I feel tricked. I feel like the 21st century pulled a fast one. Growing up, I was raised on a pre-millennium realist fiction that focused hard on real people, their real problems, the real gripes and desires of a real modern society. I fell in love with a complex but containable realism—you could see its four walls.
But now that I try to write my own realist fiction, I have to contend with all that the 21st century is throwing at us: AI, social media, pandemics, cartoon leaders, climate disaster, drone warfare, space…great topics, just not ones that feel real. There is too much future, today.
The science fiction writer William Gibson called this “the alien present.” To deal with it, Kazuo Ishiguro gave himself permission “to use what traditionally might have been called genre tropes.” Meanwhile, Geoff Ryman pioneered “Mundane Science Fiction,” using mundanity to ground the complex topic of the future in the same way ‘80s pop used it to ground the complex topic of love (see ABBA, “The Day Before You Came”).
With my debut novel, Sike— about a young man using an AI psychotherapist to navigate his relationships—I tried to deliver a doorstep technology in a realist way. I wanted to be indifferent to the tech, non-polarized and gently mocking, integrating the future into the story alongside other indefinite topics (like modern psychology, rap, love).
Here are some books that do similar: four about technology; one each about medicine, synthetic love, the internet, mathematics; and two set in space.
The Time Machine by H.G. Wells
A time traveller recounts his exploits to a room full of cynics. He has been to the future, past civilization’s demise to the end of the world, and back again. The Time Machine is serious about time travel, and serious about the discovery that, 800,000 years from now, society has divided into a literal under- and over-class, with the underclass living underground and harvesting the child-like overclass for meat.
But while the subject matter is extreme, everything is couched in the contemporary. The novel starts in present day, and Wells places his fictional science next to actual contemporary science, and the fictional thinkers of the novel praise and dismiss the real-world thinkers of the time. Meanwhile, the detail given about the future is deliberately vague, the level of detail in other fictional utopias being declared as “altogether inaccessible to a real traveller.”
Wells is at pains to make it all real. Even on a sentence level, he delivers extreme imagery on the back of realist, even dry observation: “The place, by the bye, was very stuffy and oppressive, and the faint halitus of freshly-shed blood was in the air.”
Exhalation by Ted Chiang
“O MIGHTY CALIPH AND COMMANDER OF THE FAITHFUL, I am humbled to be in the splendor of your presence…” This isn’t a typically realist start for Ted Chiang’s book of science fiction short stories. But part of Chiang’s genius is in taking you to realism in roundabout ways. In this first story, a character listens to fable-like tales of time travel, and then time-travels himself and spots characters from the tales. When an inventor succeeds at alchemy, he quickly dismisses it as economically unviable. The fable is made true, and the magic is made rational and redundant.
Subtle spins like this plunge you into a strange type of realism. The stories start and you think, huh, ridiculous. But Chiang ploughs on, doubling down on the tech and using it to focus elsewhere, until you think, huh, feasible. You don’t think the story is true, but you can’t help believing that it could be, or should be.
What feels most realistic is that, except in a few stories, Chiang’s technology doesn’t lead to doom. When it does, the story feels less like a dystopian take on technology, and more like a parable for a pressing modern concern.
The Dream Hotel by Laila Lalami
Laila Lalami’s latest novel is a surveillance dystopia. The protagonist Sara is detained for a crime she is predicted to commit. Data has been mined from her dreams, and the “Risk Assessment Administration” has determined she might kill her husband. She is put into a retention centre away from her children, and her every move is tracked, the data fed into her risk score. She is meant to stay there twenty-one days, but months later there is no hint of release.
The taste of dystopia could overpower any flavor of realism, but Lalami’s villains use technology that would look normal, even old hat, in the latest Apple product launch. Everything feels plausible, even the dream readers, even the interpretation of all the tracking, done by “agents who cared only about the data, not about the truth.”
The uncanniness goes deeper. The legitimate fears of inmates echo the day-to-day paranoia of real life. Have you ever acted differently upon seeing a CCTV camera? Even when doing nothing wrong, Sara fabricates movements for the Guardian cameras that monitor the centre, lest she “convey unintended meaning.” Dissociation through video happens again—more perniciously, more recognizably—during a call between Sara and her husband. The mundane tension of it is chilling. He is moving around his office, she is at her lowest ebb. “Now isn’t a good time for me to chat,” he says. “I’m really busy…”
Klara and the Sun by Kazuo Ishiguro
We’re in the mind of a robot, called Klara. She’s an “Artificial Friend,” who is in a store and waiting to be bought by a family. Eventually a young girl called Josie chooses her, and Klara’s job will be to give Josie companionship. Klara gains energy from the sun. Josie suffers from a mysterious illness, possibly a result of a genetic enhancement surgery she underwent, and Klara thinks the sun might be able to help her too.
Ishiguro is a master of matter-of-factness: Klara and the Sun delivers its extreme subject matter through Klara’s naïve eyes. So we come to recognize the loneliness of technology, the horror of sequestering a child’s future, gradually, bit by bit, as though the future is creeping on us.
And as we stand in the wings with Klara, watching the human theatre and only ever half understanding it, the sense of technology as humanity’s tool develops. Ishiguro doesn’t condemn the future, even when he condemns the humans living it.
White Noise by Don DeLillo
A paranoid professor of Hitler Studies navigates his family through a toxic spill and goes on the hunt for a pill that cures the fear of death. The toxic spill is massive, uncertain, and escalating; the pill is unverifiable and addictive. The characters are up in arms, and DeLillo laughs at everyone and everything, guiding the reader to do the same.
