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A Case For the Necessity of Science Fiction 254

unc0nn3ct3d writes "This article makes an interesting point about the necessity of science fiction — or, more specifically, speculative fiction as a tool to aid in the long-term survival of the human species. 'We live in a world that is incredibly frightening for a growing portion of the population because of the exponential rate of change we are experiencing. Our world is changing so fast now that we often don't have time to contemplate the full ramifications that come with the increasingly rapid adoption of new technologies and social changes. Most often this is simply because these changes are being introduced almost one after another after another, without any time to breathe. Speculative fiction, however, if widely adopted, makes it almost instinctive that we think about these situations and possible outcomes before they even arise.'"
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A Case For the Necessity of Science Fiction

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  • And then, we.... (Score:4, Interesting)

    by FooAtWFU ( 699187 ) on Sunday January 24, 2010 @01:32PM (#30880406) Homepage
    And then, we get all frightened and refuse to build large-scale particle colliders because we're afraid that black hole monsters will crawl out from under our beds and suck us into the fifth dimension.
  • This is true. (Score:5, Interesting)

    by hedronist ( 233240 ) * on Sunday January 24, 2010 @01:35PM (#30880442)

    I find in talking with my wife and other friends/family who are not SciFi readers that they are often surprised by certain events in the news. Whereas I will say something like, "Oh, this reminds me of Snow Crash, or Left Hand of Darkness ... kewl!"

    Good quality, 'what if'-style SciFi keeps your world view more flexible than reading most any other kind of genre.

    • However the way that situations proposed in SF actually play out in real-life (when or if they so occur) is almost never the way the author wrote it. So in that respect SF may well be preparing us for the future - but it's the wrong future. (where's my flying car?)
      • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

        by aurispector ( 530273 )

        Yeah, but it gives us a template with which to evaluate new scientific developments. Analogy is a useful thing.

      • Re:This is true. (Score:5, Interesting)

        by fuzzyfuzzyfungus ( 1223518 ) on Sunday January 24, 2010 @03:13PM (#30881604) Journal
        I think "flying cars" brings up an important limitation of much of sci-fi as a future-predicting instrument.

        Science fiction does, in some cases, do a fairly decent job of predicting some scientific advances(Clarke and Satellites, etc.); but it often does a much poorer job with political and social stuff, either wildly overshooting(In the future, politics will be replaced by instantaneous world democracy through voting brain implants and the UN!) or wildly undershooting(Yes Virginia, even in the future with spaceships and robots, politics and gender roles will look exactly like 1950's America...). Also very common is succumbing to the pressure to make things "speculative, futuristic, or creative" and underestimating the degree to which glacially slow progress is mixed with radical change. For instance, consider the percentage of the world population that is still dying like flies because they have shit in their drinking water, or is fighting some ghastly little bush war with Eastern Bloc kit from the 60's and 70's; but also owns(or at least has access to within a small social group) a cellphone with more computing power than the dumb terminals that Asimov's characters were connecting to MULTIVAC with.

        In the case of flying cars, we've had helicopters for decades, and various slightly more tractable variants have been on the drawing board or in prototype for some time; but we are actively moving away from the economic conditions that would make the middle class wealthy enough for these to, like cars, be more or less ubiquitous.
        • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

          by kenwd0elq ( 985465 )
          The problem with the whole "flying cars" thing is that they are technologically possible, and have been for some time now. The problem is lawyers. Every time somebody comes up with a great idea, some shyster starts thinking of ways to steal all the money by filing frivolous lawsuits based on a worst-case scenario about what could happen. If we were allowed to shoot any lawyer who filed a lawsuit based on the FEAR of some outcome instead of on some ACTUAL outcome, the world would be a better place - and w
      • by HiThere ( 15173 )

        I can remember two or three science fiction stories that had flying cars. No more. In all of them very few owned such a vehicle. Most of them are from the 1940's. Fancy spaceships are much more common. (I still want my own "Skylark of Valeron", or even "Skylark III".)

