Future Fictions
by Michael Barron
The guests of honor at a recent event hosted by the arts and literary institution Triple Canopy were four loblolly pines genetically modified to produce extra sap. The event itself served as ceremony for their unveiling and potting. While the audience sat in the main room, in another smaller office Triple Canopy founder Alexander Provan unpacked the saplings first from a large cardboard mailing box, then from a cooler, and finally from the plastic wrapping around their roots, before proceeding to stand them in plastic basins filled with soil scooped from a nearby tub.
This was broadcast and projected live onto a screen in the main room under which the novelist Katie Kitamura read from a novel-in-progress about an investor interested in using genetically modified loblolly pines as an alternative source of fuel. The investor, who has an unspecified autoimmune disorder, visits the geneticist responsible for creating the trees. Kitamura ended the reading with the geneticist offering the investor a sapling.
This wasn’t entirely an exercise in scientific ekphrasis. Rather, the commencement of a long-term collaboration. What Provan unpacked were actual saplings of these modified pines, part of a multifaceted work-in-progress by the artist duo Goldin+Senneby. The project and novel are both working under the title Crying Pine Tree. As stated in Triple Canopy’s programming:
“In the coming months and years, Goldin+Senneby will engage in research, biological experiments, and the staging of events involving the modified pines, which will inform the development of Kitamura’s novel, and vice-versa.”
It’s an intriguing premise and catch. What Kitamura read wasn’t an excerpt, it was all she had written up to that point. In order to proceed, she would have to wait for Goldin+Senneby to further develop and experiment with the pines. Loblollies, one of the fastest growing pines, will show signs of maturity in seven to eight years, speedy for a tree, but equivalent to the time it takes a novelist to write two books. It’s a safe bet to think that this won’t be Kitamura’s next work.
There is no correct way to write fiction; form and content are both subject to whatever induces the writer’s imagination. The potential of how to tell a story can influence the potential of what kind of story to tell and vice-versa. Kitamura’s collaboration with Golden+Senneby brings to mind OULIPO, the French literary collective dedicated to discovering new possibilities of constraint-based writing. Parameters often allow for coherent experimentation.
In her essay “Les Fleurs du terminal,” Kitamura writes how parameters intrigue her as a novelist:
“The idea of setting certain parameters and then allowing the resulting conditions to generate the content. The notion of authorship being located in the identification of a system, rather than in the micromanaging of content.”
To further this point, Kitamura describes her experience of being approached by the Bloomberg corporation to generate creative ideas designed to stimulate the company’s employees. (An idea for a perfume machine that would generate bottles based on the best performing company on a given trade day—“the scent of oil for Exxon, corn syrup for Coca-Cola”—was rejected).
As the world progresses into what was once science fiction, the kinds of realities within which stories are set expands. Fiction has always been a laboratory to study the human condition but with the advancements of technology and science becoming more commonplace, fiction has become a simulation runner to experiment on the plausible consequences of these achievements.
In Elvia Wilk’s technopoetic novel Oval, the narrator, an artist, is employed as a consultant for a major corporation (much like Kitamura) and whose boyfriend is developing a drug that enhances the part of the brain responsible for generous and benevolent behavior. Scientifically, the location of this cerebral activity, the subgenual anterior cingulate cortex, is a recent discovery published in 2016. Wilk’s novel appeared in 2019. I do not know if the finding inspired or informed the ovoid pill at the heart of Wilk’s book, but if that is the case, maybe more novelists should be reading Wired, where the article on the study appeared.
Innovations inspire but so too does the culture that germinates them. Novels are increasingly populated by the employees of megalithic tech corporations and ambitious startups, enough that we are seeing the burgeoning of a new genre—tech fiction—which walks the line between realism and speculative fiction.
New Waves, a forthcoming novel by Kevin Nguyen, features editor at The Verge, is partially set within a TikTok-like startup involving a tech-related caper, online escapism, and content moderation. And in “You Will Never Be Forgotten,” a darkly humorous short story by writer Mary South recently published in The New Yorker, a content moderator who works at a Google-like company is obsessed with stalking the man who raped her, a successful Silicon Valley investor with a “hot” and “cool” girlfriend. In the story, the rapist glibly states that “techies are the latest REM cycle in the American Dream.”
Newish forms of communication—texting, messaging, face-timing, social media interfaces—are now making their way into literary works, and sometimes enlivening them, as does the writer Sally Rooney. But while it is exciting to have ever diversifying methods of storytelling, the stories themselves are often variations of contemporary concerns. It is simply easier to update the tools of humanity than it is to update humanity itself. Which is why alongside fiction that feels techie, even speculatively so, you are likely to find social issue novels whose problems far exceed our tech-driven solutions: climate change, authoritarian presidents, sexual assault.
Whatever the next Great American novel will be, it will be scrutinized for missteps—literary or societal. This is how American Dirt, a novel authored by a white woman that problematically imagines the flight of a Mexican bookkeeper to the American border, went from being hyped as The Grapes of Wrath of our times to being the subject of wide ridicule. New York Times book critic Parul Sehgal pointed out in her jeremiad review that “the motives of the book may be unimpeachable, but novels must be judged on execution, not intention. This peculiar book flounders and fails… it feels conspicuously like the work of an outsider.”
In the same article, however, Seghal concedes a point:
“I’m of the persuasion that fiction necessarily, even rather beautifully, requires imagining an “other” of some kind. As the novelist Hari Kunzru has argued, imagining ourselves into other lives and other subjectives is an act of ethical urgency. The caveat is to do this work of representation responsibly, and well. The journalist Katherine Boo, who wrote about a Mumbai slum in her National Book Award-winning Behind the Beautiful Forevers, and has reported on poverty and disability, often speaks of the “earned fact”—the research necessary before making a claim. ‘Getting it right matters way more than whether you can make people care,’ she has said.”
The year 2030 is already less than ten years away. We’ll be a slightly more scientifically advanced and technology savvy society than we are now (barring the back-burning thought of a nuclear holocaust). What matters to us now may still matter to us then, but there will be new concerns to respond to, new parameters to follow.
Writers should always imagine responsibly when it comes to the lives of others, just as they should otherwise have the right to imagine creatively. Literature should have the right to advance in forms of writing and storytelling which do not exist here, now, in 2020.
Michael Barron is a writer and editor who lives in New York.