White Noise is far from farce though, and it’s not fable either. Perhaps it’s the oblique angle of the humour, or the depth of interaction with a modern American commercialism, that lets us see the spill and the pill as realistic tokens from the world around us.
There is something also in DeLillo’s attention to character. The spill and the pill, and ultimately death, are less relevant in the physical than they are as conversation choices between deeply human protagonists.
The Answers by Catherine Lacey
Lacey’s book could be a blueprint for a realist future fiction. In the very first paragraph, she lands a heavy insight about desperation: The protagonist, Mary, has placed her last hopes on a stranger, and is hoping that “whatever that stranger might do to her would be the thing she needed done to her.” This is followed swiftly by the introduction of a mysterious health treatment, PAK. But straightaway we learn that, in an aloof way, Mary still doesn’t know what this is. The effect for the reader is instant: this can’t be science fiction if we don’t know, or care about, the science.
As Mary earns money to pay for PAK, by engaging in a new social experiment that aims to distribute the sating of a celebrity actor’s romantic needs across a series of girlfriends (the “Maternal Girlfriend,” the “Intellectual Girlfriend,” the “Emotional Girlfriend”), she never really knows what’s going on. Mary is chosen as the “Emotional Girlfriend,” and becomes part of the various technology-laden experiments that are perilously forced upon the girlfriends by the actor’s flippant research team. We watch as she tries to understand love. She thinks of “all those billions of hearts beating out there, trying to find love or keep love going.” Love is another strange concept, almost futuristic for Mary. The miracle treatments and synthetic emotion manipulation blend in behind it.
No One Is Talking About This by Patricia Lockwood
The protagonist is an authority on internet culture, who spends all her time online, even as she travels to deliver talks about the internet. She can tease out the subtlest nuance of a meme, dissect a joke for its essential function. She is an expert on the modern virtual world and its reflection and redistribution of the real world. Sitting on stage at her talks, she thinks, “This did not feel like real life, exactly, but nowadays what did?”
Disaster hits her family, and perhaps there is her answer. Her sister’s unborn baby is diagnosed with a rare disease, and suddenly reality pokes in. She instantly asks, “…oh, have I been wasting my time?” She becomes estranged from the internet. She types words, but “All at once they were not true, not as true as she could have made them.”
No One Is Talking About This pins down the aggregated fakeness of the very real internet, and somehow translates social media into prose. There is an uncanniness. You come away from the book as if you’ve been trawling an app yourself—the imagery falls so thick it feels algorithm generated.
The Housekeeper and the Professor by Yoko Ogawa
A mother takes a housekeeping job with a maths professor, with the catch that the professor has amnesia and can only remember new things for 80 minutes. He is genial and eccentric, and when he hears that the housekeeper’s son is home alone, he insists on her bringing him along each day. The professor teaches them all kinds of mathematical things, revealing the beauty of numbers, kindness, memory, and family.
AI, space travel, biomedical breakthroughs—in some ways, the future is pure mathematics, and Ogawa shows you the numerical beauty motivating today’s tech mavens. But you wouldn’t necessarily call Ogawa’s subject matter futuristic. Rather, the book is a lesson in how to deliver a complex topic seamlessly, and how to use it to step around and gaze in on more human topics like family. You aren’t required to care about math or science, technology or the future, to see the beauty.
In Ascension by Martin MacInnes
Martin MacInnes cares about science, and so does his protagonist, Leigh. She is a marine biologist who becomes an astronaut, and her journey to chase down a mysterious ovoid meteor takes her through sea and space to the origin of the earth…perhaps. You’re never absolutely clear what has happened, and the ambiguity of time, and the confusion of stars, rocketships, waves, and algae, deliver the sense of a wild and unknowable universe.
If this is science fiction, the science runs out. We track it for a bit, but it trails away as Leigh travels beyond contemporary human knowledge. Similarly, the story lets go of the mission narrative and stops paying attention to the meteor, which disappears with no explanation. MacInnes lets it all go. He cares about science, but he cares more about questions of human nature, and the futility of that questioning.
Orbital by Samantha Harvey
There is nothing made up or fanciful in Orbital, which details a day in the life of six astronauts on the International Space Station. “They are the latest six of many,” Harvey tells us, “nothing unusual about this anymore…” Rather, they are all aware of “what has suddenly become their own mundaneness.”
Like Harvey, the characters are slightly less enamored by the space travel—which is shown to be problematic for its by-any-means-necessary pursuit of progress—than by what’s back on earth. They stare out of the windows watching day and night flit by, and run experiments that will benefit humans back home. It’s as if Harvey wanted to write about earth, about everywhere on it, mountain and lake, Pretoria and Patagonia, so she sent her characters up into orbit to look down at it all. This is almost the basis upon which the book was marketed: Don’t worry, everyone said, it’s not really about space. It’s just set there.
The effect is powerful and, counterintuitively, Orbital’s approach refreshes the excitement of space rather than relinquishes it. The new realness brings new magic. We learn that the floating, puffing astronauts are not in zero gravity, they’re in free fall. They’re only weightless in “the sense that you’re weightless for a moment on a plunging roller coaster.”
The book is short, but you spend all of it with these falling astronauts in their small shell of a space station. By the end, you feel like you’ve been there. The book lands the future so neatly in this way. You realize this is real, this is us. I’m up there.