week 29 / 2025: rifts in the schismatrix

“Be careful, you might hear something / you don't want to hear / be careful, you might say something / that you really mean...”

Last week’s unfinished thoughts on the different modes of concretisation in science fiction and fiction-for-futures have sat with me all through the week, in between other activities. I think there’s something more to chase down in my line of thought, but it’s going to take more focus than I have to hand right now! In the meantime, however, some interesting lines of flight have presented themselves.

The first of these comes from that rarest of birds, namely a genuinely interesting LinkedIn comment. Simon Spearman responded to last week’s WEEKNOTES with the following teleological observation:

“… sci-fi is intended more to unlock novelty in thought/perspective while scenarios and foresight are intended to unlock novelty in action and behavior. Sci-fi estranges the novum to get us thinking, ‘What if...?’ and ‘Given what if, so what?’ And scenarios get us more into thinking about ‘What if...?’ also, but lean more toward a ‘Given what if, now what?’”

This orientation of scenarios toward action—even if it’s rarely more than gestural action around the boardroom table—approaches the question from the front end. The importance of intention probably needs building into the theory I was blundering toward last week.

Heading in a somewhat different direction, I was reminded of the distinction that informs the title of JF Martel’s Reclaiming Art in the Age of Artifice. There’s a lot more to his argument, but one of the ways Martel distinguishes art from artifice is that the latter is almost always representational in its intentions.

Now, there is definitely a value judgement in play here, but nonetheless Martel is not dismissing representation outright: it has its place, it is an expression of mastery, and many true works of art have a representational aspect. But for Martel, the strange magic of true art leaks out of the rifts in representation: from the places where it breaks down, whether through the failure or the transcendence of technique, or is abandoned entirely. Put another way, art is rooted in something visionary that arises spontaneously, without intention.

Fiction-for-futures is necessarily and intentionally representational: the job is to quite literally re-present the scenario in a different form, to apply a narratological transformation to a rational model of futurity. In Martel’s schema, then, fiction-for-futures is inescapably artifice rather than art. Wearing my practitioner’s hat—and straddling the fence between two fields as I do so—I would say that there’s plausibly some possibility-space in which true art might emerge from the artifice of fiction-for-futures, but the constraints of the form make it unlikely: you’re usually working in a very short form, which means you need to focus on functional material over flights of fancy, and you’re quite often working to tight deadlines.

That said, insanely fast rates of production can surely be generative of the rifts that characterise true art: the early novels of Philip K Dick and Michael Moorcock would be good examples, though we should probably factor in the influence of pharmacology—and a certain innate genius—in both cases! Nonetheless, as short as those novels were by the standards of modern genre publishing, they were still an order of magnitude longer than the fiction-for-futures stories I produce. So, to tack a piece of my own onto Martel’s hypothesis: a rift is by definition a rent or tear in a larger landscape, which is implicitly defined by its having a coherence that the rift somehow interrupts; a work of art cannot be pure rift, because then the rift would not be recognisable as such.

Anyway, point being: fiction-for-futures is artifice, while science fiction—at its best—is art. And I’m going to leverage the established format of these posts to introduce an illustrative example…

reading

…because this week I have been reading Bruce Sterling’s Schismatrix Plus. This is one of the dozen or so novels which I re-read every couple of years or so, partly due to the undimmed pleasure I get from reading them, but partly as a way of reminding myself of what seem to me to be the peak achievements of genre literature. I could write a whole book of my own about this particular book, and someday I hope to do so, but for now I want to look at it through the lenses we’re playing with above.

The Schismatrix texts—the novel of that title, and the bundled stories set in the same “Shaper/Mechanist” universe—do many things, one of which is the concretisation of a particular metaphor. As Sterling notes in his introduction to the tenth anniversary edition, his writing in this period drew on a number of works of speculative non-fiction, including Ilya Prigogine’s From Being to Becoming, a notoriously dense theoretical work which (on the basis of my own aborted attempt to read it back in the Noughties) is part of Prigogine’s attempt to do away with the determinism that he saw as characterising scientific thought. (Fans of posthumanist theory may be interested to know that Prigogine went on to write a couple of books with Isabelle Stengers, meaning that his ideas have contributed to the shaping of the contemporary posthumanist theory-scape.)

Leaving aside the content both of Sterling’s stories and of Prigogine’s theories—both of which are highly resistant to concise summary—the thing to note here is Sterling’s characteristically cheerful admission that he mostly picked up the terminology and style of Prigogine’s writing, rather than its substance, as the basis for the technomystical worldviews of the two main factions in the fiction, a trick that “worked like a charm”. He then recounts an anecdote in which a fan of his who was studying under Prigogine put the stories in front of the theorist, who responded by saying that the stories had nothing to do with the the work they appeared to be referencing. “Well, that was very true,” Sterling remarks, “but charms are verbal structures. They work regardless of chemistry or physics.”

