JessicaRulestheUniverse.com

This is the text of my keynote address at the BDAP (Book Development Association of the Philippines) Literary Festival on 29 Nov 2020.

In 2016 it occurred to me that the apocalypse had begun. A little late, since many had expected it at the turn of the millennium. This apocalypse is not the stuff of biblical Revelations, at least not literally. It is less spectacular, more life-sized, more plausible and therefore scarier. It could happen. It’s happening.

In 2016 all my assumptions about the world were upended one by one. All around the world, far right populist strongmen were elected NOT despite but because of their appeal to the prejudices and hatreds of the people. There have always been demagogues, but we believed that the people would reject them. It turns out that we didn’t know the people, and we were horrified at what they believed. Reason became powerless against fear and loathing. Soon it became apparent that it was useless to argue by bringing up facts: they would not change anyone’s mind. The very foundation of knowledge—the truth—was under attack. I still recall my bewilderment at hearing the term, “post-truth”. How can supposedly intelligent people believe fake news? How could the truth be out of fashion? I felt as if gravity had vanished. We had come unmoored and were in danger of drifting off into space.

Small wonder that George Orwell’s 1984, which many of us had read under duress in school, or remembered mainly from that computer ad, became a bestseller. We recognized our present in the words that were written seven decades earlier:

War is peace.
Freedom is slavery.
Ignorance is strength.
Doublethink means the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one’s mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them.
If thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought.
Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.

1984. A science-fiction novel had predicted our strange new world, and it was not the only one. Science-fiction, which is still shunted off to the genre section and exiled to the fringes of capital-L Literature, had seen this coming, because that’s what science-fiction does.

Meanwhile climate change continues to escalate, causing more massive catastrophes with each official denial of its existence. Planetary extinction events are on their way, and no number of pretty speeches and eco-friendly shopping bags will stop them without concerted global action. Here is something easily capable of fulfilling the worst parts of biblical Revelations. It is the stuff of science-fiction, and now it is real.

At the same time, a disproportionately high number of artists I looked up to were dying. 2016 gave us a rapture-like The Leftovers scenario, in which the chosen suddenly and inexplicably vanish, presaging some apocalyptic event. David Bowie. Alan Rickman. Gene Wilder. Leonard Cohen. George Michael. When Prince died, I knew the Apocalypse was well and truly underway. To punctuate a year of grief, Carrie Fisher who was back on the screen as the former Princess and now General Leia, died. There was nothing more to be said.

As the weeks stretched into months and the months into years, it became clear that this was not some weird daymare that we would suddenly wake from. On the contrary, things became even more baffling and incomprehensible. This is how we live now. And I accepted that science-fiction is the only literary genre that can explain today’s world.

I’ll interrupt this direness with a cheerful flashback. As a young nerd who did well in school but could not relate to my classmates, I gravitated towards science-fiction. My entry point was the original Star Trek TV series, which was airing in endless reruns along with Charlie’s Angels and the Donnie and Marie Show. These American products were deemed safe by the martial law government, as was Combat, which made it seem like World War II was still being fought by one weary platoon of GI Joes. I was entertained by the female detectives who emerged from grave danger with perfect hair, and slightly bothered by the brother and sister team singing love songs to each other, but I wanted to be in the crew of the USS Enterprise. The universe they explored was unimaginably more vast and fascinating than my world of house to school and back. And no matter how often they traveled into the uncharted regions of space, many of their discoveries were about themselves and the mystery of being human.

The first science fiction stories I read were novelizations of Star Trek teleplays by the British writer James Blish. I have never stopped reading science fiction. People who dismiss it as rayguns and aliens assume that we read it to escape reality. There is always an element of escape even in the most realistic fiction, but in science fiction the worlds we escape to are often worse than this one. The difference is that the people have the imagination, ingenuity, and intelligence to begin to address their problems. These are usually the very people who are rejected and marginalized by their societies, the outsiders, heretics and nonconformists. Science fiction is the voice of the nerds.

