Stories about the Future: From Patterns of Expectation to Pattern Recognition

Abstract

It is not news that “science fiction” has come to refer in the past few decades not only to a popular narrative genre, but also to a kind of popular cultural discourse, a way of thinking about a sociopolitical present defined by radical and incessant technological transformation. William Gibson’s Pattern Recognition (2003) is both a realist novel set in 2002 and an sf novel set in the endless endtimes of the future-present. It brilliantly conveys the phenomenology of a present infused with futurity, no longer like itself, no longer like the present. In this essay I discuss Pattern Recognition in the context of two other contemporary novels, Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake (2003) and Greg Egan’s Schild‖s Ladder (2001), that also address the complexities of contemporary technoculture’s interactions with the future. Oryx and Crake, an apocalyptic satire by an author most often associated with the realist novel, is a telling demonstration of how non-genre writers turn to science fiction as a way to characterize the lived experience of technoculture. Schild’s Ladder, situated at the centre of genre, captures the fascination with which some contemporary hard sf views the potential of technoscience to transform human history in radically unforeseeable ways. In his latest novel, meanwhile, Gibson has traded in the tropes of sf for the strategies of mimetic realism to dramatize the future as a kind of impossibility. I read these three novels as a series of significantly interrelated stories about the increasingly complex nature of the future in technoculture.

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