More on Sociology and Science Fiction

The key problem here is one of cultural lag. Things are changing in a non-linear fashion, and the literary memes can’t seem to keep up. That is why the stories recounted by Homer and Shakespeare keep getting remade with characters in space suit costumes. Here are some epochal pending changes that leave literature in the dust of failed imagination:

1. Superorganism emergence. The notion of individual heroism is so critical to the literary tradition that there is no mechanism for artistically engaging ego-less hive mind actions or dispersed identity.

2. Multiplicity of existence. Related to the extinction of heroism is the dissolution or multiplexing of unified personal identity. At any given time, a member of a sufficiently advanced society could be in one or more of N existential states, including participation in a superorganism. What is this person’s “story?”

3. Spatial implosion. Instead of expanding outwards, an excellent argument can be made for advanced civilizations imploding inwards, consuming progressively less space and energy while steadily expanding complexity and capability. That is why there are no SETI signals: a sufficiently advance civilization travels (at infinite speed) in (spatially arbitrary) logical space. This is a challenge for the literary journey meme, to put it mildly.

Alas, literature, that fountain of artistic innovation and imagination, no longer seems able to keep up with the increasingly strange ways of the world.

I would hope that people are reading the original Murakami, because I don’t think McAuley is actually grokking what Murakami is actually saying. I believe this because Murakami is saying the exact same thing, and not what McAuley *thinks* he said–anyways, Murakami more or less implicitly stipulates this and talks about what forces a writer in a genre (aaaaaaaaaaaannnnnyyyyy genre, peeps!!) to change the tools, props and assumptions in plying the trade. It is, in other words, stipulated that we live in a fictional construct of some collective thought. What *changes* the things that are so emphemeral and subject to willpower is a collective cultural conflageration of superimposed, collective, and overwhelming unreality, using the latest newly built geopolitical/cultural mechanisms of spreading, coercing, and adopting ideas. A culture marks time from one event of undesired, unwanted unreality to the next.

In other words, Murakami is a zillion steps ahead of McAuley and answered his fucking question. With a model, too!

n.b. McAuley is on my shit list as far as writers go, so take my vituperative attitude with some salt.

Offhand, the only sf superorganism of interest that I can recall is the Martian Cloud-Mind in Olaf Stapledon’s Last and First Men.
Of course, my history students texting in class come close to life imitating art.

worth, not work

aaarrrrgh, I blame the texting kids

@2 I’m not so sure that this super-organism experience is really a new thing under the sun, or that it’s happening for the reasons people think it’s happening.

How then should we live? becomes a question of real concern, because we have, in fact, the power to change ourselves, and are steadily accruing more of it.

This, I think, is the question at the heart of science fiction at its best. (This meshes with Jo Walton’s apt observation that one of the key aesthetic experiences of reading SF is having a new world unfold in one’s mind.) Now it is clear that the vast majority of it is rehashing familiar themes and properties, and transparently projecting the social situation of its authors.

This is interesting to me both as a pulp fantasy fan, and as a historian of pre-modern Asia because (and I think I’m not alone in this) this is also the appeal of a lot of good historiography, especially historiography of Asia (and also because of The Singularity–but different aspects of it). For a lot of the Third World, especially in Asia, it’s almost impossible to think about the future without keeping one eye on the past. Sometimes historians look to the past, especially the (in certain ways) truncated histories of Asian civilizations, for things we would like to see in the future. (A good example of this is In An Antique Land, and I think a lot of Ottoman historians, among others, do this on some level.)

Certainly the nature of “the individual” is one thing that has changed across time and geography, and the possibility of heroic individuals making a difference, or at least the faith in this possibility, was not always there. So, is the disappearance of the individual really a matter of technology, or is it more a matter of history? Could it be caused by loss of the faith that our communities–nation state or world–will deploy technology for the reasons and in the ways that we previously believed they would? Maybe super organism experience is really just the decline of The West, an undoing of a major part of the Singularity–a part of the Singularity that we take for granted, but that we knew would come undone sooner or later? Maybe the world doesn’t seem bigger because it IS bigger, or more interconnected, it seems bigger because the End of History didn’t happen according to our expectations, and we’re put in more meaningful (co-equal) relationships with people who don’t look, sound, or think like we expect them to. And maybe super-organism experience is in some ways closer to how people experienced the world before they could read printed novels in their living room?

