It’s Friday night, and a small group of twentysomethings convenes around a conference room at the Dropbox headquarters in San Francisco. They’re not there to burn the midnight oil — only one person in the group actually works there. The rest hail from Lyft, Snapchat, Google, and Facebook, respectively, and they collectively await instructions from their dungeon master with rapt attention. “You awake to find yourself surrounded by the king’s guard,” the DM says. “The captain slowly draws his sword.” Someone cracks open another LaCroix.
The scene is a paradigmatic example of a convergence happening in the Bay Area; while technology has always played a hand in shaping science fiction, San Francisco’s fantasy and science-fiction community is now bleeding into tech.
Tech workers are moonlighting as dungeon masters for hire (for up to $500 per game), and venture capitalists are investing in startups in order to “make science fiction nonfiction.” With nearly 34,000 tech jobs in the Bay Area this year, San Francisco’s science-fiction and fantasy community has been increasingly supported by a growing fan base.
Borderlands, the only (remaining) science-fiction and fantasy bookstore in San Francisco and, arguably, epicenter of the community, experienced this firsthand. In 2015, Borderlands owner Alan Beatts announced that the store was going out of business. In a bid for survival, Beatts organized a grassroots campaign to fundraise enough money to buy a permanent home for the bookshop in the Haight. He succeeded, raising $1.9 million to buy 1373 Haight Street.
The store has since set a national precedent of the “how to save a struggling bookstore” variety, which others have written about. When I spoke to Beatts, he was in the midst of renovating the store’s new location (which will open in a few months) and sounded relatively upbeat about Borderlands’ future.
“I don’t think [the tech industry] impacts the number of people who support the store, but I do think it impacts the degree to which people were able to support the store,” Beatts said. “Given that San Francisco is pretty affluent right now and the tech industry is rewarding, it puts people in a position where they’re able to give more [financial] support.”
He offhandedly mentioned how that same affluence was the reason why his store was in danger in the first place, but let bygones be bygones. Beatts also said that that he may use the building’s upstairs apartments for a writer-in-residence program in the future. When I asked if he thinks being a science-fiction or fantasy writer is a viable profession in San Francisco these days, he paused.
“Not if you want to do it full-time,” he said.
From talking with several writers — both veteran and aspiring — I got the sense that he is right. A lot of local science-fiction and fantasy writers have day jobs, and many of them work in tech.
Rudy Rucker, a mathematician, a founder of the “cyberpunk” movement, and the author of 23 novels, has resided in the Bay Area since 1986. He started writing science fiction in 1980 because he was “interested in whether there could ever be intelligent robots.” He’s best known for the novels in the Ware Tetralogy, the first two of which won the Philip K. Dick Award for best novel.
“It’s about two Berkeley grads who find a way to predict the future using some weird computational device. At this point, the Bay Area is almost a parody of itself.”
“I could be considered a successful writer by most people, but the most I could usually hope for was about $20,000 a year,” Rucker said. “So I needed another job. Of course, you can get a tech job, and you have to have the right mind for it, but the problem with tech [companies] is that they can be real omnivores in terms of eating up your time.”
He’s referring to the over-glorification of working long hours in the tech industry, to the point where hanging out at an office on a Friday night seems fun.
But being a science-fiction writer in San Francisco does come with competitive advantages. The city speaks to the present and works as a source of inspiration for futuristic thinkers. “There’s this thing I do called ‘transrealism,’” Rucker said. “I write about my immediate surroundings but mutate it into science fiction.”
Rucker then recalled his book Mathematicians in Love, a novel that’s equal parts romantic comedy and Bay Area spoof set in alternative versions of Berkeley (the book’s university towns are called “Humelocke” and “Klownetown”).
“It’s about two Berkeley grads who find a way to predict the future using some weird computational device,” he said. “At this point, [the Bay Area] is almost a parody of itself.”
