Upcoming Interview With Karl Schroeder on Wednesday, January 23
I first heard Karl Schroeder talk at The Academic Conference on Canadian Science Fiction and Fantasy in 2009 and have looked forward to the opportunity to talk to him. I am pleased that I will be able to share that conversation with all of you readers on Wednesday, January 23, when Karl Schroeder talks about his work consulting about technological and social futures, the role of SF in promoting non-violence, the flexibility of reality, collaborative writing, and the potential of SF to help readers to question the world around them and develop better methods for decision-making. This is definitely an interview that opens up new worlds of experience for readers.
Here are some teasers from our upcoming interview:
Karl Schroeder: “Nowadays, my Canadian identity—like my Mennonite background—probably shines through most in my attitudes toward violence as a valid political tool. I.e., it isn’t one. I do write ripping pirate yarns, such as the Virga books, but those are cartoonish in their depictions of war. When I’m serious—as in books such as Lady of Mazes or the forthcoming Lockstep—I am careful to present nonviolent paths to resolving conflict as the superior option.”
Karl Schroeder: “We spend much of our lives programming ourselves to react automatically rather than to think. It’s faster, costs less energy. Part of that process involves the ossification of our basic categories: man/woman, human/nonhuman. SF deliberately blurs these categories in order to almost literally wake us up. It’s strangemaking, which is a very valuable capacity, especially in the present situation when the world needs innovative new solutions to some pretty dire problems.”
Karl Schroeder: “It’s not that SF presents, or even can present, the solutions to big issues like global warming or global poverty; it’s that it helps educate us in the kind of thinking that can lead to them.”
Karl Schroeder: “I could simultaneously write a hard SF novel and a fantasy epic, without the stories interfering in any way with one another.”
Karl Schroeder: “Realism, in literature, painting, and science, is just the rule of the lowest common denominator. It’s not actually a successful stance in science, for instance; strictly realist approaches to quantum mechanics fall into paradox pretty quickly. Realism achieves some stability in understanding the world by simply discarding 99% of all the available data (whether that be measurements, opinions, or political stances).”
Karl Schroeder: “What we lack today is a mythic dimension of the real. There’s plenty of sense-of-wonder available from fantasy, but why should we have to escape reality in order to experience the mythic? Much of my work consists of examples of things that are perfectly possible, but as magical as anything you can find in fantasy.”
Karl Schroeder: “Everyone in the world today is caught between what they believe to be true, and what they know to be real. We’ve been taught that the real is not the realm of magic or of the imaginative. In fact, most of us are utterly incapable of reconciling what we believe to be true and what we know to be real.”
Karl Schroeder: “I wrote the Virga books to illustrate just how much novelty and wonder were still possible within science fiction with just what we knew a hundred years ago. The so-called ‘ordinary’ is an inexhaustible wellspring of wonder. To know that is to be comfortable living in this world.”
Karl Schroeder: “Nuclear fusion, augmented reality, nanotech… yeah, they’re all great. But we don’t need them. There’s only one development that we need at this point in our history: better methods and systems for decision-making, both individual and collective.”
Check out Speculating Canada on Wednesday, January 23 for Karl Schroeder’s philosophical insights as well as his thoughts and speculations about the writing process. This is definitely an interview that will challenge the status quo and push the boundaries of the way we define reality.