  • Only on slashdot (Score:5, Informative)

    by CodeDragonDM ( 1570963 ) on Sunday January 24, 2010 @01:37PM (#30880460)
    Only on Slashdot will you find an article saying we need more science fiction as news.
  • by pigiron ( 104729 ) on Sunday January 24, 2010 @01:42PM (#30880544) Homepage
    Engineers and scientists will invent things anyway regardless of whether there has been bad fiction written about the concept beforehand.
    • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

      by jdigriz ( 676802 )
      'We live in a world that is incredibly frightening for a growing portion of the population because"... they are largely ignorant of science, technology, politics, economic, history, strategy and other cultures. Of course it's frightening to them, they don't have the information necessary to understand anything that's going on. Sheesh.
    • by Kell Bengal ( 711123 ) on Sunday January 24, 2010 @01:50PM (#30880632)
      But a surprising amount of technology is inspired directly or indirectly from fiction. I work in robotics and I can tell you that there isn't a single person I've met robotics conferences who didn't grow up thinking about robots from the works of Asimov or Lucas or Japanese anime. We loved them and we wanted to be a part of that - to make it so.

      Science fiction is a history of the future - a self-fulfilling prophecy.
    • Adolescent fantasies? So fiction that takes place in a modern day or historical setting is mature fantasy while science fiction settings are all adolescent fantasies? Can you say pretentious snob?
  • by b4upoo ( 166390 ) on Sunday January 24, 2010 @01:48PM (#30880604)

    We do need to speed up social conventions to match the speed of technology. For example part of the unemployment crises that we are now seeing is due to technology displacing workers. Whet people don't seem to grasp is that there is a very serious intention to replace all labor with machines. Education and shifting from job skill to job skills will not be enough to keep afloat soon. Yet when social scientists try to offer solutions they are seen as crackpots and lunatics. Frankly some of their solutions make a lot of sense.
                      However there are some basic issues that never resolved before robotics and the like advanced and one wonders what will happen if robotics is able to solve them. For example robots designed to remove dents and to paint cars might be able to keep every car looking new. But sense we were never able to do that before robotics what will be the economic effect of doing it. The same is true of house and lawn work. Good roofs and fresh paint on a sharp looking lawn without human effort would be a shocker. But what does that do to an economy. We don't even know if humans should be involved in an economy or whether we best let robots and computers serve us all things that we need.

    • That's one of my favorite questions. When a person exists who eats more than a robot that can do everything better than he can, what do you do with him? Let him starve, or give him handouts? There will be a lot of starving people or handouts, one way or another. We will have to choose.
      • by tenco ( 773732 )
        I don't see what's so hard about this decision. Give handouts, of course.
        • Because you're going to have to get people to embrace welfare which they hate?
          • by sammyF70 ( 1154563 ) on Sunday January 24, 2010 @02:55PM (#30881392) Homepage Journal
            Maybe, the right question to ask then is WHY do people hate welfare? (full disclosure: I'll be on welfare from next month on, due to some complicated issues). You don't have to sit in front of the TV, munching fast food all day long, wondering which of the 200 applications you sent will be the next to be declined.
            There are lots of much more personally fulfilling activities you can do, for which you never had time before due to your job. If robots take over the jobs, just see it as an opportunity to do something creative (in a very broad sense) and meaningful for yourself. If others might enjoy it, even better (and I'm not talking specifically of FOSS here)
            • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

              Oh, heck yeah I think it'd be awesome for the robots to take care of us while we (the humans) played. But the guy over there who owns 37 mansions and an army of robots might resent me trying to live off of his 'hard work'. When I state the question I don't answer which choice is correct, in my opinion I think handouts are correct. The real kicker is that starving people or handouts are the only two choices.
            • by jedidiah ( 1196 )

              > Maybe, the right question to ask then is WHY do people hate welfare?

              Why? Because many people realize that someone needs to pay the bills and that someone will likely be THEM.

              It doesn't matter if it's some fat cat that can buy himself some sort of tax break or some working class schmuck that can't.

              Either one of them will realize that someone has to pay the bills.

              This money doesn't just magically come from someone's nether-regions.

              • Considering I'm definitely in the "poor bastard who can't pay the bills" category, believe me when I say I'm well aware of that. Still, there are instances in which welfare (insofar as there is some kind of welfare wherever you live) is unavoidable for some reasons which might not be under your control (no, I don't adhere to the "you can do/be everything as long as you're willing to work hard enough" belief).

                To get back to the topic, the case in which robots take over most of the jobs is such an instance,

              • So, what did people do before money was invented then? Pick fruit off the trees and grab fish from the rivers? Oh, right, yeah that's what they did. :-)

            • Maybe, the right question to ask then is WHY do people hate welfare?

              Because the perception is that people on welfare tend to make more children on welfare perpetuating a long-term cycle that is unhealthy for the overall economy.

