Jim Baen's Universe

Notes From the Buffer Zone

Columns

Stalled Conversations, Global Visions, and the Future

Written by Kristine Kathryn Rusch

In June, I will complete my 50^th year on this Earth. If my luck and genetic heritage hold out, I will have another 40 to 50 good years ahead of me, years of writing, years of reading, years of experiences. If science has its way, I might squeeze an extra five to ten years out of that.

I’ve always looked forward to old age. Seriously. The best people I’ve known were in their eighties and nineties—full of wisdom, yes, but with that impish youthful soul still intact. I’ve actually started monitoring my health these last five years with an eye toward living a long time—that means more exercise, a better diet (dammit), and regular checkups.

As a result, I don’t feel my age. I am in better physical condition than I was at 25 (although I’m not half as thin) and I’m as or more enthusiastic about life. I do know that life has its ups and downs, and if you wait long enough, everything will change. I know this from experience now, not because someone told me this would happen.

And yet, a trickle of discontent slips in. The last few years, the older layer of my friends, family and (dare I say it?) enemies have died off. The remaining ones are not the tastemakers any longer. Most of the people I’ve pushed against are gone. If I’m going to prove something to them, it no longer matters; their side of the argument is over, static, and exists only in my memory.

And, I realize, there are now a group of people out there who are pushing against me.

A couple things brought this home just recently.

First, the release of the remastered Beatles. The Beatles are all 20 years older than I am. I can’t remember a moment without Beatles music. In fact, one of my earliest memories is of arguing with my sister over who was the best looking Beatle. I, in my five-year-old wisdom, believed it to be Paul. She, all of twenty-one, knew it was George. (I don’t know where she stands now; I, on the other hand, still cling to Paul. When I’m right, I’m right.)

Throughout my childhood and young adulthood, the Beatles were the pinnacle of innovation and of rock and roll. Even after they broke up, they were still the touchstone, right down to the arguments between John Lennon and Paul McCartney about “silly love songs.” I know where I was when John died. I thought the world had ended.

Now, the remastered Beatles has come out, two different versions, along with the Rock Star game, and the Beatles, whose music hasn’t been played on the radio in a generation, are influencing music again. Cool, nifty, very science fiction.

And yet . . .

On September 9, the day of the remasters were released, VH1 ran the Beatles Anthology, a movie about the life and times of the Beatles. I recorded the whole thing, and watch it on rainy days, when I’m stuck on my treadmill. And here’s my realization:

The films of the Quarrymen (the band’s first name), the images (the scenery, the people, the cars), the controversies, the worries, the fears—everything seems dated. Not just dated, but old.

Old in the way that the World War II documentaries on The History Channel look old. Old in a time-gone-by sort of way. Not even nostalgic old, as in “I remember that,” but more in a “Was that real? Did that really happen?” kind of old.

Even though I know it did. Even though I do remember a lot of it. Even though it once seemed fresh and new and oh-so-important at the time.

So as I’m dealing with the remastered Beatles, I find a cardboard box in storage. This box contains six years of my life, from age 19 to age 25. In it, I find photos of my first wedding, pictures of old friends (looking young), letters from my family, my friends, and folks I can barely remember (Oh, who am I kidding? Folks I can’t remember). Also in that box, manuscripts and correspondence from my early fiction career and my nonfiction career. Manuscripts I labored over, manuscripts that look unprofessional today because of—get this—the typeface.

I had spent a gazillionbillion dollars on my printer so that it would mimic typewriter font, and it did, down to the uneven letters and the inky vowels. If an editor got a manuscript these days that looked that choppy, the editor would be convinced she was dealing with either a crank, an old-timer, or a some kind of nostalgia buff. Yet those manuscripts—in their appearance—were state-of-the-art.

As I went through the box, I read and cried and thought and shared. Then I packed the box away. After I finished with my little jaunt through the past, I posted a few of my discoveries on Twitter and Facebook, e-mailed a friend or two I’d neglected recently, and wondered if I should do something special with that box.

Which got me thinking about the internet and e-mails and social networking. Because to this day, I keep hardcopy letters. I delete my e-mails.

People tell me that once something is on the internet, it’s there forever, but it’s not there in quite the same way that box has been in my house, buried under other boxes, waiting for me to find it. Unless I do a vanity search, I won’t find my tweets again. I certainly won’t see the old e-mails again. The photos will remain on some file somewhere, but I’ll have to look for those as well.

And at some point, all of this will look old. Not recently in the past old. But World War II old. Beatles old. Time-gone-by old.

It’s my job as a science fiction writer to imagine the future. I should have a guess about what the world will be like when I’m in my nineties—and I do. On a global level, I have quite a few ideas.

But on a personal level, I don’t have a clue. Although I’m starting to gain one. I already feel the earth shaking beneath my feet as the old arguments fall away when the old arguers die. I feel the occasional irritation at yet one more piece of new technology to learn or a new movement to follow. New politicians seem to spring up like weeds. So do new musicians. Trends that seem current to me are actually ten years old.

And I don’t care about some things. I now realize the true meaning of the word “fad.” When you’re young, the fads that rise around you seem so very important. As you get older, you just don’t care. And then when you get much older, you realize that you’ve missed half a dozen fads—things you would have thought life-shattering, earth-shaking, revolutionary at the age of sixteen.

It helps with the global perspective. It really does. I felt like an ocean of calm during the economic meltdown last fall because I not only foresaw much of it (thank you, University of Wisconsin, for that history degree), but I also knew that we as a nation have survived much, much worse. Historical patterns are easy for me to see.

Personal patterns, not so much.

The very old people I have known were sanguine about death. They knew it was coming, they talked about it with a calmness that still seems odd to me. But I’m slowly catching a clue. They had seen it, some all their lives, some from their middle years forward. They knew that the older layer goes away, the old arguments end, and at some point, the last person standing is the only person who cares about issues long forgotten.

Honestly, the hardest thing for me as I enter the second half of my life isn’t some new piece of technology (because, as I’ve said before, I love gadgets and gadgetry and change). Nor is it the fact that Beatles now make me think of Churchill. (Seriously. Maybe I watch too many documentaries).

The hardest thing for me is the way that conversations stop in mid-sentence. Generations push against each other, struggle for ascendance, and fight with each other. With Obama’s presidency, my generation takes its place on the world stage. People who are my age run countries, sit on the Supreme Court, head major corporations. But we won’t do that for long—twenty years or so—before another generation takes our place.

That generation pushes against us, and some of us will push back. But most of us will watch with understanding and amusement, offering what little wisdom we have. Secretly, though, we’ll be wishing we could ask the generations we pushed against, generations long gone, what they think of the current situation.

Sometimes we know. But mostly we just want to continue the conversation and we can’t. Because the people who know the topic, the people who truly understand it, are all gone.

And that’s tough to write about. Maybe not in mainstream fiction, certainly not in mystery fiction (hell, at times I think that’s what mystery fiction is all about), but definitely in science fiction, the literature of the future. When we write it, we forget about the push of generations, the way that time actually passes (slowly when you’re young, rapidly when you’re older). We as writers also seem to think the conversation remains static, that people in the future will listen to our music or understand our fads.

The individual level. That’s where we as sf writers miss. So that our stories will sometimes feel dated even though they’re about a future that hasn’t yet arrived.

I don’t know how to fix this. If I did, I would be giving all kinds of advice here, quoting all kinds of experts.

I guess we sf writers just keep plugging away. Some of us will have a handle on the future conversations. Some of us won’t.

At least we’re all looking forward, believing that a future exists. Hell, the older we get, the more we know a future exists. Because we’re living our future. One day at a time.

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