While I’m not sure this is quite the way other genre scholars would use the term, Sterling’s trick here described is pretty much exactly what I mean when I talk about the concretisation of metaphor: he’s interpreting a bundle of highly abstruse scientific concepts and theories without any care for their accurate representation. His response to them is predominantly aesthetic: Prigogine’s words painted pictures in Sterling’s head, and he collaged them into a bundle of other ideas (including some from Freeman Dyson and some from J D Bernal) and mutated science fiction tropes to produce something wholly original and new.

Schismatrix is not very well known these days, which I find baffling and somewhat tragic. But that it burgeons with the rifts of true art is evidenced by its influence on works that followed: it’s arguably the ur-text for not only the British boom in New Space Opera on either side of the Millennium (with Alastair Reynolds in particular referencing Schismatrix as hugely influential on his own work), but also for post-cyberpunk and posthuman sf. Certain of what Sterling himself might call “dead media moments” date the book somewhat, but the story itself is timeless—and, I would argue, of particular relevance to people working in foresight. Do yourself a favour, and read it.

a clipping

I’ll keep it brief with today’s clipping, which is very concisely summed up by its own declarative title: “Population growth or decline will have little impact on climate change.” But I will quote the author’s closing point, because I feel like it’s one that, sadly, we’re going to have to make repeatedly and loudly in the next few decades:

we should do many of the things that have been associated with declining fertility rates: reduce child mortality and poverty; give girls the opportunity to go to school, get an education, and employment; improve access to contraceptives; and empower women to make their own family planning decisions. These are all excellent things to do; I just don’t think climate change is the main reason to do so.

Or, to put it a bit more bluntly than Ritchie is willing to: blaming climate change on the reproductive rates of people in the developing world is a very bad look. “Cast out first the beam out of thine own eye”, and all that.

ticked off

• Eighteen hours on PROJECT PORTON. (Report edits! To a fairly tight deadline! Never my favourite part of the process, if I’m honest, but an important one—and made much easier and more agreeable by having a good team to work with.)
• Five hours on PROJECT PONTIF. (PORTON kinda ate up the mental bandwidth necessary for thinking at the scale of a book, so PONTIF’s been on the back-burner again this week.)
• Four and a half hours of admyn. (Including the writing of these weeknotes, which—given they’re taking much more than an hour to produce—seems like it should become a ledger’d item.)
• Two and half hours as expert participant in a technology futures workshop. (And another timely reminder that, once you move even a very little bit away from the direct beneficiaries of the gravy train, the majority of informed people are pretty skeptical about technological progress in general, and about the hysterical promises attendant upon Those Two Letters in particular.)
• Ten hours of undirected writing and reading, as always.

Not a bad tally, considering I took Thursday as a day off to hang out with friends!

kinmaking

I forgot to include any kinmaking activities last week, so this is a fortnight-long catch-up batch:

I’ve known Ahmet Sabancı as part of my online networks for what has to be more than a decade now, if not longer still, but somewhow we’d never gotten round to actually, y’know, having a chat—so it was good to finally remedy that oversight.

I’ve known Joanne McNeil for longer still, and we even managed to meet a bunch of times on what we now realise was the 2010s ZIRC conference circuit, when there was enough financial and cognitive capacity for conference planners to decide to invite some fringe weirdos alongside the big-top acts. Our conversation wasn’t all nostalgia, mind you; we managed to get in a fair amount of lamentation regarding the current state of science fiction, too!

I had a good long natter with Ben Holt, recently taken on at SOIF, formerly of IFRC.

I had a catch-up with my former academic sort-of-mentor and dear friend Zoe Sofoulis, in which we kicked around some ideas for an article she’s working on. Zoe’s grasp of metaphor and knack for theory is an inspiration. She’s also a truly epic character, and I love her to bits.

Last but not at all least, I had a call with Jason Dinsdale of the UK Environment Agency which was ostensibly about planning a webinar for the autumn, but which to an outside observer would have appeared more like a long rambling discussion of narratology sprinkled with Ned’s Atomic Dustbin references...

And that’s all for this week. The lens of the heat-wave has finally shifted northward enough to have Skåne in its focus, so I’m going to find a cool corner to lurk in for the rest of the weekend. I hope things are well with you, wherever you may be.

This has been the Worldbuilding Agency weeknotes for Week 29 of 2025. Thanks for reading! If you've enjoyed them, it's free to subscribe. If you are already subscribed, please send to a friend who you think might also like it!