You can't make this shit up
Arvind Ethan David asks: with the world in paroxysms of excessive implausibility, how’s fiction meant to keep up?
Working as a writer in Hollywood is to spend your life getting feedback – ‘notes’ – from Studio Executives and Producers. Sometimes these can be helpful. Often, they are not.
Of all the notes, one of the most frequent and most annoying is:
‘But that just wouldn’t happen in real life.’
Or there is it's more sophisticated sounding, but equally unhelpful, equivalent: ‘That strains credulity.’
The reason we hate this note is that fiction, by definition, is an account of things that didn’t happen and an invention of the incredible. As a writer of fiction, receiving this note feels rather like being criticised for doing your job.
A full 200 years ago, Coleridge — that most perceptive of critics — in an essay about Shakespeare, pointed out that ‘suspension of disbelief’ is the deal that storytellers have always made with our audience. Just agree to set all that reality malarky aside, we humbly request, and we’ll show you the truth.
Often, the real ‘note behind the note’ – the useful, intuitive concern behind the constructed thought – is that the story-beat under scrutiny has failed to construct a sufficiently robust framework on which the reader or audience can hang their disbelief.
The real issue, in other words, is not that the tale itself is fantastical (it’s supposed to be), but that its fantasy is poorly designed, lacking internal logic and therefore unconvincing. As Douglas Adams once put it: ‘Without logic, there is no surprise, and no joy.’
The job of a creator of fictions, therefore, is to construct an unreality carefully supported by rigorous structure and logic such that the audience is happy to hang their collective disbelief at the door and open themselves to wonder and revelation.
It’s a weird job, but it’s an honourable one.
Or at least, it used to be. That was always the deal, the accepted division between those of us who trade in fiction and those who work in fact. In recent years, that compact has started to break down, and for a totally unexpected reason: reality isn’t playing ball anymore.
Over the last decade, reality has become problematically implausible. In many areas of existence, things are happening IRL that would usually be challenged as unrealistic in fiction — and as a result, certain genres of fiction are struggling to find new footing.
To use the vernacular: ‘You can’t make this shit up.’
Let’s start with the most obvious: politics. Consider some of the landmark political TV shows of the last half century: Yes Minister & Yes Prime-Minister, The Thick of It, The West Wing, Veep, House of Cards
At the time, these were either vicious satires, brilliant commentaries or insightful aspirational dramas. What none of them were meant to be were ‘realistic’. But they all felt, in a deeper sense, true. They contained insights about our political systems and leadership and their strengths and failings.
These shows still aren’t realistic but try to watch any of them today with the back-drop of today’s politics and they seem trivial and absurd. The brilliant bureaucratic obfuscation and delaying tactics of the urbane Sir Humphrey Appelby — as immortally portrayed by Nigel Hawthorne — seem quaint and ridiculous compared to the whining WhatsApp messages of Boris Johnson’s Cabinet Secretary Simon Case; the idealistic striving of the West Wing’s staffers in Aaron Sorkin’s world, inspired by the Clinton era, and in turn inspiring the Obama era seem utterly unimaginable compared to the folks who are currently inhabiting the actual West Wing.
Even the most satirically venal of those shows – President Selina Kyle’s empty headed yet cruel vanity in Veep; or Frank Underwood’s willingness to commit actual murder in House of Cards (made all the more creepy in hindsight by Kevin Spacey’s legal trials in real life) seems benign and gentle compared with the current President’s psyche and the worst excesses of the inept group of underlings currently rampaging like so many ketamine-infused bulls through our fragile halls of democracy.
(To say nothing of, for example, the actual storming of the US Capitol on January 6 2021; the attempt to impose martial law in South Korea in November 2024, a military coup in Myanmar being live streamed as the back-drop to a fitness class; or the overnight fall and rise of regimes in Afghanistan and Syria when apparently no one was looking. I assure you, all of these things would have been noted as ‘unrealistic’ by studio executives.)
This implausibility is a problem for the world, certainly, but it is also, selfishly, a problem for writers and for the culture.
Nor is the problem limited to politics. Day to day life in so many ways has also become implausible.
With Santa Monica and the Sunset Strip on fire one minute and underwater the next, with snow in Florida, floods in Spain, Mars Missions being planned by the world’s richest man even as he strips funding from the world’s poorest places, airplanes knocking into each other and falling out of the sky at alarming rates as Artificial Intelligence helps our kids cheat at homework and decimates entire professions — all of this is weirder than our weirdest imaginings; and that’s not even mentioning the global pandemic that shut down the world for nearly two years and killed 8 million people.
With reality like this, who needs fiction? What new compact must us creators make with our readers and audience? What can we offer you in such madly implausible times?