              Whether this is true, I do not know. But this perception is the reason you're looking for.

      • by hitmark ( 640295 ) on Sunday January 24, 2010 @03:02PM (#30881472) Journal

        i kinda recall a statement similar to "every golden age had a free lunch".

        that is, greeks and romans had slaves. Later on it was oil. The next may well be humanoid robots, filling much the same role as slaves did in roman times.

        and yes, i do wonder about the same thing. And i could have sworn i bumped into a story somewhere on the net where a guy had wrestled with the topic, via burger flippers that was guided by wireless headsets and sound prompts from a computer, via robots and the poorhouse for displaced workers, to a kind of utopia set up in australia, where people had free food and housing, and could use a daily allotment of "resource points" either on themselves or pool them to "fund" greater projects someone was working on.

        thing is that if we ever get to the point where machines can be fed a CAD plan and build the complete device without human intervention, we hit a point where only "intellectual property" and access to the raw material matters. The latter is a age old problem, while the former is playing out in prototype form by way of copyright, patent, DMCA and ACTA as we speak.

        btw, doctorows latest, makers, pokes into this. Funny enough, his inspiration was the aftermath of .com, while the release timed perfectly with the most recent economic downtime.

      • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

        The very phrasing of your question seems to reveal a prejudice towards free market thinking. I would contend that it's just this kind thinking which we have to fight against, if we're ever to come to terms with the problem.

        Why "handouts"? If robots are doing all the work more efficiently than humans, the net result is not a bunch of worthless humans requiring handouts - it's a bunch of humans who are suddenly free to devote their lives to science, or to art, or even to sheer pleasure if they wish, while rob

      • We will need to move to some sort of post-scarcity society. Some stuff I wrote here:
        http://www.pdfernhout.net/post-scarcity-princeton.html [pdfernhout.net]
        Marshall Brain wrote some ideas here:
        http://www.marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm [marshallbrain.com]
        I helped organize this article listing more ideas by various authors:
        http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jobless_recovery [wikipedia.org]

        The conclusion there: "Dealing with a jobless recovery presents global society with some difficult choices about values and identity. A straightfo

    • For example robots designed to remove dents and to paint cars might be able to keep every car looking new. But sense we were never able to do that before robotics what will be the economic effect of doing it.

      It would be vastly cheaper to build cars that have all-replacable body panels, or cars designed to allow you to easily strip all components from the body and install them into another, than to build robots that could do auto body work. You'd basically need a car factory, plus a car factory in reverse, to do what a human can do — and humans are involved in the assembly of all vehicles currently made. Or, you'd need a robot as capable in every way as a human. Those will be subject to frequent failure fo

      • by selven ( 1556643 ) on Sunday January 24, 2010 @02:22PM (#30881018)

        Who says humans will take it sitting down as robots shoot up past us? Humans will be riding the wave of progress and will improve themselves alongside their machines. Robots won't be rising up against us, they'll be integrating with us.

        • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

          by Shatrat ( 855151 )
          Not the dumb people, though. Think of all the people who can't do anything that couldn't be done as well or better by a robot.
          Mathematically, half of us are of below median intelligence, after all.
          Those people are going to form unions and special interest groups and fight progress like it's AIDS in the coming years.
          • It will be the middle 80% and they will win. Society will devolve and human-kind will come to an end.
          • Mathematically, half of us are of below median intelligence, after all.

            That tells me nothing unless the difference has some practical significance.

            If the machine can maintain itself it doesn't need the IT guy with his above average IQ.

            If it can't maintain itself, the machine may need the guy with the wrench more than he needs the guy with the pocket protector.

    • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

      by gmuslera ( 3436 )
      Only social conventions? See how media that used to have physical distribution clash about digital age? Internet changed the board for everything, and still 15 years after it started to popularize we are slowly, very slowly, adapting to all that it implies.

      What fails most science fiction is that they add a new technology, and shows how it changes one aspect of our life usually towards the plot of the story, but leaves everything else, on how we think and see life, as normal. Maybe it would happen that way

    • by khallow ( 566160 )

      Yet when social scientists try to offer solutions they are seen as crackpots and lunatics. Frankly some of their solutions make a lot of sense.

      What are these solutions so that I can judge for myself whether these solutions make sense or not?

      We don't even know if humans should be involved in an economy or whether we best let robots and computers serve us all things that we need.

      There's still the matter of comparative advantage. Why is it better to have these sophisticated robots trim lawns and paint houses than whatever else they could be doing?

