cosmism

As a professional—and successful—science fiction author, Stross says he’s “spent a lot of time lifting up the rocks in the garden of SF to look at what’s squirming underneath.” One of the slimy grubs he found there was cosmism. Tsiolkovsky didn’t just influence Clarke. Tsiolkovsky’s quote about Earth as the “cradle” we’re destined to outgrow has long been iconic among space enthusiasts and science fiction authors, a shibboleth and a whispered hope. Yet Tsiolkovsky didn’t just want humanity to go to the stars. Like Fedorov, he wanted humanity to reorder the cosmos, creating a rationalized universe devoid of anything natural. In this “utopia,” tasks would be assigned to different peoples based on the supposedly inherent aptitudes of their race, and the disabled would be killed. Imported across the Atlantic by rocketry enthusiasts and early science fiction authors, Tsiolkovsky’s cosmist vision of universal colonialism and eugenicsi meshed well with existing ideas in American culture, like Turner’s frontier thesis. This set the tone for American science fiction. “There was an implicit ideology attached to this strain of science fiction right from the outset: the American Dream of capitalist success, mashed up with progress through modern technology, and a side-order of frontier colonialism,” Stross writes. “There’s been a tendency in American SF, ever since those early days, to be willfully blind to the political implications of the shiny toys.” Instead, billionaires explicitly use science fiction as a blueprint—Musk even tweeted that “science-fiction should not be fiction forever!”—heedless of the intent or meaning of the works that they’re blindly emulating.40 “Did you ever wonder why the 21st century feels like we’re living in a bad cyberpunk novel from the 1980s?” Stross asks. “It’s because these guys [tech billionaires] read those cyberpunk novels and mistook a dystopia for a road map.