How can Science Fiction Contribute to Doing Social Sciences Otherwise?
BY MARIE LECUYER & CARLOS VELÁSQUEZ
Promotional poster from the event.
On February 17th, 2023, we invited fiction writer Kim Stanley Robinson to discuss his craft and how he envisions its relation to social sciences. What initially prompted this invitation is a shared interest in this rather difficult, oftentimes even painful, craft of writing. On this occasion we proposed to ask what this craft is about; how to “do” the writing; and what writing can do for and to us, to our imaginations, and ways of existing otherwise. We are curious to sit at this porous boundary between writing fictions and what anthropologist Anna Tsing’s calls f(r)ictions (2005). That is, to think about writing perspectives that interfere with one another, that are co-constitutive of the worlds and the people—human and non-human—that touch us affectively as they end up leaving a trace on the page as much as in our lived experience.
As a science fiction author, KSR is critical of what he describes as the pessimist inclination of existing social analysis which avoids broad explanations or the formulation of comprehensive alternatives under the claim of preserving scientific validity. In contrast, works like The Ministry for the Future, The Mars Trilogy, and even New York 2140 depict the emerging possibilities of life—of a life lived differently, in a world beyond capitalist production and climate crisis. This manner of conceiving science fiction manifests the great influence that Philip K. Dick had on KSR for, as suggested by Fredric Jameson, it was Dick who moved science fiction writing away from its dynamic of imagining unimaginable futures and towards using the future as a means of reflecting on the present (2005, p.345).
Where Philip K. Dick’s work focuses on the war of worlds between "delusional" psyches or “internal” subjectivities (see Lapoujade, 2008), KSR’s work addresses “external” environments which could perhaps also be said to be "delirious"—in the face of which characters maintain a certain composure. KSR’s descriptions of radical futures, in which the climate crisis has been mostly evaded or managed, are not narrations of what the future might look like, but reflections on what it is we can do in the present. As such, KSR proposes an optimistic interpretation of Dick’s method, an adaptation in which, rather than presenting the challenges and tragedies of future societies as critiques of contemporary failure, positive futures are imagined as reminders that the possibility for change exists within the present. Thus, following Philip K. Dick and the Realist tradition in science-fiction, we can understand Kim Stanley Robins projections of the future as but means of mapping an absent present, a present in potentia.
The sense of possibility conveyed in his work speaks less to a mere program of action to be implemented, but rather to “a moral obligation, especially to privileged people, to stay alive to the possibility that we could, and should make things better, get along with the biosphere” (KSR). The sense of possibility at play in his work speaks to a collective capacity to act, to imagine, and to create new time-spaces that are in direct contact with the topos (territory) people find themselves in. In that sense, we may venture to say, following philosopher Gilles Deleuze, that KSR’s works of fiction may be less considered a utopia, the fabulation and construction of another world altogether, and more as an “atopia”, a re-imagining of ways of inhabiting this current world. KSR’s work can “give us reason to believe in this world (...) Only new deliriums, new fabulations can make us believe in it again” (Lapoujade, 2014, p. 290, our translation).
KSR’s fiction can be seen as an invitation to reinject potential in the present to aspire not only to a better future, but to becoming otherwise now – by reappropriating the means of imagination. For KSR, works of fiction allow us to render perceptible the ways different people at different times and space perceive and invent their own present, much as the social sciences do. It is an invitation to think of fiction not as something distinct from lived experience, but to think “in fictions”. That is, to think fictionally in ways that intensify the present.
The author considers that we all perform or create sci-fi projections in our day-to-day lives as we imagine our personal futures and attempt to, in a way, forecast or contrive ideal outcomes. His work guides and delimits such speculative efforts by critically relating them to the present and by setting up what could be possible futures. However, the image is never complete. KSR just hints at what might be a means of dealing with crises. It is up to the reader to finalize such an image and, hopefully, reflect on the existing historical conditions that hinder us today from such possibility.
KSR’s generous presence—even if only locally remediated through Milieux Institute’s digital set-up—was just another way of collectively intensifying our present and propagating the conversation from one location to the next
References
Jameson, F. (2005). Archaeologies of the future: the desire called utopia and other science fictions. Verso.
Lapoujade, D. (2008). Fictions du pragmatisme: William et Henry James. Les Éd. de Minuit.
Lapoujade, D. (2014). Les mouvements aberrants. Les Éd. de Minuit.
Tsing, A. L. (2005). Friction: An ethnography of global connection. Princeton University Press.