The animated TV series, Cowboy Bebop, takes place in a somewhat post-apocalyptic setting in which earth is frequently bombarded with meteor showers making it inhospitable to civilization, and on a deeper, thematic level, the show is about the displacement of Western civilization as a force that structures and dictates meaning–the actual, approaching post-Western world. So you could say that it equates the decline of the West with apocalypse. There are a lot of spaceship dogfights and heroic action in a kind of wild west-like setting, so it is very much “re-hashing familiar themes and properties, and transparently reflecting the social situation of its authors.” It’s good fiction rather than good science fiction, strictly speaking, keenly aware of its own location in history. But it’s also forward-looking.

So, maybe understanding our own location in history is something we need to do before we can write forward-looking scifi, or before we can be inspired to write forward-looking scifi?

increasingly strange ways of the world

Seems to me that Cosma’s earlier post was an excellent corrective to this sort of thing. It’s just not the case that we live in a period of accelerating change, technological or otherwise. By any measure, social and material life have changed less in the past 50 years than in any of the three or four preceding 50-year periods.

It’s also not the case that sf has a better handle on the (non-increasing, but certainly real) strangeness of the world than other forms of literature. On the contrary, the range of human situations and types in most genre fiction is much narrower than in other forms of fiction. You’ll find far more genuinely new worlds in the realistic stories of Wells Tower (Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned) or Miranda July (No One Belongs Here More Than You) than in almost anything on the sf shelf.

I enjoy science fiction as much as anyone, but I’ve never understood why so many fans feel the need to elevate it by dismissing everything else. Suggests some insecurity, or a lack of imagination.

Straightwood:

The problem with approach #1 is that it would have a hard marketability problem in our culture: individuals buy books, not the existent superorganisms, and “book buyers” have not coalesced into a superorganism of their own. The current population of bookbuyers apparently want individuals to associate with. The idea that a corporation or collective can be heroic is somewhat alien to the human ideal.

Greg Egan attempted to tackle #2, and ultimately deferred to the Space Opera meme.

Man, I’m feeling like an old grouch, but *Elf M Sternberg*, but I’d just have slapped Straightwood with Hannu Rajaniemi’s book.

Then again, that book has absolutely no exposition fairies in it. I think it’s like Blindsight in that it’s completely opaque to a non-genre, non-scientifically literate reader.

Which is kind of the point. All of those complaints/points of *Straightwood* is that people do write books like that–for a much smaller audience. I mean, how many people read and understood Schild’s Ladder to any real extent?

The silliness of the whole “everything’s changed” idea really comes out in McAuley’s piece, where one of his history-is-accelerating events is …. September 11. I’m really, really tired of the stupid narcissism of Americans who can’t imagine that bad things have ever happened to anyone else. That 9/11 continues to hold such a central place in people’s imagination is testimony to the lack of epochal events in recent years. Why people ant to imagine the current period of stability as one of incessant change is — as Cosma rightly framed it — an interesting sociological question.

Gah why don’t sf authors know anything about modernism? SF is after all one of the central literatures of modernism.

@5 I hardly think that the concept of a “post-scarcity society” was invented by Iain M Banks. Go read some of the Midas World stories written back in the 50’s by Fred Pohl for starters.

SF authors have been thinking and writing about this stuff for a long time. Just because the SF in the spinner rack at the airport is mostly *ZAP* *ZAP* power fantasies (not that there’s anything wrong with that) doesn’t mean that there’s not a lot of interesting and thoughtful work going on out on the margins.

chuchundra, sorry to rile you – I wasn’t trying to make a claim about who invented it in sf, just quoting someone I know as reference to it. My point is that it should have been thought of in fantasy but wasn’t. And I don’t think my sf reading is “spinner rack at the airport” stuff, don’t be so condescending.

Henry in reference to McAuley’s sci fi book “Cowboy Angels” :
“An America which discovers how to access parallel worlds through an accident, and uses the opportunity to extend an American empire through various versions of itself …”

Sure this isn’t horror genre?

John Holbo: “I think, for starters, The German Ideology, by the 19th Century sf great Karl Marx, presents us with a vision of a post-scarcity society.”

David Brin has actually said several times that he believes Marx was a sf author — e.g. http://www.depauw.edu/sfs/backissues/71/asimovpanel71.htm (near the end of the discussion, although his analysis of the adoption of Marxism is …wanting, let’s say, in that particular example).

A lot of science fiction is really about the time it was written. I like reading Asimov because he gives such a good picture of what the 1950s was all about. His future is like working at Honeywell in 1958.