    • by RonTheHurler ( 933160 ) on Sunday January 24, 2010 @05:03PM (#30882736)

      I have first hand experience with this. I used to employ two skilled carpenters to cut wood all day long. For the cost of one year's salary for those guys, I bought an automated CNC machine that does everything they did, and more, and has been running virtually non-stop for a solid three years.

      Sounds awful when I stop there. So then what happened...

      My product's quality, consistency and reliability shot up dramatically, Tolerances went from 1/4" to 0.005". My customers noticed, and then my sales shot up too. So my employee count went up to handle the new order volume. I have employees doing jobs that didn't exist when I started this business ten years ago. And now my employees get to work in an air conditioned office and don't have to worry about cutting their fingers off with a table saw either.

      So, because technology killed two jobs, I'm better off, my customers are better off, and I was able to hire more employees who are also better off.

      When a textile worker was complaining about his job going to China (in the news last year), an astute interviewer asked him "Do you want your kids to grow up to work in this same sweaty factory, breathing this lint filled air?" Of course, the answer was "No.", so then, why not let the job go to China, and teach your kids to embrace the innovation and change that will be so inevitable in his lifetime? That's the value of Science Fiction in my opinion. Once a kid gets his head around it, he understands intrinsically that that "different" is natural, and change is normal. He has to change his world-view to get into the story, for most of the stories he reads. That's good practice for living in any future, especially your own.

      I grew up on a steady diet of science fiction. I'm 50 years old now, and I've changed careers in every one of my adult decades. It has always been a good thing for me too. Follow-up studies consistently show that 95% of workers who are laid off get better jobs at higher pay within two years of being laid off.

      By the way, here's how the economy really works -- It's not "supply and demand" as the old school used to teach, it's really all about production and consumption, which is subtly different, but in a very important way. A healthy economy is driven by production. Production is driven by consumption. Consumption is driven by innovation (think iPhone, Blu-Ray, etc.), and innovation is driven by education and imagination. If you want a healthy economy, invest in education and support the arts. Give a kid a Kindle stuffed with a thousand books (there are literally thousands of free and nearly-free books for the kindle on Amazon, including the HG Wells collection for $0.99, etc...)

      • by Paul Fernhout ( 109597 ) on Sunday January 24, 2010 @07:41PM (#30884162) Homepage

        Healthy humans only need so much stuff. Automation may be good for firms that do it, but if demand is limited, jobs disappear in the system. That's why capitalist systems must grow continually, to create new jobs to make up for productivity increases. The problem is, too much stuff actually can get in the way of a good life, since good human relations are generally the most important part of a happy life and too much stuff distracts from that. Also, right now, much stuff has negative external costs involved in its creation (though we may someday move beyond that).

        Here is some sci-fi on ironies in a world of abundance:
        http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Midas_World [wikipedia.org]
        ""The Midas Plague" (originally published in Galaxy in 1954). In this new world of cheap energy, robots are overproducing the commodities enjoyed by mankind. So now the "poor" are forced to spend their lives in frantic consumption, trying to keep up with the robots' extravagant production, so that the "rich" can live lives of simplicity. This story deals with the life of a man named Morey Fry, who marries a girl from a higher class. She is unused to a life of consumption and it wears at their marriage. ..."

        But, that would still be a big shift from what we have now, which is based on the idea that people only have a right to consume based on the value of their labor. This was talked about back in the 1960s in a letter sent to President Johnson in 1964:
        http://educationanddemocracy.org/FSCfiles/C_CC2a_TripleRevolution.htm [educationa...ocracy.org]

        To deal with increasing automation destroying the value of most labor given limited demand, what we need more is a global sharing of the wealth produced by an automated industrial commons, which means taxes for a basic income
        http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_income [wikipedia.org]
        or transitioning to another economic model like a gift economy or a subsistence economy or something else. The big issue is not so much automation (although there are aspects that are negative of loss of control or loss of joy in hands on work that you may love) but the issue of how the fruits of automation get distributed. Related on three different visions of work we need to bring together for the 21st century:
        http://www.smallisbeautiful.org/buddhist_economics/english.html [smallisbeautiful.org]
        http://www.whywork.org/rethinking/whywork/abolition.html [whywork.org]
        http://www.papert.org/articles/HardFun.html [papert.org]

