A Sci-Fi Visionary Thinks Greed

Might Be the Thing That Saves

Us
It’s easy, especially now, to imagine a bleak and withered future, and that’s largely
what our storytellers are doing. Whether it’s in novels, TV shows, films or video games,
speculative imaginings of the world we’re heading toward tilt strongly to fatalistic
despair. And while I can’t say with much conviction that I have hope for where our
current path may lead, I have wondered why more artists aren’t pushing back and
composing visions of the future in more than just minor keys. (Lord knows we could use
it.) One artist who has done that over the course of his career is the best-selling sci-fi
novelist Neal Stephenson. His books, the best known of which are probably the
cyberpunk thriller “Snow Crash” and “Cryptonomicon,” an opus about money and
code-breaking, have long dealt in apocalyptic events and malevolent uses of new
technology. But — and this is particularly true of his latest novel, the climate-change-
focused “Termination Shock” — their renderings of the future also include potential
solutions (morally and technically complicated though they may be) to the problems of
living in a radically changed world. That is to say, their imagination extends beyond the
edge of the cliff. “To portray a more utopian future,” says Stephenson, who is 62 and, to
be clear, far from starry-eyed, “is to lay oneself open to a certain level of mockery from
critics and skeptical audience members. Whereas there doesn’t seem to be any level of
grim dystopian imagery that will make the fans and the critics say ‘enough already.’”

