From the SFRA Review
Summer 2024
Ian Campbell
I’ve long felt that the timeline where friends got both David Bowie and Prince to the doctor in time back in 2016 is the control universe, and we’re living in the experimental one, and that sometime around (let’s say) 06 January 2021, the researchers grew bored and put their collective thumb on the fast-forward button. But I was incorrect, I think: when Golden Toilet almost took a bullet and then a very effective incumbent dropped out of the race, I came to understand that what we now live in is the Black Swan universe. Anything goes, folks: buckle up, or don’t.
SF, among other things, enables us to run experimental universes: to say “what might happen were X true”, whether X be faster-than-light travel, or colonizable planets, or sentient aliens who just want to party. SF lets us look at what the consequences of those developments might be, and also to use those hypothetical universes as distorted reflections upon our own here and now. In this issue of the SFRA Review, our Managing Editor Virginia L. Conn brings us a set of articles about SF and socialism: what a collective approach to solving problems or rebooting our society might look like. We hope that you find these articles, as well as our usual palette of reviews, to be food for thought. Imagine an experimental universe where money did not count as free speech.
The two hottest days in recorded human history were reached last week, breaking a record set last month, which broke a record set last year. I’m beginning to sound like a broken record, but our climate change future is already here: it’s just very unevenly distributed. It reminds me of William Gibson’s work in The Peripheral and Agency, where the background plot revolves around a non-white woman elected to the US presidency around this time and then either assassinated, or not, depending on the timeline. Imagine an experimental universe where the open undermining of democracy led to actual sanctions. Write me at icampbell@gsu.edu.
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