Mage, Cultural Irrelevancy, and the New Despair

The other day someone who liked Genius: The Transgression asked me what Mage: The Ascension books were worth reading. White Wolf (what's left of it) is coming out with a 20th anniversary Mage just like they did with Vampire and Werewolf, trying to recapture the magic. Some of the designers seem aware of the problem with Mage: The Ascension: it's a New Age game about mysticism and technology-as-the-enemy, heir to Carlos Castaneda and the LSD-enlightenment movements of the 60s and 70s, and right now the Nerd World could not be further from that. Right now everything is steampunk and ray guns and Neil deGrasse Tyson, and the anti-scientific thinking Mage pushes is about as hip as liberalism after the Iran Hostage Crisis or conservatism after Hurricane Katrina.

I watched as the 90s became the 2000s and geekdom shifted away from the pagan/postmodern thinking that helped produce Mage into the (often equally shallow, but still diametrically opposed) "hurray for science" attitude that continues to persist, despite economic and ecological calamity. Now Mage's themes look more dated than the Captain Planet ecofascism that litters Werewolf: The Apocalypse. Meanwhile, Marvel movies sweep up the box office because 1962 and 2014 are similar in a lot of ways. The same gee-whiz attitude unites the present day and the years when Kirby and co. were creating the Marvel universe; the early 90s might as well be the Cretaceous.

There are ways out of the 20th anniversary game's conundrum, though. I would emphasize the empowerment offered by Mage. Phil Brucato, one of the chief architects of Ascension, has spoken several times about Mage's empowering elements, and I think that message, more than the mysticism, is what still resonates. This is especially the case as more people from traditionally disadvantaged groups get online and realize that they are not as powerless or alone as society told them they were. Tumblr--much-maligned, frequently-ridiculous Tumblr--probably feels like a Mage-style Awakening to the historically disenfranchised people who get on there and realize their concerns and opinions are real and shared by thousands of others. Translating the energy of that discovery into Mage is a better idea than digging around in the detritus of postmodern philosophy and New Age.

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I wonder if the pendulum of geek culture can swing back. It's hard to imagine, in the middle of it! No more steampunk, no more bacon science robots, no more happy Pinterest garden projects--at least, not as anything but a cultural relic. But culture shifts fast.

The rise of New Age coincides with the failure of the Space Age. I'm not sure if that's a coincidence or a cause, but the timing is conspicuous, and we have another failure on the horizon: the second dotcom bust. No one can look at the death spiral of Yahoo!, the frenzied world of pointless app creation, the corrosion of Google, and see anything but disaster on the horizon. When the whole farce comes crashing down--harder than the first dotcom bust, maybe harder than any collapse we've seen since the gutting of American manufacturing or the slow death of American unions--we will see more than enough despair to fuel a furious reaction against the science-fetishism that characterized the early 60s and that characterizes our current age. Maybe, the collapse of Silicon Valley will be enough to end this age of do-it-yourself tinkering and can-do spirit. Maybe in a few years, we can go up on a steep hill in Las Vegas again and look west, and see another high-water mark, where the wave broke and rolled back once more.

What Matters

I've been thinking about what matters to futurists. Now it's information, a fact so obvious that it's almost baffling to look at Heinlein and Clarke and see their tremendous excitement over, of all things, transport. Because that's what a lot of 20th century science fiction was about: moving faster, moving better. And that was the trajectory of the 20th century: from the train to the car to the airplane to the jet to the space-rocket. And we just kept getting faster, and our enthusiasm for speed stayed strong, until some time well after the Apollo missions.

What's interesting is that though now so many science fiction writers are focused on information, transport wasn't the first thing to fascinate science fiction. Go back to the dawn of SF and you see an even earlier fascination with production, a concern even more distant from our own time. The early 20th century Socialist SF writers were always going on about production and efficiency and labor and all that other stuff that's as boring to us now as--no doubt--our present-day SF ramblings about gigahertz and petaflops will be to readers from the next century. If there had been more SF in the 18th and early 19th centuries, no doubt they would have massively obsessed over these new speculative political developments as much as we massively obsess over spimes and cloud computing.

This opens up a number of questions for any SF writer. The obvious one is, of course, what's going to engross the next century's SF writers? Politics, production, transport, information...then...what? Some new personal-scale sociological development? The creation and proliferation of new biological or digital organisms? We probably don't even have a word for it yet. But also--and here's one of greater interest to me--with the rise of various retro-future SF tales, from steampunk to neo-post-atomic-holocaust, it behooves us to analyze what drove the speculative fevers of previous eras, to see how we can use those concerns in our own fiction, rather than overwriting what interested a previous era and replacing it with our own fascinations. Steampunk's revolutionary original conceit--industrial-age people interested in information-age concerns--has grown a bit worn since The Difference Engine. I think a re-evaluation of our retro-speculation is in order, which would allow us to mix and match eras and obsessions. I love steampunk, but I'm getting a bit tired of seeing 19th century + information. I want to see new combinations of times and interests, new ways to bring later interests to earlier times, and speculation about how later eras, even our own, could return to the obsessions of previous centuries.