        Think of this example: someone sets up vending machines powered by solar panels in every community, and these machines print wood shaped to order for very low prices, and the machines take next-to-no labor to keep going. Basically, what you outlined, only even better (maybe the devices just suck carbon and water from the air to make the wood). Your company can't compete with the prices and quality and speedy delivery, so everyone you employ is laid off. The owner of this enterprise, who owns all the patents and who gets all the money, decides to pile it under his or her mattress, or alternatively, gamble it in high stakes poker games (called derivatives :-) that just move to higher and higher stakes. Where are the new jobs there? Sure, that company may make a few new jobs, but overall, lots of labor is saved, so there is a net negative as far as jobs, because healthy people only need so much wood. The only reason to even worry about jobs is this issue of the right to consume, as well as government enforcing monopolies on land or patents or copyrights, since otherwise there is so much abundance we could organize the economy differently, like GNU/Lin

        • Hm... (Score:5, Interesting)

          by jvonk ( 315830 ) on Sunday January 24, 2010 @08:36PM (#30884596)

          Think of this example: someone sets up vending machines powered by solar panels in every community, and these machines print wood shaped to order for very low prices, and the machines take next-to-no labor to keep going. Basically, what you outlined, only even better (maybe the devices just suck carbon and water from the air to make the wood). Your company can't compete with the prices and quality and speedy delivery, so everyone you employ is laid off. The owner of this enterprise, who owns all the patents and who gets all the money, decides to pile it under his or her mattress[...]

          Dude: I am no forensics master, but aren't you violating a basic premise of debate by countering the GP's actual example with a speculative future scenario in which you cherry-picked the parameters to bolster your agenda?

          If that is a legitimate debate tactic, then one presumes he could counter with a similarly cherry-picked scenario where he and his firm counter the structural shift in their industry by developing "programs" for these devices to create "fad wood cut designs of the week" (ala iPhone). He would then consolidate his firm's massive profits and, of course, go on to personally develop economical nanotechnology and nuclear fusion--thereby ending scarcity for the entire world! [wikipedia.org]

          ...not as nice of a tactic when used both sides, it seems.

          Aside from that, it seems that most of your concerns miss the point that most of your future scenarios result in one of two general outcomes. One possibility is that the trend away from agriculture to manufacturing, and then away from manufacturing to services, and then away from services to "aaaa! no more work for Americans!" is economically sustainable at a national level, then there is no problem. In such a case, the general wealth level of the nation (and the society at large) is high enough that we are borderline post-scarcity (otherwise, markets for 'new things/services' would emerge). That is, one way or another, we continue to be to afford to pay other countries to "make stuff" for us. Don't know how we would manage to do that, but good for us if so.

          However, what if such a trend is unsustainable? I believe this to be the more likely case. In that case, China (et al) stops feeling the urge to continue to inflate our standard of living by floating our colossal trade deficits. I mean, what are we giving today them besides US Treasury IOU's? (the fact that they can trade US dollars for oil is notwithstanding, because eventually the world will decide that the farce has gone on long enough if they value nothing we produce) Okay, so, now the value of our dollar plummets, we aren't getting our market flooded by goods that are manufactured at prices with which we can't compete domestically, and then suddenly we start finding it is cost-effective to manufacture in the US again.

          Of course, everyone in the US is poorer on average in the latter scenario, because free trade tends to be ruthlessly efficient--and inefficiency is expensive. For example, it isn't efficient to pay a union worker $40/hour + benefits to screw on jar lids, when a robot could do it much faster, more accurately, and more cheaply. Are you aware that you share the same concerns as the original Luddites [wikipedia.org]? The structural economic shifts in efficiency brought by technological progress have been beneficial to the economy & society as a whole, and there are two centuries of evidence to support this.

          Of course, individual actors must "evolve or die", just as the buggywhip manufacturers needed to migrate into manufacturing automobile tires (or bondage gear, depending on their marketing department's forecasts). Anyone can predict dire economic scenarios due to technological advances, but you will forgive me if I believe that they are unlikely given the overwhelming preponderance of the historical evidence.

    • This sci-fi book from 1982 explores a lot of these issues:
      http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voyage_from_Yesteryear [wikipedia.org]
      "Since the availability of power from fusion reactors and cheap automated labor has enabled them to develop a post-scarcity economy, they do not use money as a means of exchange, nor do they recognize material possessions as symbols of status. Instead, competence and talent are considered symbolic of one's social standing - resources that cannot be counterfeited or hoarded, and must be put to

    • by rwv ( 1636355 )

      Good roofs and fresh paint on a sharp looking lawn without human effort would be a shocker. But what does that do to an economy. We don't even know if humans should be involved in an economy or whether we best let robots and computers serve us all things that we need.