The best prediction of the future I can think of was Orson Scott Card predicting blogs in Ender’s Game back in the 1980s.

Zamfir, I see. I first thought of a flint hammer like a stone hammer or a wooden mallet. More like a meat hammer, which tenderizes meat. I may be overthinking this.

But those who would use the “crude flint hammers of pulp” will produce only flaky literature!

Sorry. Where I am it’s already Friday night, and I’m in a funny mood.

MC Hammer died a few months ago, BTW:

pleasant little pulpish daydreams in which starships still effortlessly span a galaxy where a guy can turn a profit, or where technology is as controllable as clockwork and the actions of individuals can still make a mark on history.

This is actually a not-too-far-off description of recent SF books like “Gardens of the Sun” and “The Quiet War”, written by one P. McAuley.
Both very good by the way.

Science fiction for the most part found it a non-event: if you routinely imagine the destruction of Earth, one lousy terrorist incident is no big deal.

Here’s a thought. Isaac Asimov said that “history is the trade secret of science fiction”. There’s a degree to which geography is now the other trade secret of SF. William Gibson, of course – “the future’s already here, just unevenly distributed” – and the increasing vogue for SF and SF-influenced authors like David Mitchell to look at other periods and/or other cultures for ideas and settings. If you want to set your novel in a weird high-tech omniconnected near-future culture, you can make one up, or you can just set it in Tokyo. If you want to set it in a decaying post-industrial dystopia full of dangerous military technology, you can make one up, or you can just set it in Russia. If you want to set it in a truly alien culture where almost none of your readers’ assumptions about how society and relationships work hold true, you can make one up, or you can set it in seventeenth-century Nagasaki. And you’ll have exactly the same Walton moment whichever option you pick. Ian McDonald and Paul McAuley and William Gibson and Jack Womack and others have all picked up on this.

And the relevance of 9/11 here is that, if you come from, or spend your time thinking about, a society in which mass-casualty terrorism is common, then 9/11 was nothing really new. The dividing line here isn’t SF/mundane. It’s broad versus narrow minds – broad, in the sense of ‘broadened by travel’.

Martin Wisse: I dunno, I look at the post-9/11 madness of American writers from James Lileks to Dan Simmons, and the accelerated madness of ones who were already morally defective like John Ringo, and it’s hard for me to agree with Science fiction for the most part found it a non-event: if you routinely imagine the destruction of Earth, one lousy terrorist incident is no big deal.

(No, I’m not trying to claim that Lileks is an sf writer, just roping him in as a non-core mimetic author to illustrate the point.)

I do very strongly agree about the turning in, though. For every writer like Tobias Buckell who’s trying to do something that bridges the real world and ones he dreams up, there are several who’ve just plain given up bridge-making altogether.

And another one, now I think about it: William Gibson, with “Pattern Recognition” and “Spook Country”.

Ajay, using far away places in place of a fantasized future carries the risk of a kind of orientalism. You don’t try to describe really existing people and places as they are, but as you like them be as background for your story. Usually based on a rather stereotypical idea of the place. Even if the writer is fully aware of the difference, readers who never visited the place in question just get a rehash of their stereotypes.

Both Russia and Japan clearly suffer from this treatment. In quasi-SF, most places in Russia are former military operations in the snow with mafia connections, and Japan consists of techno-corporations run by cunning old men in skyscrapers who talk quiet wisdoms based on ancient tradition.

In general, places the readers of the book actually visit don’t get this treatment to such extent. Gibson might be an exception here, who turns every place into an orient.

I much prefer that people create their own fantasy worlds resembling ours, than that they project them on the stereotypes of real places.

Yes, I think Tristram has a paper on this coming out soon.

@45 using far away places in place of a fantasized future carries the risk of a kind of orientalism. You don’t try to describe really existing people and places as they are, but as you like them be as background for your story.

If you do that you’re probably already way off the rails. On the other hand, it seems like any effort to explore the more remote states of the human condition would be hamstrung without a good sense of how human life varies across time and geography on a span of decades or centuries, and merely earthly distances. The idea isn’t to faithfully reproduce 17th century Nagasaki as your setting, but to mine ethnographic data for insights into how people may behave in radically different social circumstances, what kinds of social structures and cultural institutions already exist(ed). Maybe a future world without borders (say, a future Dubai, or New York) would have things in common with Medieval Cairo?

Pattern Recognition’s depiction of Russia isn’t really orientalism, though.

Well, Stephenson’s first novel is kind of orientalist about physics professors, sororities, and gamers.

