Asimov, and Clark, and homogenizes Golden Era science fiction to make a point. It’s like reducing Western music to just a superficial discussion of Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms.
If you want to talk about a toxic work of science fiction and its deleterious effects on society, you might do better to dissect “Atlas Shrugged”.
If a technocratic “science is the answer to all our problems” approach seems troublesome, the current regime in Washington seems determined to stamp out all reliance on science.
People who preach the gospel of capital-S Science have promised to use science alone to solve problems of material deprivation and repeatedly failed to do so because they have refused to grapple with the political, rather than scientific, barriers to material prosperity.
I would certainly prefer it if they didn’t, but unfortunately those kinds of broken promises can turn people away from science!
I get this. The point of science fiction was the science. Joe Haldeman and Heinlein read each other's works and enjoyed them. Those two veterans had very opposite politics.
A sanity check for ideology's consistency is: What can you not do because of the ideology? Or does it boil down to "I do whatever I want and no one can stop me"
Great piece.
I like that style of SF. I'm rereading Niven currently. I have a book case full of that stuff. Yes, they are white male focused, painfully outdated tech (the tech is mostly the tech of the day, Metropolis had flat screens resembling movie theatre screens, 1960's Star Trek had CRTs, etc.). Hardly any female protagonist in sight (better these days).
It hasn't made me personally believe it as an inevitable future nor a desirable one or believe in 'tech would solve all'. So, are Heinlein, Asimov, Clarke, Vinge (two of the best space opera books ever written), etc. to blame? And in how far were these books not a driver of those techno-optimist beliefs but a reflection of them? Is harking back to them maybe comparable to MAGA's love affair with an imaginary 1950's?
And wasn't it mostly indeed a US SF phenomenon? Plenty of more sombre UK or even Eastern European (I invite you to read the 1960's Russian Crabs on the Island: https://ia801306.us.archive.org/0/items/CrabsOnTheIsland/15r.pdf, yes robots, tech optimism, but it ends not quite as paradise). And we had Vonnegut, LeGuin, etc.
PS. I ordered Burning Chrome. Thanks for the tip. No need for piracy :-)
The line about alchemy struck me. Did you know, the first time Hubert Dreyfus thoroughly critiqued a previous round of AI hype, his 1965 RAND paper was titled "Alchemy and Artificial Intelligence?"
Quote with link at the bottom of https://ea.rna.nl/2023/11/26/artificial-general-intelligence-is-nigh-rejoice-be-very-afraid/
Also contains a reference to the earliest critique of digital computer AI hype in ... ~1842. Yep.
This made me think of “Exiting the Vampire Castle” by the late and much missed Mark Fisher.
Alfred Bester’s The Stars My Destination, also from the 50s, challenges a lot of this reading of technology and progress. It’s still one of the best descriptions of how technology divides, power concentrates, and inequality widens, all in the face of “progress.” I wish it was more widely read.
Accompanying the nostalgia for decades-old dreams is waking up to a world where non-Western visions of the future drive technological progress across many fields. So maybe it’s not only the failure to see past dreams through, but also no longer being the central dreamer of modernity, that shapes all this — and that ultimately we need to contend with.
Both SF and Silicon Valley need to get used to the idea that human space travel is never going to amount to anything more than tourism, over distances measured in light-seconds at most.
The Technocracy movement briefly promised to be a real challenge to the mainstream political parties, with uniformed activists and a rejection of electoral democracy, but otherwise dissimilar to European fascism. King Hubbert, famous for the Peak Oil hypothesis, was a prominent member. When I looked at it a few years back, the remnants of the movement were still around in Canada. Here's a 2018 article https://www.canadashistory.ca/explore/politics-law/the-last-utopians
Following the principle that sometimes, to drive out an intransigently fixed bad idea you need another idea that meets many of the same emotional needs, I wrote this alternative almost-techno-optimist vision that I've found helps me have much more productive conversations with Gernsback-Continuum-type techno-optimists than I could have before I wrote it: https://blackthornhedge.substack.com/p/the-wet-route-to-the-stars
I think it does "escape the Gernsback Continuum" on its own terms, but whether it works well enough to help many others out of it as well... that seems too soon to tell. It's at least been good for my friends and family.
The reviewer at TheS Space review looking at just Becker's position on space is rather opposite to yours. He takes Becker's pessimism about space as a strawman argument that it can NEVER BE ACHIEVED, rather than it cannot be achieved with the technology we currently have.
Science fiction has changed over the last 100 years. Verne was pro-science. Mary Shelley against unbounded science. US science fiction was generally very different from the UK, although space flight was common to both. After the techno-optimism of the 1960s, we have the pushback in the 1970s, as well as the New Wave. Both Orwell and Huxley both wrote dystopias, with Huxley's Brave New World a very biotech dystopia. Both the fantasy (Star Trek, space opera) and the dystopias, and everything between has been explored in Scf-Fi. Video sci-fi, especially from the US tended to be either fantasy or horror, with little that was more realistic about possibilities. US science and tech tv tends to be very "Isn't this marvelous?" in tone, with no sense of potential problems. It can be a relief to watch the UK "Black Mirror" series, as well as episodes from the British "Out of the Unknown" sci-fi series in the 1960s and 1970s, not to mention the "Quatermass" shows (tv and movies), and the short-lived "Doomwatch".
Tech Bros mostly seem to be caught up in the US sci-fi of their childhoods, with Musk's rockets looking like Chesley Bonestell rocketships of that era. As an ex-denizen of Silicon Valley, techno-optimism was generally in the air as one would expect from an engineering culture. Is it any different from the great engineers of the Victorian era? But most engineers don't believe in the fantasies of Star Trek. It is the super-wealthy who lose grounding and believe they can do anything if they put their minds to it, and the little people don't block their brilliant creations (very Ayn Rand).
Sci-fi has little to do with it, because if it did, then avid readers would not believe the unalloyed techno-optimism of these unmoored people.
Gil Duran has an interesting newsletter today... the alchemists become Inquisitors
https://www.thenerdreich.com/from-gay-money-to-gods-wrath-praxis-ceo-melts-down/
From Gay Money to ‘God’s Wrath’: Praxis CEO Melts Down
How a Gay-Funded ‘Tech Utopia’ Turned Into a Bigot’s Apocalypse
"Some of the most powerful people in tech pledged half a billion dollars to fuel a dystopian fantasy that has culminated in a fire-and-brimstone rant against a Pride parade."