      It's probably too late for this comment to get modded high enough for many people to see it, but I'm in the process of polishing/publishing a speculative fiction novel that attacks this topic. Preview version is available here [2076book.com].

      I think the basic social motivation will evolve to (a) robots do boring work, (b) humans do creative work. Certainly, a robot driven economy will be capable of supporting a centralized leadership, but as long as the general population is given enough freedom to basically do whatev

  • Little surprise (Score:5, Insightful)

    by mseeger ( 40923 ) on Sunday January 24, 2010 @02:12PM (#30880928)

    I don't think there is much in the current world to surprise you, if you've read John Brunners The Shockwave Rider [wikipedia.org]. The biggest surprise is when you look at the time it was published: 1975. It has always astounded me, how clearly Johns eyes have seen....

    There are so many good quotes in that book, that you could make nearly a second book out of them. My favorite: There are two kinds of fools: One says, "This is old therefore it is good." The other one says, "This is new therefore it is better."

    I think the thesis "Speculative fiction, however, if widely adopted, makes it almost instinctive that we think about these situations and possible outcomes before they even arise" is correct. At least i can say it worked for me.

    CU, Martin

    • by nomadic ( 141991 )
      I don't think there is much in the current world to surprise you, if you've read John Brunners The Shockwave Rider [wikipedia.org]. The biggest surprise is when you look at the time it was published: 1975. It has always astounded me, how clearly Johns eyes have seen....

      I got that same sort of shock after reading Brunner's Stand on Zanzibar, then seeing the publishing date.
      • I read Stand on Zanzibar when it first came out in 1968. It was pretty shocking then, too. I see it was set partly in 2010; it might be interesting to reread it.

        Although technology has changed a lot since then, I think the biggest changes have been social: recognition of civil rights for women and minorities. Those changes and their effects are harder to predict, but it was Star Trek which showed the first interracial kiss on US TV. That was also in 1968.

    • by Alrescha ( 50745 )

      > There are so many good quotes in that book, that you could make nearly a second book out of them. My favorite...

      The one that always sticks in my mind is:

      ""If there is such a phenomenon as absolute evil, it consists in treating another human being as a thing."

      A.

    • There are so many good quotes in that book, that you could make nearly a second book out of them.

      Perhaps, but it would be a lot shorter, and it would be called "Quotes From The Shockwave Rider".

  • by dunkelfalke ( 91624 ) on Sunday January 24, 2010 @02:23PM (#30881026)

    ... but if I don't read a SF book for three days I start going mad. For some people escapism is very important for staying sane - even Tolkien recognised that:

    "Why should a man be scorned if, finding himself in prison, he tries to get out and go home? Or if, when he cannot do so, he thinks and talks about other topics than jailers and prison-walls?"

  • by petes_PoV ( 912422 ) on Sunday January 24, 2010 @02:34PM (#30881144)
    Constant change is here to stay.

    Really, there have always been people who are unable or unwilling to deal with change. It's nothing new and it certainly isn't getting worse with time. 100 years ago some individuals were having a tough time dealing with the idea of mass population moving to the new fangled "factories" (or as they were originally called: manufactories) and leaving the farming life behind. 50 years ago some people were having a hard time coming to terms with the social changes hitting society - lack of respect, sexual freedom and all this rock-n-roll.

    So no, I don't buy the basic premise and I certainly disagree with the idea that the people who are insecure about change will want to read books about even more change.

    • Constant change is here to stay.

      Didn't you read the summary?

      Constant change would be k * t
      Merely polynomial change would be k0 + k1 * t + k2 * t^2 ...
      Exponential change would be k ^ t

      Hope that clears everything up.

  • by John Guilt ( 464909 ) on Sunday January 24, 2010 @02:43PM (#30881236)
    I basically agree that science fiction can help forearm us for making reasonable decisions, but think there's a danger of people swallowing authors' interpretations of what the effects of different developments might entail whole. Roy Blount reports that a man was once asked if he '...believed in infant babtism', and he responded 'Believe it? I've seen it done!' Though we can tell reality from fantasy (and science fiction...incorporating the worlds of if), some works can make impressions to the point that people treat them as if they were evidence.