“Anna Karenina” is noticeably orientalist about Russians.

Is this really the case? What would a person from 1800 find so different in 1850?

Steam power, steam ships, rail travel, the electric telegraph (so: moving matter at fifty miles an hour rather than the speed of a horse, moving large amounts of information instantly across hundreds of miles rather than by horse, ship or semaphore), street lighting, gas lamps, macadamised roads, a professional police force, a recent revolution in almost every European nation, photography, surgical anaesthesia, mass production, the vast expansion of London and other cities…

ajay:
Some very interesting examples. However number of items on your list began in the 18th century not the 19th so we can assume that a person from 1800 may already have been familiar with some of them. For example:
– The mass production of goods began in the 18th century. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Industrial_Revolution)
– The first practical steam-powered ‘engine’ was developed in 1698 by Thomas Savery. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steam_engine)
– The 18th century had its share of revolutions and unrest. The French Revolution for example.
– Examples of professional European police forces predate 1800. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Police#European_developmen)
– The transition from rural to urban was well under way by 1800.

Still I take your point.

Ajay, I don’t mean orientalism to be taken too literally. More as an analogy, for the way how fictional descriptions of a real, but faraway place can be become so standardized that references to the place have more to do with its earlier fictional appearances than with reality. The Russia in Pattern Recognition is basically that from GoldenEye.

When McAuley writes , “Asking how novelists should respond to this [the “two acts of destruction”]- as they must, or else fall silent or become irrelevant”, I think, why must any novelist, or artist, respond to events that others deem important? The best sci-fi writers create something de novo, which may or may not be pertain to current events. Of Tolstoy’s absurd criticism of Shakespeare, Orwell wrote, “there is no kind of evidence or argument by which one can show that Shakespeare, or any other writer, is ‘good’ … Ultimately there is no test of literary merit except survival, which is itself an index to majority opinion. Artistic theories such as Tolstoy’s are quite worthless, because they not only start out with arbitrary assumptions, but depend on vague terms (‘sincere’, ‘important’ and so forth) which can be interpreted in any way one chooses.”

Love that jaunty “a galaxy where a guy can turn a profit.” As someone who writes about an alternate (but not sci-fi) world of economic disaster, I am mystified, as the post says, that our current situation is being generally ignored.

Alex 45,47:

‘Another country is like the past: they do things differently there. ‘ (as Abi Sutherland said recently in Another Place)

Ajay, Zamfir: it strikes me that one person who ought to be getting discussed in this context is Ian McDonald (for River of Gods, Cyberabad, Brasyl and now The Dervish House

Unfortunately, the only one of these whose setting I’d really feel confident about discussing in this context is The Dervish House, which I haven’t got round to reading yet. Any thoughts from either of you about any of the others?

It often said that we are living in a time of increasing individualism. So this talk about the emergence of superorganisms would go against the modern zeitgeist. It could even seam too old-fashioned, a throwback to earlier times when more people did view themselves as a part of a larger collective, whether it was the nation, or the proletariat. Wasn’t communist parties in many ways intended to be superorganisms, with the Comintern as the central node?

There are crucial distinctions of tempo and optionality that distinguish between future super-organisms and past assemblages of massed humanity. We have no proper vocabulary for describing these new phenomena, but one can get a hint of the superorganism participation sensation by joining a fast-moving live blog discussion thread on a developing news event. As each participant adds to the knowledge store and deflects the discussion stream in new directions, it is clear that one is participating in the thought process of a collective mind, and this can be exhilarating. Of course, depending on the capabilities of the participants, YMMV.

A high speed of mental interaction among digitally linked members is a crucial enabler of superorganisms that functions differently from traditional organizations of individuals. This speed will only increase for the foreseeable future, so it is likely that an existential threshold will be crossed. Another distinctive feature of emerging superorganisms will be the optionality of participation. A single member may participate in one or more superorganism entities at will, and possibly simultaneously.

modern “superorganisms” … don’t explicitly require that its nodes give up individuality

For my money, the most plausible and desirable of superorganisms is the Overmind in Arthur C. Clarke’s Childhood’s End. I’ve had arguments about whether it requires the humans whom it assimilates at the end of that novel to give up their individuality or (as I maintain) bestows on those humans the full development of their individuality. After all, it was like us once: a race of poor forked creatures, scrabbling on a tiny planet lost in a nondescript galaxy. And it became pure mind, just as we’re destined to. So why shouldn’t it give us a leg up?

