In May 2024, at the Far Futures launch event, science fiction writer Annalee Newitz took part in a Far Futures contributor panel. The panelists talked about their stories and their approaches to imagining a world without nuclear weapons, as well as the value of bringing creativity and storytelling to our planet’s most pressing problems. Annalee’s (lightly edited) answers to the questions posed to them during the panel are below. Eager to watch the whole event? Click here for the video.
When you think about futurism and science fiction, a lot of times people will divide those stories into utopian, which is a wonderful world that doesn’t exist, or dystopian, which is a horrific world that doesn’t exist. That doesn’t give us a lot of space for thinking practically and pragmatically about the future. And so I often refer to my work as “topian,” meaning the future is a place, and we’re going to see things change for the better for some people and things change for the worse for some people. And when we imagine those futures, we can’t ever reach a kind of “Wizard of Oz” moment where we all just dance around and all the bad things are gone and we just eat candy and have sex for the rest of our lives.
So, in my Far Futures story, I really tried to think about what would be the knock-on effects of having a robust nuclear disarmament program globally. What would be the new problems that would arise? Doing that reminds us that we’re always going to have to be one step ahead, thinking about what’s the next thing that we’re going to screw up. Because humans are good at screwing things up—but we’re also good at solving things. I love problems like that, where we get to think through the consequences of doing something good, to make sure we keep doing the good thing as new problems arise.
The story is about a very humble character. He’s a gardener in Golden Gate Park in San Francisco. In his world, the nuclear disarmament treaty is enforced through a global network of little tiny flying computers called motes, and each one contains a drop of water. And this is based on a study done very recently that it’s possible to use water to detect antineutrinos, which are particles thrown out from the process of making nuclear weapons. So the idea is that we have these motes all over the world, detecting antineutrinos and protecting everyone. But it’s really costly to make these itty bitty drones. So governments and intergovernmental organizations make deals with corporations, like whatever the future version of Facebook is, to fund these motes. As long as the motes are carrying a drop of water, they can carry all kinds of other stuff: apps for surveillance that maybe are feeding information to the police, apps for measuring temperature and sensing the environment—anything you can imagine that could be contained in a mobile flying device that’s networked.
And so the main character, this gardener, discovers that someone has hijacked the motes and is using them to take upskirting photos. In his case, he’s bending over some roses, and someone using the motes takes a picture of his plumber’s butt and puts it on a site called I Left My Butt in San Francisco. And at first he’s like, “Aw, they thought I was cute” but then it’s, “Wait, no, this is very bad.” He uncovers a group that seems to be releasing the motes without keeping the water in them, and he has to report this to the intergovernmental agency. And that’s the whole story. It’s just someone being a good citizen, having a kind of goofy thing happen, and because of that he realizes these companies aren’t really following the agreement and putting water in their little motes. They’re just using the motes to do all kinds of possibly nefarious crap.
And for me, that’s a kind of third-order effect. You imagine there’s this disarmament treaty, then you imagine a network of motes, and because I live in the Silicon Valley and San Francisco Bay Area, I know immediately of course that tech companies are going to figure out all kinds of ways to add garbage to these technological wonders that are supposed to be protecting us. This is a very gentle story, but you can easily imagine this story being about police surveillance and that kind of thing. And that’s my sweet spot, imagining that third-order effect. Making it a little gentle and goofy, but allowing the reader to imagine a whole world where there are all kinds of misuses of a technology that of course has an intent to be safe and helpful.
Fiction is a safe space where we can explore ideas that we might not entertain if we were reading a nonfiction article. It allows us to let our guard down and play with ideas instead of feeling like someone is shoving those ideas at us. The idea behind telling these stories and using them as a light to guide us toward policy is just that it lets us have a more relaxed and open-minded discussion of where we want to be as a civilization, and who we want to be. So in a sense it’s about using play and fun and entertainment as a way to think about the future.
I agree with Paul Miller’s point that it’s easier to imagine the end of the world than it is to imagine the end of capitalism, or really any systemic horror that’s being visited on us. It’s just easy to imagine blowing it all up and very complicated to imagine the process of remediating the problems that we have. But that’s the road of topia. That’s the road where you have to acknowledge that we’re going to screw up again. We’re not going to reach that moment in Star Trek where everyone turns into a light-filled being and disappears out of existence with a smile on their face. That’s utopia.
I think we are obsessed with dystopia, particularly in the United States, partly because our current nation was founded by a bunch of protestants who were obsessed with hell, so that was sort of their storytelling tool to keep people in line: it’s either dystopia or obey your leaders. So I think it is our job to create this kind of counter-propaganda. And people have been doing that throughout US history. We’ve seen groups come forward with alternate visions of how the future could look. And that’s certainly what gives me hope, especially stories that are practical and pragmatic about that hope rather than doing the equivalent of dystopia with utopia, where it’s like, “And then we solved everything!” I like the stories that go on beyond the solution and say, “And then we pooped our pants again, and we had to clean that up too, so here’s what we’re doing now.”
Read Annalee Newitz’s Far Futures story, “The WaterNet Regulatory Agreement Has Been Violated (Again).”