    This can range from a shrill 'Any altruist or collectivist government action will lead to disaster---I saw that happen in Atlas Shrugged!' to a smug 'All giant corporations are evil---I saw that in every sci-fi movie from 1970 onward,' to an arse-hurt 'Charles Stross is wrong when he says that space colonisation is probably impractical---I've seen it happen in 99% of the books I've read since the age of 8.' Again, the problem is that within a book the author has control not only of what arguments are presented, but of who presents them (either the estimable Wesley Mouch or that obnoxious and long-winded Galt/Ananconda/Swaggart crowd) and what happens when one idea or another is put into practice (think of a notional authors' fictional contention that a Marxist revolution---a Marxist one, mind you---would be followed massive State Capitalism, suppression of workers' rights, and the like).

    I think this is a particular danger in a society where 1.) so many religious fanatics insist that their children be taught that one particular book's premises, observations, and conclusions must be treated as infallible, and also 2.) many science fiction fans think, 'I'm so much more clever than those religious fanatics, I'd never be that gullible,' which is one of the stigmata of a mark. Newt Gingrich, Cory Doctorow, and that woman in the Dorsai merc outfit at that Westercon who apparently jills-off to the thought of our getting Starship Trooper's political system all come to mind.
  • by Garrett Fox ( 970174 ) on Sunday January 24, 2010 @02:47PM (#30881292) Homepage
    Summarized the article just says, "SF is good because it helps us think about stuff -- but not that icky lowbrow SF like Star Trek; that's practically porn."

    That's not a fair distinction. The author dismisses Trek, which in the 60s had some ham-fisted attempts at an Important Message (mainly re: race), and puts "Avatar" in that category even though it has a (stupid, hypocritical) moral message too. So it's not having A Message that makes for the kind of SF the author likes. The article's more like a guide to making movies that will get whipped in profits by the latest Star Trek. For good or ill, I hear some people were deeply affected by "Avatar", so that sort of movie is capable of being deep and meaningful in some people's eyes.

    I wrote an SF novel recently. There was supposed to be a Message in it. I'd read enough SF to know that making the Important Message blatant and heavy-handed is a way to ruin an otherwise decent story; famous example "Atlas Shrugged". What I found to be a good solution is to focus on being entertaining first, with plot and character being much more important than the Deep Philosophical Implications. The same group of characters could've been used to tell a story with a different message, if the character development had gone a different way ("This cause isn't worth killing over!"), and that's a good thing.

    So, if anyone wants to apply the article's advice, they should interpret it as, "Write stories with meaningful takes on the possible future -- but they should be stories first."

    (One bit of snootiness: I've got a theory that a way to describe character growth is a two-axis method. One axis is, "Can the hero find the strength to do what he's trying to do?" and the other, harder-to-write one is, "Is the hero questioning what he should do?" Simpler stories tend not to bother much with the second one, but overusing it gets angsty and annoying quickly.)
    • by hey! ( 33014 )

      As somebody who's just finished a draft of a fantasy novel, I agree with you 100%. It's is absolutely critical that as sci-fi character's view of the world grows *into* the world. At the end of the story, the character must have learned the secret to liberating the power of element X (bah), or to break through those assumptions foisted on him by a corrupt sociopolitical system that enslave him in subtle ways. Whatever rings your bell.

      Fantasy goes the other way. Fantasy is about the character learning a

  • by feepness ( 543479 ) on Sunday January 24, 2010 @02:48PM (#30881296)
    You can keep up on the latest trends in who Marsha might be attracted to besides Curtis! And is the Jennifer's baby actually Devon's? And will Steve ever come out of that coma, and if he does, what will happen to June and Chris?
  • Reminds me of a much earlier article by Athena Andreadis: http://www.starshipreckless.com/stories/archives/The%20Double%20Helix.pdf [starshipreckless.com] The Wired article's author is listed as 'admin'.... wonder if admin has read any of Athena's articles... Of course, there is nothing new. No doubt many have penned similar sentiments before. I'd take a slightly different tack and suggest that imaginative work in any realm is not only essential, but part of the human construct. We thrive on extending our possibilities through th
  • by AmElder ( 1385909 ) on Sunday January 24, 2010 @03:12PM (#30881578) Homepage

    I had a teacher as a child who told me "art teaches us how to be human." It's a compelling idea that neatly sums up my experience with novels, music, theatre, and some movies. I think, though, if it can also be a deceptive illusion that distracts us and convinces us the world is better than it is and we ourselves are kinder, more knowledgeable, better meaning, more competent than we really are.

