Jonathan Strahan
Let’s start in the pages of Merriam-Webster, a definitive source of definitions since 1828. It defines science fiction as fiction that deals “principally with the impact of actual or imagined science on society or individuals or having a scientific factor as an essential orienting component.” While there’s a lot of science fiction that doesn’t fit that definition too well, I wouldn’t quibble overly with it. My feeling is that science fiction is fiction that looks at the problems of today through the lens of tomorrow in order to better understand the world we live in now. Not all of it does, of course, but that’s the fun of defining science fiction, which could fill a book by itself.
Anyway, the world we live in is a bit of a mess right now. As I write, we are more than two years into a global pandemic that is only just beginning to show signs of abating and that has stretched science and society to the breaking point. And yet this pandemic, the COVID-19 pandemic, is a temporary problem. Global income equality, human rights issues, social justice issues, data privacy, and more affect us all, whether we’re on the streets of New York or the streets of Lagos—but as serious and persistent as those problems are, I think it’s fair to say they’re not the defining problem of our time. That honor goes to man-made climate change.
We are living through a specific time in our planet’s history. I’m sure J. R. R. Tolkien would have a fancier name for it, but consensus seems to be that it’s to be called the Anthropocene, a period of time our old friends at Merriam Webster define as that “period of time during which human activities have had an environmental impact on the earth regarded as constituting a distinct geological age.” It goes on to add that this began with the Industrial Revolution—which sounds right, but isn’t directly relevant to what we’re addressing here, which focuses on what’s happening now and what might happen next.
The Anthropocene is characterized by warming oceans, melting ice caps, extreme weather events of all sorts (dry ones, wet ones, cold ones, hot ones), habitat loss, species extinction, and more. Fun! Well, really not fun. Rather terrifying, actually. It can be pretty hard to feel good, to see a way forward, when you feel that the world as you know it is actually dying around you.
But as Kim Stanley Robinson, who is interviewed by James Bradley in these pages, has said elsewhere, there’s a moral imperative to be optimistic, to attempt to deal with climate change and the challenges it brings in a way that improves our situation, rather than giving in to despair. In fact, as he suggests in these pages, the COVID-19 pandemic shows that there’s reason for some optimism in our situation. An optimism that people across the world can work together on a global scale in a way that might address the problems we face, can find ways for people to live and even thrive as the planet faces changes it cannot avoid.
And that’s where Tomorrow’s Parties: Life in the Anthropocene comes in. I wanted to give you a glimpse of what life might be like, however improbable, however bleak, as we live with climate change in the future. What, I asked, would education, raising a family, building a home, doing any of the small day-to-day parts of life look like? And I got some incredible responses. Ten stories by ten talented science fiction writers, fantastic art by Sean Bodley, and a terrific interview. These aren’t hopepunk or material for doomscrolling; instead, they’re engaging, wonderful—and admittedly sometimes very dark—stories set around the world in the nearish future, and they all show how we might just live with and even through this current age.
Tomorrow’s Parties is part of the MIT Press’s Twelve Tomorrows series, which has as its mission the exploration of the role and potential impact of developing technologies in the near and not-so-near future. The title is a nod both to the fine Velvet Underground song “All Tomorrow’s Parties” and to the William Gibson novel of the same name. It seemed to fit this project, which in a way is a gathering of stories looking for spaces in which tomorrow’s parties might happen—a little sad, a little elegiac, a little hopeful. I think these stories fulfill that mission and more, and I hope you enjoy them as much as I have.
Perth, Western Australia
March 2022