One thing that I have been contemplating is the way that I think about time. I think I’ve gotten too complacent with how I divide it, and I think I can do better.
As a science fiction writer, I tend to think of time as being sliced up into the really ancient past, ancient past, distant past, the recent past, the present, the near future, the far future, and the really far future.
The present is, of course, the time I’m living in right now, which started at some hazy point in the 2010s and will continue for a few more years, maybe a decade. We’re all familiar with the present, even if we do our best to avoid living there.
The recent past, in my mind, is whatever’s still in living memory, plus a little bit more. It includes the Cold War, World War II, and maybe even World War I if we want to get really extensive with it. Even though stuff like the French Revolution is recent in the grand scheme of things, it still falls into the next category, that of the “distant past”, which covers about anything from Roman times up until the recent past. And, of course, before that, is the ancient past, with the pyramids and Babylonians and all the way back to Gobekli Tepe and Catalhoyuk. Then, past that, into the really ancient past we have the evolution of Homo Sapiens, the evolution of life, formation of the Earth, big bang, etc.
With the future, we have less fine gradations, because we haven’t had any anti-historians around to categorize the events that will happen. The near future is the future that I’m expecting to live into, or at least the future I’m expecting people I meet to live into, so that brings us to around the middle of the 22nd Century when the last of my younger relatives are liable to die out, or maybe some time in the 23rd Century if we’re optimistic about life extension. The far future is anything past that where I can expect the geography of the planet and the nature of culture to be even slightly recognizable, so that runs from somewhere in the 22nd Century to some time past that, perhaps the dawn of the 4th Millennium CE, or somewhere in the middle of the 3rd Millennium, or further. And then the really far future is everything past that, up until whatever fate this universe ends up meeting.
This makes for pretty easy classification of science fiction, with The Tower of Babylon clearly being set in Ancient Times; Bruce Sterling’s The Ancient Engineer being set in the distant past; Cryptonomicon being set all across the recent past; No One is Talking About This happening in the present; Red Mars being set in the near future; Star Trek taking place in the far future, and The Xeelee Sequence taking place in the really far future.
Now, I know some people who would propose an alternative division of time, that being certain young-Earth Creationists, who would perhaps divide time up into Prelapsarian, Antediluvian, Old Testament, New Testament, present, and Eschaton eras, based on their own biblical chronology. Of course, these definitions could shift a little, and some might replace “present” with “Anno Domini” and mark the current day as part of the Eschaton, when the world is winding down. Of course, proper Christian Dispensationalists often follow a seven-dispensation scheme that breaks up the Old Testament into a few chunks and switches some bits between “present” and “Eschaton”, but they fit this mold approximately.
These Christians mark time based on the events that are most important to them, and they are hardly alone in this. Many cultures throughout history have marked time based on the regnal years of Kings. The Romans marked their time Ab Urbe Condita, “from the founding of the city” and the French Revolutionaries declared that the Republican Era began in the year we know as 1792.
There are two interesting features about this Christian calendar, however, that bear further consideration.
The first is that it can have some legal implications. The book Medieval Futures, edited by Burrow and Wei, notes that medieval laws were considered to be indefinite and not permanent because God would inevitably return and repossess the world, which would make feudal vassal-lord arrangements obsolete. Having this kind of natural endpoint is alien, I think, to most people’s conceptions of time, but it could have interesting implications for science fiction writing. There is also a sense of stasis in each era, which is, in retrospect, not reflective of reality. Medieval farmers would have lived very cyclical lives, and not seen much change in living conditions between birth and death. There was no expectation of technological development, and it was generally assumed that life had been the same since the death of Christ and that it would remain the same until his return.
The second feature is that because this timeline has an end and a beginning, it excludes certain futures. If you’ve ever talked to radical Christians about science fiction, which I have, they have a fundamentally different attitude towards the genre: they do not think that it could ever come to pass. For them, there is no distinction between even the hardest science fiction and the most whimsical fantasy, because there can be no Expanse or Schild’s Ladder after A Thief in the Night or Left Behind.
And I name those two works for a very particular reason: they are seen as realistic depictions of possible futures by these same radical Christians. Both are about the state of the world after the Rapture, where all righteous and correct-thinking Christians suddenly vanish and are sent directly to Heaven without having to die. The people who are left behind (hence the title) have to deal with a world rapidly falling into the clutches of Satan during a period called the “tribulation” where terrible things begin to happen on Earth, usually involving a world government (the United Nations Imperium of Total Emergency, from A Thief in the Night, has probably one of my favorite names of any fictional government), the Mark of the Beast (mandatory to buy and sell, sort of like a debit card), and the rise of the Antichrist. Then, eventually God returns, punishes evil and rewards good, and the universe achieves its final, perfected configuration.
A lot of more liberal Protestants that I’ve met, as well as all the Catholics, find these movies groan-worthy, and there are many Christians with more ordinary views of the future, but it’s interesting how their view of the world fully excludes lots of very grounded and near-term science fiction.
