Mirrors and Reflections

Back From The Future: Part II

For almost 30 years I’ve made my living as an editor and writer — and being an editor is really being a writer too, given I spend part of my time writing lengthy reports on manuscripts, for which I get paid, it’s just not writing for publication. Long before that I wanted to be a novelist, until I realised my strengths as a writer were in nonfiction, and in helping other writers to tell the stories they wanted to tell.

Like many teenagers, I made various attempts at novel writing, which thankfully the world will be spared from ever reading. One that I wrote several chapters of, this was about 50 years ago, around the time the original disaster movie cycle peaked with Jaws and The Towering Inferno (yes, back then Jaws was widely regarded as a disaster movie, not a horror film or a sui generis Steven Spielberg masterpiece), was about a satellite that collected solar energy using a giant mirror, then beamed it back to a station on earth where it was converted into electricity for distribution to the power grid. The satellite was in geosynchronous orbit, meaning it was always in the same place in relation to the ground. But that’s no fun, so in my story something happened – an accident, sabotage, I don’t remember – to change the orbit so that the satellite, and the beam of concentrated sunlight, started moving in relation to the earth. And the beam couldn’t be shut off… The story then became a race against time to somehow destroy the satellite or deflect the heat ray before it cut a swath of destruction straight though a major city.

Okay, it’s a stupid story idea for all sorts of reasons. But then I was 13, and in my defence, a little over 20 years later people made Armageddon, one of the silliest films it has been my misfortune to see in a cinema, and very large numbers of people watched it without laughing.

Last month I wrote my first post for Timepieces, in which I reflected (word choice deliberate) on my journey Back From The Future: From Science Fiction to Historical Fiction and I began the third act of the post thus:

‘When I started thinking about writing this post, I wondered how the two genres, science fiction and historical fiction, mirrored each other, which may on the surface seem a strange idea, but both have at heart imaginative constructions of other times, other worlds, that we can never truly know.’

Well, sometimes it feels like the world is taking me too literally. The morning I drafted this post the Independent published an article by Samantha Lawler, The Conversation, & Aaron Boley titled, US company cleared to install giant mirror in space to create ‘sunlight on demand’.

Here’s the beginning of the article:

‘A giant mirror to create “sunlight on demand” was just approved by the United States Federal Communications Commission (FCC), despite opposition from astronomers and the public, and real safety concerns.

‘The FCC approved the company Reflect Orbital to test one satellite, named Earendil-1, as a means of reflecting the sun’s rays back to Earth for extra solar energy and wide-area lighting. The light is expected to cover an area about five kilometres wide, and will require repointing every four minutes.

‘And this is just the start. Reflect Orbital plans to have more than 50,000 satellites in action by 2035, which they claim will be used across agricultural, emergency response and other industrial sectors.’

Later, the article goes on to note:

‘Satellite proposals for “emergent space activities” in low-Earth orbit are becoming increasingly outlandish. The proposals have become so weird, in fact, that the FCC recently published a document called “Spectrum Abundance for Weird Space Stuff.”’

Read the piece yourself to see how bizarre things might get. All of which ties in with how I wrote in my earlier post about how I now prefer to work in the field of historical fiction, because essentially not just the imagined future, but the very real present is getting too darkly deranged for consideration, at least if one hopes to remain in relatively good mental health.

And then, no sooner had I read the Independent article and started to work on this post, then I came across a truly exceptional essay on Aeon by Ali Rıza Taşkale published two days earlier with the title, The Looting of Science Fiction, about how ‘tech titans’ claim to be inspired by the genre, but have latched onto the shiny surfaces of SF while not understanding their context and meaning, failing to grasp that often the stories they claim to be inspired by are warnings against people just like them. For example, the essay begins:

‘In January 2026, Elon Musk stood before the US Secretary of Defense and senior Pentagon leaders at the SpaceX Starbase in Texas. ‘We want to make Star Trek real, OK?’ he declared. ‘We want to make Starfleet Academy real. So that it’s not always science fiction, but one day the science fiction turns to science fact, and we have spaceships going through space. Big spaceships!’’

The irony being, of course, that the world’s first trillionaire wants to realise the visuals of Star Trek in the most literal, superficial way, seemingly oblivious to the fact that in creating the Federation, Gene Rodenberry imagined a racially harmonious post-capitalist future in which money is only necessary when dealing with other cultures that haven’t outgrown their infancy, everyone’s material are needs freely met by right from the abundant wealth produced by society as a whole, and no one dies or loses their home because they can’t afford healthcare. Do read the whole article, it’s excellent.

It’s hard to argue with the level of cognitive disconnect of those being inspired by the warnings of science fiction I grew up with to further their dystopian aims. They have visions of futures I want no part of — as if they are living on, or from another planet. So while good science fiction continues to issue warnings, historical fiction now seems like a more careful home for nuanced explorations into the inner space of the human character, not least because in the past things changed much more slowly, providing greater stability on which to found fictional imaginings.

At this point I was going to do the L.P. Hartley quote, you know the one, but Steve Cox already beat me to it here on Timepieces. So let’s go straight on to the ironic twist ending.

Later in the day after writing the rough draft of this post I was asked to contribute a chapter about an award-winning science fiction novel for a forthcoming book. And I signed the contract. Just when I thought I was out, they pull me back in….

Double twist. The day I came to polish this post before uploading it to Timepieces, I found that the author of the science fiction novel I am to write about will, next year, make their debut as a writer of historical fiction.