I hesitate to offer a definition of science-fiction because that would mean putting limits on what should be boundless. For my purposes I will quote the Yugoslavian critic Darko Suvin, who said “It is a literary genre whose necessary and sufficient conditions are the presence and interaction of estrangement and cognition, and whose main formal device is an imaginative framework alternative to the author’s empirical environment.”

Consider the 1951 short story by Cyril M. Kornbluth entitled “The Marching Morons”. This is its premise: intelligent people opt to have few or no children, while the less intelligent have plenty of children. So many centuries from now, the world is populated by morons—except for a small, overworked, extremely-stressed, intelligent elite who keep it running. Interesting. Did it predict our world today? I should hope not, and anyway it is too simplistic.

We could argue that social media, particularly Facebook and Twitter, have broken democracy. However, they did not turn people into morons. They did not make people bigoted, misogynist, anti-science, classist, and callous. But social media gave them a platform on which they could reveal themselves, and those lower case-r revelations came as a shock to us. We had always assumed that our friends, family, colleagues, the people we grew up with or interact with daily, whom we share histories with, felt the same way we do about basic issues. Basic, as in right and wrong. We realized that we don’t really know each other, and maybe we should’ve stayed oblivious because once we became aware of their opinions on the value of strangers’ lives, we could not bear the thought of knowing them.

This year we are living through another one of science fiction’s greatest hits: a pandemic. Who knew that we would be spending the year indoors? Did you ever imagine that you could kill someone by breathing on them? That the streets could be as empty and quiet as the aftermath of a zombie outbreak? If you had any remaining doubt that we were living in science-fiction times, they disappeared the first time you stepped out of your door wearing a mask and face shield and constantly disinfecting your hands.

This pandemic has laid waste to the global economy, but it’s also shown us what we must do to ensure the survival of the species. We cannot go on the way we have, casually destroying the environment, poisoning ourselves, and allowing a few absurdly wealthy people to have more than everyone else combined. The carbon emissions that the world’s governments have not succeeded in reducing (because economies depend on the ability to spew carbon) were reduced during the worldwide lockdown. There was no choice but to shut down industry. The air was cleaner. Our surroundings were cleaner. We saw what the world looks like if human impact is minimized. We saw that while an invisible, insidious virus has forced us to put our lives on pause, we humans are the real virus.

Obviously we have to come out of our houses and go to work at some point, but we have to change. If capitalism, industry, travel and tourism go back to the way they were—and more, to make up for lost time and revenue—we will have learned nothing from this catastrophe, and are truly, undeniably, doomed.

Ted Chiang, one of the greatest science-fiction authors despite his relatively small output and his not having written a novel, pointed out that there are two kinds of narratives. In the conservative narrative, there is a problem: a disaster or a war. It is solved, and everything goes back to the way it was. The status quo wins. In the progressive narrative, there is a problem: a disaster or a war. It is solved, and nothing goes back to the old normal. Society emerges from the catastrophe fundamentally changed.

I would like to think that we are living in a progressive science fiction narrative. What is my basis for saying this? Nothing, I just want to believe.

I do not mean this as a criticism of the people who are paralyzed by anxiety during this terrible time and need all their energy to keep it together. So many of us are finding it extremely difficult to read books, much less write them, and that is an understandable reaction to this. But I have never been particularly sociable and I am comfortable in the great indoors. I have never read so much or written so much as I do now. Why? Because I can’t get leave the house physically, I can’t travel as I used to, but my mind can. This is the gift of science fiction to every nerd who was ever bullied or alienated: the power to imagine another world, a better world where your intelligence and innovation could make a difference.

Recently, on Instagram, I had a conversation with a new friend, a wonderful writer who is working on a new book. She said she felt almost guilty about writing fiction, that it felt shallow and self-indulgent in the face of awful reality. On the contrary, I think, it is in truly awful times that we need fiction even more. Not just to escape, which at this point, nine months into the pandemic is a form of self-care, but to envision a world in which truth, justice, compassion, equality, and art triumph. Because if we can imagine it, maybe we can will it into being. I will remind you that our nation was imagined into being by a young man who poured his rage, his disillusionment, and his wicked humor into the tale of a man who just wanted to open a school.