The stylized world-building kinda was the point in the Cherie Priest sense. People complaining about world building of all things, in a speculative fiction format have quite little basis to stand on. There are other reasons I loathe Paul McAuley, but poorly imagined attempts at ultra-hard sci-fi, where the techsplanations aren’t organically involved in the storytelling, just rubs me raw. I’ll take Peter Watts over Alistair Reynolds any day of the week. Greg Egan over Neal Asher. Karl Schroeder over Peter F Hamilton. I mean, The Culture Universe has all of the credibility of the Trek Universe. Octavia Butler spends far less time talking about tech and journeys and ai than Orson Scott Card does, but Blood Child beats the snot out of Ender’s Game.

Now, if you want to talk world building, read Rosemary Kirstein. The basic political economy just doesn’t realistically work, but letting it go builds a world far vaster and detailed than any galaxy spanning venture by John Ringo.

People write the good stuff. They always have. Except the good stuff is usually demanding. There is far more real meat in Wind Up Girl, assisted by the world-building than there is in River of God. Politically, even in tech…and from my perspective, it’s a far better portrayal of Thais in a super-modern (not) context than the Hindu motif in River of God. You just have to read between the words.

People not wanting to read between the words leads to a link to a thoughtless blog-post instead of actually linking to the original post where an effin’ master of the craft writes quite elegantly about how the times demand the arts.

But noooooo, the arts lead the times, right?

Ah, no, I didn’t mean the star would be a mind, sorry. I meant that a star is certain balance of gravity and pressure from the fusion process. Too small, and it won’t shine, too large and it will blow apart. Beign a star is a possible property of a limited range of masses. But it required a lot of understanding of stars to know this, and without it you could speculate about much larger or much smaller stars than actually can exist.

In the same vein, overminds might simply not be possible, or even meaningful, in the sense that being a “mind” might only be something stable for things vaguely comparable to ours, and larger, more complicated things can never resemble a mind.

Of ocurse, larger objects can be galaxies, or black holes, or whatever, but they can’t be stars.

It is a puzzle to me that people willing to grasp the sheer vastness of even the known universe, in dimensional terms, have such a cramped scope of imagination for the cognitive and spiritual possibilities of living things more complex than humans. How hard is it to consider the delta between the brain of a salamander and Homo Sapiens, then lay out a commensurate span of difference between us and a more advanced being?

What does tragedy mean to an immortal species whose members can store their identities and mind states and resurrect themselves, even if physically destroyed?

Symbolism…

Look.it.up.

That was never supposed to be anything but something that was cool to imagine and something that was an indictment. Of us. Because we fucking do exactly that, and we’re never going to change, and we’ll *still* be doing exactly engineering XXX and processing yyy and out comes the wooden button. Because our society is structured and incentivized to set a heirarchy of meaning and means and accounted by resources/finance. The actual windup is an alpha/omega snake-eating-the-tail of what human interactions with technology and its consequences. You know, the whole fighting your constructed essence, and dealing with being intensely conscious of each use of energy intensive technology, including what should be bodily second nature? People cycling, converting rice into electric energy is meant to be an allegory, not some strict fact. It.is.a.work.of.fiction. Verisimilitude got nuttin’ to do with nuttin’ when it comes to imagination. I’ve certainly have had enough physics education (about the rough ability to do a Heisenberg for a single atom) that I intimately know how interstellar space travel isn’t possible. Enough to know that, oh, Karl Schroeder’s Ventus‘s essential plot-point is thoroughly impossible or Chris Moriarty’s two works uses a bunch of real quantum mechanics plus a whole bunch of crazy shit to make her little mass teleportation scheme work. That sort of thing is just not a reason to diss a science *fiction* novel. Geeeez. Isn’t it enough to say you don’t like it, instead of also accusing it of being what it essentially is?

Good gods, did you fail British Literature because you thought that funny Irishman was serious?

How then should we live? becomes a question of real concern, because we have, in fact, the power to change ourselves, and are steadily accruing more of it.

And, might i add, that we are changing ourselves. There is a whole host of universities and colleges working to produce research, colloquies, and conferences on transhuman development. Much of our unfolding current technological advancements are actually fairly old, four to six years, with an ever-expanding base of newer, not yet public, ones waiting in the wings.

Vets have been putting chips in pets for several years now so that owners can track them, and many children are implanted now as well to “enhance protection.” An increasing range of humans are implanted, or are implanting, chips that provide a variety of services. Much of this has happened without much thought about where it will all lead; the quest for research zeal seems ahead of the ethical and moral discussions.

