The Wages of Nostalgia
Posted by Niall Harrison
17 February 2012
Benjamin Rosenbaum on reading "a story published a while back in one of the print SF mags" whose real year is 1985, not 2511:
When you don't know something, you are innocent of it. Once you do know it, though, all that is possible is feigned innocence, or incoherence.
The story wasn't using its 1985-ness in any self-aware way. That would be interesting. A story that overtly erases everything that's happened to us since the Cold War ended, that refuses the internet, that insists on the jet-pack future of yesteryear and does so honestly -- a story that acknowledges, however implicitly, that doing all this is an act of violence against our actual present -- that I could see loving.
But that isn't the kind of story that I keep running into -- particularly in the print SF magazines. The kind of story I keep seeing, is the one whose covert, unacknowledged hatred of the present shows up simply as indifference to how the world actually works now.
We talk about it as nostalgia, as an affection for tropes, as a science fiction unmoored from caring about the world, interested only in playing logic-puzzle narrative games in comfortable settings borrowed from the extrapolations of yesteryear. But I wonder if it isn't more than that. I wonder what we're really doing, with all this refusing of now.
Don't miss the discussion in the comments.
(I'm pretty sure I know which story he's talking about. But as he says, that's not really the point.)