    If I understand the article right, the idea is that speculative sci-fi helps people beat future shock. By reading/viewing speculative stories, models of good technology use lodge in our minds and we get prepared to make decisions about using tools that come to us. I can see that. But counter that rosy image with the idea that stories featuring high technology instead train us to acquiesce to technology in our lives, not making conscious choices but instead sleepwalking into an isolated, un-fun, inhuman world all the while under the illusion that we're in control of the process.

    I'm inclined to think that the best way to make good choices is by paying attention to the here and now, not by putting "the logical part of our brains... 100% in the future at all times." We can recognize good technology by seeing the good it does in our lives, not by comparing it Blade Runner, Star Trek, or District 9. (or Snowcrash, Red Mars, or Neuromancer). Marry that with social interaction, so that adopting/creating new technology is a communal, connected process and we have a good chance of making good decisions.

  • S(peculative)F is solidified imagination. Imagination must remain fluid, but it should also be provided material from which to start and with which to work. In the absence of this particular form, another would no doubt come to fore, such as the original Hypercard was intended. Perhaps after the fact such a codification of material for speculating might be seen as necessary, but that's only after the fact. At the time it (SF or its substitute for the purpose stated) is simply an inevitable and spontaneous e

  • by Animats ( 122034 ) on Sunday January 24, 2010 @04:21PM (#30882258) Homepage

    The article has much blithering about "exponential change", probably written by someone who has no idea what that means, or that the exponent might be < 1. Actually, the rate of change in lifestyle for the average person in the developed world is slowing down. And much of the change is negative.

    It's useful to think of the Industrial Revolution as starting in 1808. That's the first year someone bought a train ticket and went someplace. Technology prior to that was spotty and didn't have much broad impact. Most people never got more than 50 miles from where they were born, just as in the previous 5000 years or so.

    Jump ahead 50 years, to 1858. Railroads were all over France, Germany, Britain, and the eastern US. Telegraph lines were widespread. The first Atlantic cable was just starting to work. Heavy machinery and big factories were producing goods in volume. The world had become much smaller, and there was far more man-made stuff in it. The life of someone who lived from 1808 to 1858 changed enormously during one lifespan.

    Jump ahead to 1908. Railroads to everywhere worth going. Electric power. Telephones. Wireless. Cars. The first airplanes. Much more manufacturing. The world of 1908 had early versions of most of the important stuff we have now, yet it was a century ago.

    Jump ahead to 1958. Almost everything we have now already existed. Jet aircraft, nuclear power plants, space satellites, transistors, computers, television, Interstate highways, data communications - they were all up and running. The first IC was proposed in 1958. Antibiotics were available, and DNA had been identified. Manufacturing was so good that production gluts were common. Agriculture in the developed world was producing so much food that surpluses were a major issue.

    Now look at the last 50 years. All the stuff from 1958 works, usually better, but most of what's happened since then is tweaks on 1958 technology. No new big sources of energy. No big progress in space travel in 40 years. Progress has slowed down. Per capita income real for the median American hasn't increased much in 40 years. Corporate leaders don't even talk about "progress" any more; just "change".

    The next 50 years are going to be about running out of stuff. Oil, copper, neodymium, and tantalum are already getting scarce. Substitutes all use more energy and money. A century ago, raw materials were available near where they were used. The easy to get at resources have already been extracted. It looks like it's all downhill from here.

    Which is why SF has lost its optimism. Popular SF today is either space opera or about vampires. Or it's about a realistic, but grim, near future. SF is now just entertainment; it has no major cultural function, other than perhaps preparing us for the future society of scarcity.

    "My grandfather rode a camel, my father rode a camel, I drive a Mercedes, my son drives a Land Rover, his son will drive a Land Rover, but his son will ride a camel." - Rashid bin Saeed Al Maktoum, Emir of Dubai.

  • by swframe ( 646356 ) on Sunday January 24, 2010 @04:24PM (#30882300)
    I didn't RTFA but I've wondered if dreams are similar. When faced with a similar situation, do people use their dream experiences to help make a quicker decision. I wonder if deja vu is just the feeling of experiencing something from a forgotten dream.
  • ..or roving bands of cannibal gangs. The next twenty years are going to be a fun time to be alive.

"All the people are so happy now, their heads are caving in. I'm glad they are a snowman with protective rubber skin" -- They Might Be Giants

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