How to 3D glasses on reality

      We are now living in a science fiction novel that we are all writing together. The present is dangerous and unstable, and what the future will actually become is radically uncertain. It could be a good life for future humans in a shared and interdependent biosphere. It can be extreme climate change, mass extinctions, agricultural collapse, and intense deadly conflicts between desperate human groups, including nuclear war. To deal with this bizarre breadth of possible futures, I tend to take it one story at a time. And I deploy a set of organizational ideas. Science fiction is the realism of our time. He describes the present the way a skeet shooter takes aim at a clay pigeon and aims a little ahead to reveal what is not yet present but already having an impact. This gives us metaphors and meaning systems that help us conceptualize our moment. So, as with any other realistic art, you pluck just one strand from the fabric of the overall situation and follow where it leads. Because the novel is not the world.

         Even if it's the world. It's just one story out of millions that could be told, so it doesn't have to cover everything. We read fiction to have two science fiction experiences: time travel and telepathy. Fiction takes us to other times and places (Regency England, the Ice Age, the moons of Jupiter) and takes us inside people's heads, where we hear their thoughts and feel their feelings. And science fiction can describe any time, from tomorrow to billions of years from now. This is a large expansion and creates a number of sub-genres, each with their own qualities. Space operas set in the distant future use the entire universe as a story space, sometimes to spectacular effect. Near-future science fiction is the phonetic realism I describe above. In between, say about one to three centuries from now, there is a less populated story zone that I find interesting. You could call it the history of the future.

        The stories set in this zone are reminiscent of nineteenth-century social novels: characters interact not only with each other, but also with their societies and even their planets. It may be that, in the face of the overwhelming complexity of our present, describing events a century from now allows us to disentangle selected elements for closer examination. Here's how I think science fiction works aesthetically. It's not a prediction. It has rather a double effect, like the lenses of 3D glasses. Through one lens, we seriously attempt to paint a possible future.

        Through the latter, we see our presence metaphorically, in a kind of heroic simile that says: "It is as if our world were like this." When these two visions come together, the artificial third dimension that emerges is simply history. We see ourselves, our society and our planet "as giants immersed in years", as Marcel Proust said. In fact, it is the fourth dimension that jumps into view: deep time and our place in it. Some readers can't make this merger, so they don't like science fiction; it glitters unbelievably, it gives them a headache. But relax your eyes, and the results can be surprising in their clarity.