Looking back at old sci fi writing, it’s easy to feel the same way. Something like 2001: A Space Odyssey depicts a world that never came to pass, with huge amounts of space settlement by the start of the 21st Century. That world is also bizarre and fantastical, but looking back, we recognize that this was seen as a realistic prediction of the future at the time. It wasn’t fantastical back then, except for the bits with alien monoliths. The expedition to Saturn, HAL 9000, nuclear weapons platforms in orbit? These were all supposed to be part of the future.
There is, however, a divide in science fiction writing that looks more like the difference between Dispensationalist Christian views on the future and more mainstream ones, and that is the apocalypse question. Will the world end?
Now, the idea of the world ending is hardly extreme. Researhers tried to predict the causes and likelihood of human extinction and the idea of a nuclear war setting civilization back by centuries is widely diffused in the public consciousness. If you believe that the world is going to end, that’s a hard “branch point” in the future. You can have a near future and a far future idea, and then also a near and far future if we have a nuclear war idea that exists entirely separate from that. I don’t know of any science fiction authors who are hardline believers in the idea of nuclear war, but there is an apocalypse that some people are absolutely convinced about: a singularity.
I’ve talked about singularities here before and I’m still not a believer, but there are many science fiction authors that are convinced, to quote Nick Land, that “nothing human makes it out of the 21st Century”. Looking through The Transhumanist Reader I was struck by the fervency of some authors that we will have a hard-takeoff singularity in the near future that will reshape all life on Earth and possibly the universe at large.
This was depicted in the Accelerando stories by Charles Stross, where a singularity ends up reshaping the solar system and rendering much of its inner part inhospitable to human life, but the mainstream views today were probably shaped more by works of popular fiction like the Terminator movies, and they have received significant mainstream coverage due to the industry’s PR antics.
If you strongly believe that we are headed towards a technological singularity, that’s an event horizon in your view of the future. You likely have the expectation that you will become immortal after the singularity, so the distinction between near and far future is erased. You may also have some belief that the emergent AI gods will either be able to simulate your experience at high enough speeds, build sophisticated enough computers that they can run forever, or somehow directly prevent heat death/big rip/big crunch/whatever end of the universe you expect. This means that your timeline of the future no longer has to have an end. You have your life right now, and your life after the singularity, and that’s it. Even if you die before the singularity, you might expect to be reborn, Roko’s Basilisk style, which as I and others have said before, is pretty clearly a high-tech rebranding of Christian resurrection into Heaven or Hell.
As science fiction writers, however, I feel like there are opportunities to think about how people think about time and how that relationship can be analyzed to create more living worlds. In medieval times, as today, most people expected to keep living lives where things would be about the same in a year as they would before, but nowadays we have the expectation that our lives and world will be meaningfully different in a decade from how they were the decade before. In the medieval world, that expectation did not exist.
What if the speed of technological progression really does speed up, and in the future people come to expect that their lives will change every year? Or what if it slows to the point that life once again takes on a fully-cyclical nature? A lot of sci fi fans have criticized how in settings like Star Trek or Star Wars, technology doesn’t seem to change that much even though centuries pass in-universe, but that might be the case in real life someday.
Another thing to explore is times and places where people do have radically different expectations about the future. Most of the predictions I talked about in this post are rather apocalyptic and destructive, and I think that’s sort of a given for a lot of cases, but it would be interesting to see stories about the interaction of people who expect different rates of lifestyle and technological transformation. What is it like if you’re living in Accelerando while your neighbors are trying to stick to Star Trek?
Like a lot of things, Vernor Vinge’s Zones of Thought stories do this concept well, but with space instead of time. On the edge of the galactic core, civilizations explode, achieve great things, and burn out in a few years, while technological levels are lower closer to the center of the galaxy, but the cultures that exist there last much longer and are safer from dangerous advanced technologies.
Another possibility that has been explored is alternate timelines with different events and rules, like in the TV show Fringe, where there the protagonists in a world that mostly resembles ours sometimes cross over into a version of their reality where things are strangely different, like Nixon being on quarters and zeppelins docking at the Empire State building in the 2000s. Time travel stories often feature similar hijinks, and sometimes include alternative pasts as well as alternative futures.
Additionally, for relativistic space travel stories like Revelation Space, time often really does work differently for space travelers than everyone else. Because they move at sizable fractions of a speed of light, people who undergo interstellar voyages are likely to have very alien perspectives on time, where whole civilizations on planets are fleeting things, and their own near-futures stretch out to the cosmic level. Alternatively, for someone living on a generation ship, as in Songs of Distant Earth, the passage of time might be even more cyclical (or just static) than for a medieval farmer, with no chance of any major social change at all.
It might be interesting to have a story where all of these things are thrown together, and some planets are undergoing singularity while generation ships fly between them, and interstellar astronauts jump between AI gods and space opera worlds. Alternatively, the idea of different futures might be a way to explore catastrophization and the way that people live today.
After all, we are constantly being presented with different futures. It’s everyone’s basic feeling, I think, that the future will be approximately like today, but at the same time we live in a world dealing with climate change, AI, and other major shifts. We see ourselves at the crossroads of many possible futures, as people in the past were when confronted with the Cold War, the rise of fascism, electrification, trains and cars, the industrial revolution, and so many more major shifts that could have happened and did or didn’t. Science fiction exists to explore those futures, and the way that we live in them.
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