Systems fiction: a novel way to think about the present

“At their best, when systems novels veer right into science fiction,
they can hold infinity itself in their purview – and none come closer to
that than Kim Stanley Robinson. Robinson’s seminal Mars trilogy opens
with humanity’s efforts to colonise our cosmic neighbour in Red Mars,
and closes two centuries later in Blue Mars: by then, water is flowing
on the planet’s surface, an achievement reached after hundreds of pages
of Robinson’s musings on science, politics, economics and religion.

Robert A Heinlein’s The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress covers similar
themes to Robinson, but reaches a very different conclusion; in stark
contrast to Robinson’s holistic worldview, Heinlein’s tale of a lunar
colony fighting for freedom from the mother planet – Earth – fits
closely with the author’s libertarian beliefs.

Issac Asimov’s Foundation sequence, and his use of psychohistory in
it, makes him a remarkable systems novelist, as does Ursula Le Guin’s
Hainish sequence and Samuel Delany’s novels Nova, Babel-17 and Dhalgren. There are more contemporary science fiction authors using this model, too: Madeline Ashby, Ramez Naam and Monica Byrne all use science fiction as an arena for speculative, intellectual debate….