These days, Rucker is fascinated by biotech, telepathy, and deep learning. He recently posted a video to his Facebook page that uses an animal-based neural network to depict a psychedelic Bob Ross doing painting lessons. “Clearly, we SF writers need to try harder if we’re gonna keep up,” he quipped.
M. Luke McDonell, a San Francisco–based graphic designer by day and science-fiction writer by night, also uses the city’s futuristic culture for her “five minutes into the future” stories. Her first novella, The Perfect Specimen, made the bestseller list at Borderlands last month.
“I’ve always been a sci-fi reader, and then I see these technologies start to be developed and hit the market,” she said. “Sometimes it happens in an awkward way, like with Google Glass, and that makes me start thinking about what’s going to happen when these technologies are ubiquitous. How will normal people interact with them?”
The science-fiction and fantasy community helps transplants find their real-life “tribe” in an increasingly online world.
For McDonell, writing full-time isn’t an option, but not because of money. She thinks holing up in an attic for the sake of simply writing would become a blocker, creatively speaking.
“I would never want to give up my day job, because there are people all around me, and people are in my stories,” she said. “If I got to the point where I had a hit book and I quit my job, my writing would grind to a halt. The pressure of having a day job and then trying to write at night — it makes that time so much more precious.”
McDonell also records and produces the podcast for SF in SF, a monthly science-fiction and fantasy event series that brings together both veteran and up-and-coming authors, aspiring writers, and fans for readings and discussions.
Just last week, SF in SF hosted Charlie Jane Anders and Annalee Newitz, two of San Francisco’s most en vogue science-fiction writers, for a discussion. When moderator Terry Bisson introduced the pair at the event, he cited the “tech and science-fiction field in the Bay Area” as if it were one community.
Both local writers and readers agree that events like SF in SF or Writers with Drinks (which Anders organizes), as well as institutions like Borderlands, have thrived because of the Bay Area’s influx of tech workers. In a sense, the science-fiction and fantasy community helps transplants find their real-life “tribe” in an increasingly online world.
“A lot of people have come to San Francisco recently, and a lot of those people are in the tech industry,” Beatts said. “So having a place where you feel at home, have a social connection to other people, and have a feeling of connectedness toward where you are is perhaps more valuable for someone who just moved to San Francisco two years ago than it would be to people who have been here for a long time.”
Rina Weisman, the coordinator for SF in SF, has noticed that the tech industry also draws younger generations to the science-fiction and fantasy community.
“When we first started [SF in SF], it was the same people over and over again, and they were definitely not in their first flush of youth,” she said. “Now there’s a 30-and-under crowd that either grew up reading science fiction or got into tech because of the books. It happens a lot.”
San Francisco is becoming less of a city and more of a testing ground for zany science-fiction ideas.
Weisman is an avid science-fiction and fantasy reader and said that she felt a sense of belonging when she discovered Borderlands after moving to San Francisco (she ended up meeting her husband at the store). She then told me how she recently found all her book receipts from Borderlands, which she “saved over the years for some reason.”
For most San Francisco neophytes with an affinity for science fiction or fantasy, that first trip to Borderlands is an easy one to recall. For me, it happened during a Sunday stroll through the Mission on a crisp spring day. I walked into the bookstore looking for a copy of The Three-Body Problem, an admittedly mainstream hard science-fiction novel that friends and coworkers had recommended to me for months. As I was checking out, the Borderlands employee manning the cashier nodded approvingly. “I bet someone told you to read this,” he said. “Don’t worry — you’ll love it.”
In many ways, San Francisco is becoming less of a city and more of a testing ground for zany science-fiction ideas. At first, it was novel to see a Tesla. Then self-driving cars turned heads. More recently, delivery robots started roaming the streets (until they were banned).
“Seeing a robot in the street is mind-blowing if you read science fiction,” said Weisman. “It’s like, what has taken us so long?” Weisman says she’ll be truly impressed when we’re all using jet packs.
“I can’t wait to see what the next thing is that tech brings to San Francisco,” she said. “If it’s a jet pack, great. If it’s a self-driving car that won’t kill people, even better.”