We’re facing a potentially apocalyptic event in climate change, so it makes sense that
post-apocalyptic dystopia is where people’s heads are at as far as sci-fi and
speculative fiction. But we’re also surrounded by incredible technologies that make
our lives better, and we’re going to need new technologies to help combat climate
change. So why don’t we see much creative output that points toward the future in
more hopeful or aspirational ways? I think a lot of it — and this is going to sound like
a funny argument — is a pretty simple economic calculation on the part of people who
produce screen entertainment. I’m looking over your shoulder on this Zoom and seeing
an office building. It would be easy to blow that building up in a science-fictional
setting. We could knock holes in it and break the windows and dirty it up, and it would
look dystopian and wouldn’t require a lot of detailed imagining. If we were going to
replace that building with a futuristic building from a more utopian vision of New York
City, it would be necessary to design a new building from scratch and make it look
convincing structurally and do it in a way that was consonant with an art director’s
scheme for the production design. The latter approach is simply harder and more
expensive, and it’s easy to strike the wrong note and come up with something that
doesn’t work — whereas everyone would recognize the Empire State Building after
having been hit by a nuclear strike. We’ve also got in the habit of thinking that by
showing that kind of future, the artists are sending a message about how hard they
are: I’m not some rose-colored-glasses sap. I’m a badass thinking dark, mean thoughts about
our dark, mean future.
Neal Stephenson at home in Seattle in 1998.
Robert Sorbo for The New York Times
What about the story we’re telling as a society — beyond art — about climate
change? Is there a way we could be talking about it that’s more likely to motivate the
kind of mobilization we had, say, during the Second World War? The difficulty is that
it’s hard to get lots of people to change their minds. The United States did mobilize in a
massive way during World War II, but we didn’t start getting serious about it until 1942.
There had been a huge war raging since 1939, and the Brits were tearing their hair out
waiting for the United States to get more involved, and it wasn’t until Pearl Harbor that
there was a tipping point in public opinion that made it possible for America’s political
leadership to declare war and to enter into it in a serious way. So the question asks
itself: What might be a climate equivalent of Pearl Harbor? We’re already having little
regional Pearl Harbors all over the place. We had our heat dome in Seattle over the
summer, we had the mega tornado supercell that passed from Arkansas to Kentucky.
These little pinprick Pearl Harbor events happen here and there, but it’s difficult to
imagine one that would impact an entire country the size of the United States — if it
did, it would be a really bad thing. We don’t want to put ourselves in the position of
wishing that something terrible would happen. It’s also natural to assume that the CO2
problem is similar to other air-pollution problems we’ve had before. In the ’50s, there
was a disaster in London because of too much coal smoke in the air, and they cleaned
up the air by burning less coal. In the ’70s, a lot of the smog problem in L.A. was
cleaned up by putting catalytic converters on cars and cutting down on hydrocarbon
emissions. There’s a similar story around the ozone hole. We’re accustomed to thinking
that all we have to do is stop emitting the pollutant, and then nature will clean up the
air. But it’s not true in the case of CO2 in the atmosphere. People confuse CO2
emission reduction or elimination with solving the problem. But even if we could stop
emitting all CO2, we’d be stuck for hundreds of thousands of years with extremely
elevated CO2 levels that nature has no quick way of removing from the air. That’s the
key thing that has to be widely understood before we can actually begin envisioning
ways to attack the problem.
In “Termination Shock,” you have a billionaire character who tries to attack that
problem through geoengineering. You’ve talked elsewhere about writing about
geoengineering as a way of ensuring that people are more prepared for it when it
starts to happen. Is that something you see as a primary function of fiction:
introducing concepts or ideas to the public? Job 1 is to be sufficiently entertaining
that a fair number of people will actually read the book all the way to the end. If you
haven’t done that, then you’ve got nothing. If you’ve gotten over that hurdle, then it
becomes possible to start thinking about other things. I’m leery of taking too much of
an instrumentalist view of art because I think that if you’ve got that mind-set of I’m
going to change people’s minds or push a particular point of view the audience recognizes
that almost on a preverbal level and they lose their suspension of disbelief. I’m sure you
can think of examples where books somehow changed people’s minds about certain
topics or ended up having some functional purpose, but I think if you set out from the
beginning with a functional mentality, you’re probably going to end up with a failed
project.
Is being sufficiently entertaining “Job 1” for you or for all novelists? The novel is a
pop-culture medium just like comic books or movies. So when you’re practicing an art
form, you generally follow the formal rules of that art form. If you’re going to write a
sonnet, it’s going to be 14 lines long. You can choose to write hard-to-read books, like
“Finnegans Wake,” let’s say, if that’s what you want to do, and it’s a perfectly
defensible choice, but in general telling a readable and enjoyable story is a basic
constraint of the form.
Stephenson speaking at M.I.T. in 2008.
Daniel Leithinger
All right, here’s another question about how we conceive of the world: One of the
things that made the Baroque period so fruitful as a setting for you was the tensions
that resulted from superstitious, medieval modes of thinking coexisting alongside
the beginnings of the rational Enlightenment. What similar tensions between old and
new ways of thinking are alive in our modes of understanding the world? What we’re
seeing in the Baroque Cycle is the beginning of scientific rationalism and the idea that
we can find ways to agree on what is true, which was a new development. You know,
Barbara Shapiro has a book called “A Culture of Fact” that tells the origin story of the
idea of facts, which is not an idea we always had. Another thing I’ve been reading
recently is “The Fixation of Belief” by an American philosopher named Charles Sanders
Peirce. He was writing in the 1870s, and he goes through a list of four methods that
people use to decide what they’re going to believe. The first one is called the method of
tenacity, which means you decide what you’re going to believe and you stick to it
regardless of logic or evidence.
Sounds familiar. Yeah, this all sounds depressingly familiar. The next method is called
the method of authority, where you agree with other people that you’re all going to
believe what some authority figure tells you to believe. That’s probably most common
throughout history. The third method is called the a priori method, and the idea is, let’s
be reasonable and try to come up with ways to believe things that sound reasonable to
us. Which sounds great, but if it’s not grounded in any fact-checking methodology,
then you end up just agreeing to believe things by consensus — which may be totally
wrong. The fourth method is the scientific method. It basically consists of accepting the
fact that you might be wrong, and since you might be wrong, you need some way for
judging the truth of statements and changing your mind when you’ve got solid
evidence to the contrary. What you’re seeing in the Baroque Cycle is the transition
from Method No. 3 to No. 4. You’ve got all these people having what seem like
reasoned, logical arguments, but a lot of them are just tripping. So a few come in, like
Hooke and Newton, and begin using actual experiments and get us going down the road
toward the rational world of the Enlightenment. But what we’ve got now is almost
everybody using Method 1, 2 or 3. We’ve got a lot of authoritarians who can’t be swayed
by logic or evidence, but we’ve also got a lot of a priori people who want to be
reasonable and think of themselves as smarter and more rational than the
authoritarians but are going on the basis of their feelings — what they wish were true —
and both of them hate the scientific rationalists, who are very few in number. That’s
kind of my Peircian analysis of where things stand right now.
Do you see a way out of that? When people find that they can obtain lots of money and
power by believing certain things and following certain ways of thinking, then you can
bet that they’ll enthusiastically start doing that. The reason that Enlightenment
thinking became popular was that people figured out that it was in their financial best
interest to avail themselves of its powers. The spread of very financially successful
enterprises like, let’s say, steam engines for long-range ocean navigation was a direct
outgrowth of the practical application of the scientific method. To that you could also
add a lot of financial apparatus that came into existence around then with the Bank of
England and various ways of managing financial affairs. In other words, people don’t
necessarily follow scientific rationalism because they’re noble and pure seekers of the
truth, although some of them definitely do it for that reason. More people do it out of
self-interest.
It may be the unfortunate case that there’s more obvious financial self-interest to be
gained by promoting irrational and counterfactual thinking. If you don’t have any
perceptible downside or negative consequences, then why not sign up with or co-sign
the latest conspiracy theory? I do think negative consequences definitely exist, but
maybe the cause-and-effect relationship isn’t immediately obvious.
What are those negative consequences? What do people stand to lose? Well, the
negative consequence is our entire civilization.

This interview has been edited and condensed from two conversations.
David Marchese is a staff writer for the magazine and the columnist for Talk. Recently
he interviewed Brian Cox about the filthy rich, Dr. Becky about the ultimate goal of
parenting and Tiffany Haddish about God’s sense of humor.

Source: New York Times