DARPA is way out there, ahead of most sci-fi these days, especially in development of war without troops. While we are free to discuss the merits of this or that author, and this or that construct, our technocrats are leaping ahead trying to utilize three year old “new” technologies. Stephenson and Gibson did share in the vision, but i doubt were considered when it came time for philosophizing. Interchangeable chips in the head, already happening.

There will come a day on which things like 82 and 83 will make sense . BUT THIS IS NOT THAT DAY!

With a nauseating thud the severed oval toppled to the
floor, as the segregated torso of Grignr’s bovine antagonist
swayed, then collapsed in a pool of swirled crimson.
In the confusion the soldier’s fellows confronted Grignr
with unsheathed cutlasses, directed toward the latters scowling
make-up.
“The slut should have picked his quarry more carefully!”
Roared the victor in a mocking baritone growl, as he wiped his
dripping blade on the prostrate form, and returned it to its
scabbard.
“The fool should have shown more prudence, however you shall
rue your actions while rotting in the pits.” Stated one of the
sprawled soldier’s comrades.
Grignr’s hand began to remove his blade from its leather
housing, but retarded the motion in face of the blades waving
before his face.
“Dismiss your hand from the hilt, barbarbian, or you shall
find a foot of steel sheathed in your gizzard.”
Grignr weighed his position observing his plight, where-upon
he took the soldier’s advice as the only logical choice. To
attempt to hack his way from his present predicament could only
warrant certain death. He was of no mind to bring upon his own
demise if an alternate path presented itself. The will to
necessitate his life forced him to yield to the superior force in
hopes of a moment of carlessness later upon the part of his
captors in which he could effect a more plausible means of
escape.

Cranky, the essential problem with Bacigalupi’s setup (as described — I haven’t read the book) is that it’s wasteful. If you can grow genetically engineered crops, then almost by definition you can use the concentrated solar energy they contain more efficiently if you use ’em to produce power directly, rather than feeding them to a large animal (say goodbye to 80-90% of the energy stored in the crops as it goes into producing behemoth shit rather than usable power) and using that to store power in a (lossy) spring-loaded device.

It’s not only bad engineering; it’s bad biology. Paolo freely admits he rigged the tech side of his back-story so that nuclear power and renewables as we currently know them aren’t economically viable (source: hanging out at the bar with him). Windup Girl isn’t a rigorous attempt at envisaging a likely future; it’s clearly not aiming in that direction. Which doesn’t make it a bad novel, but it does suggest it’s not a useful work of futurology.

“What does tragedy mean to an immortal species whose members can store their identities and mind states and resurrect themselves, even if physically destroyed?”

I suppose they’d have tragedies about people who could have done exactly that, but for one reason or another neglected to. Maybe they’d have tragedies about a civilization which had cryonics, but in which 99.999999% of the people who got sick enough nothing could be done for them were permitted to rot anyway.

After all, tragedy isn’t really about the inevitable fate of everybody. Oedipus wouldn’t be a tragedy in a world where every man killed his father and married his mother. It’s a tragedy because circumstances led him to do something that *didn’t* have to happen.

87: well, he must have said it somewhere. Ken MacLeod said he did.

It’s certainly something he believed, even if he never used those words: he was quite open about cribbin’ from the works of Edward Gibbon for the “Foundation” series, among other examples.

Firewood coming /from where/?

From the fields currently being used to grow the fodder for the great big genetically engineered beasts of burden. This is GCSE biology stuff.

Maybe humans will figure out how to do that (it can’t be done now).

This really, really needs a cite, as there are in fact operational solar power plants, both photovoltaic and concentrating. Also, of course, wind power is just solar at one remove, using the atmosphere as a concentrator.

Also, if you can grow stuff and feed it to beasts, you can feed it to a STEAM ENGINE. Which would be significantly more efficient. We know this because…that’s how the industrial revolution happened in the first place. Burning wood in a steam engine was a better way of pumping water out of a tin mine than growing fodder on the land and feeding it to ponies walking around a gin to drive the same pump. The UK didn’t do woodburning steam power much, being largely an island made of coal back then, but plenty of places did. And yes, we did use steam power for agricultural traction. There are nice old men who lovingly restore Fowler ploughing engines to this day and take them to conventions to fire them up – rather like science fiction fans, really.

That was with Watt engine technology, but a future steam engine would almost certainly be a Stirling engine design, which is a considerable gain in itself.