The answer comes as it has before. In times of extreme turbulence and threat, in times of rapid, unpredictable change — there has always been one genre that steps up to the plate: Science Fiction.
From its beginnings during the Industrial Revolution when H.G.Wells and Jules Verne conjured up submarines and time-machines, taking us to societies in which the rich literally ate the poor; mirroring contemporary concerns about capitalism and imperialism; through its golden age from World War II through the Cold War, when Asimov, Heinlein, Dick and Guin reacted to the threat of nuclear armageddon and the rise of the information age, sci-fi has always been the place where fiction raises its game to match a world in flux.
My fellow sci-fi fans will need no convincing of this thesis, but if you are of a more skeptical literary bent, I offer the following:
The deepest psychological insights into how the Covid pandemic changed us come not from the brilliant and brave contemporary journalism, but from novels like Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven (2014); the clearest warning of the consequences of the Trump Administration's rolling back protections of the rights of the most vulnerable comes not from Jed Bartlett’s homilies in the The West Wing but from Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale (1985). Read and weep at the realisation that we are only a handful of Clarence Thomas Supreme Court rulings away from living in Gilead.
If you really want to understand the dangers of the tech-bro takeover of the Federal Government, read Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash (1992) and if you want to understand how climate change impacts everything, turn to Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower — written in 1993, but set, chillingly, in a climate ravaged, economically collapsed and societally broken California of 2025.
Parable of the Sower also describes what a world full of climate refugees will look like: a level of mass migration that will make the 20th century’s immigration, at the time seen as so revolutionary and disruptive as to be, in Naipaul’s phrase, a grand ‘shaking up of the world’, seem like so many package holidays.
I remember when I first read Cormac McCarthy’s post apocalyptic novel The Road on its publication in 2006, I felt that its unremitting bleakness and vagueness counted against it. I couldn’t get a purchase or find any hope, in passages like this:
‘He walked out in the gray light and stood and he saw for a brief moment the absolute truth of the world. The cold relentless circling of the intestate earth. Darkness implacable. The blind dogs of the sun in their running. The crushing black vacuum of the universe. And somewhere two hunted animals trembling like ground-foxes in their cover. Borrowed time and borrowed world and borrowed eyes with which to sorrow it.’
Today, The Road reads like a bleakly factual account of what life has been like for so many in Syria, Libya, Gaza, Ukraine and the Sahel. The millions displaced from normal lives and condemned to wander the wilderness, forever in search of hope that is never found. Their lives are closer to that of The Man and The Boy (or for that moment of Max and Furiosa in George Miller’s Mad Max films) than to yours and mine.
As William Gibson once commented ‘the future is already here — it’s just not very evenly distributed’ — when he first said it, in 1992, the assumed lens was that there were areas and parts of the world where positive future developments, such as breakthroughs in science and medicine, positively transformed things for some but not for others.
This is true, but it is also true to realise that the bleakness of the future conjured in Mad Max — a future of brutal warlords, scarce resources and a daily fight for survival — has also already arrived for many. And may yet come for the rest of us.
I’ve provided publication dates for many of the above books, to remind us that they were all written decades before our current moment. That’s sort of the point. These authors weren’t soothsayers, they weren’t in the business of ‘prediction’. What they did was apply rigorous, cohesive logic to conjuring imaginary worlds that at the time were doubtless described as fantastical — but because we have chosen as a planet to go down some dark paths, have now logically arisen as our actual, horrific reality.
It is the job of science fiction writers working today to attempt to apply equally robust and clear sighted logic to conjure the worlds that might come next. To build strong and coherent narrative structures that bridge our current crisis to its future moment. To reveal what better future might await us on the other side of our terrible present, if only we can apply the right levers now. Or as Cormac McCarthy put it in The Road:
‘You have to carry the fire.’
‘I don't know how to.’
‘Yes, you do.’
Is the fire real? The fire?’
Yes it is.’
Where is it? I don't know where it is.’
Yes you do. It's inside you. It always was there. I can see it.’
Speaking as one such writer, carrying the fire right now is a daunting task. But what choice do we have?
Arvind Ethan David is a writer and producer. His graphic novelisation of Raymond Chandler’s Trouble is my Business is available for pre-order as is Douglas Adams: Explaining the World, his audiobook about the legacy of his one time mentor. He has also adapted Lenny Henry's The Boy With Wings into a play, showing at Wimbledon's Polka Theatre later this year.
Listen to Arvind chat to Erica about this piece — and his work finding common ground between authors P.G Wodehouse and Raymond Chandler — on the Boundless podcast. Available on Spotify and Apple Podcasts