Any Smithsonian Magazine readers out there? The May issue caught my eye because it has Patrick Stewart on the cover. The man is 73 but he is still as hunky as ever (his wife is only 35!). Much as I’d love to ramble on about him, I’m going to move on to an article of interest in the magazine on science fiction. No, it’s not Star Trek or X-Men but it could be!
The article is How America’s Leading Science Fiction Authors are Shaping Your Future by Eileen Gunn. We often think of science fiction in terms of whether or not the view of the future comes true. I have found myself saying more than once, where’s my flying car? This is unfair, of course. As Gunn suggests,
the task of science fiction is not to predict the future. Rather, it contemplates possible futures.
Some writers like Ursula Le Guin like future settings because it is a big question mark making it a safe place to try out ideas. Others like to envision where contemporary social trends or science and technology might take us. Sometimes you get happy futures but these days more often than not you get dystopian futures with ideas, social structures or technology taken to extremes. Think Margaret Atwood with biotech and genetic engineering or Suzanne Collins taking the gap between rich and poor to the extreme in Hunger Games.
But does science pay attention to science fiction? Yes, it does. Astrophysicist Jordin Kare went to MIT because the hero of his favorite Robert Heinlein novel went to school there. And last fall two MIT instructors taught a class called “Science Fiction to Science Fabrication” that had a syllabus crammed with scifi novels and stories, movies and games. Students were assigned to create a functional prototype inspired by their reading and then consider the social context of what they created. One group of students, inspired by William Gibson’s Neuromancer, built a device that enables the user to make a hand gesture that stimulates the muscles in the hand of a distant second user to create the same gesture. The students thought it would be great for use in physical therapy but there was also a big discussion around how the technology might be exploited for unethical purposes as it was in Gibson’s novel.
Then there is design fiction, something I have never heard of before but which makes complete sense. Tech companies commission imaginative works to model new ideas and create what-if stories about potential new products. Novelists the likes of Cory Doctorow have written these sorts of “science fictions.”
We might not have flying cars but we have plenty of other technologies thanks to the imaginations of science fiction writers and the skills of scientists. While the design fiction kind of creeps me out a little bit (I’m not sure why), I am heartened to know that there are plenty of scientists who love and are inspired by scifi. As the article concludes:
Science fiction, at its best, engenders the sort of flexible thinking that not only inspires us, but compels us to consider the myriad potential consequences of our actions.
STEPHANIE, IF ONLY OUR GOVERNMENT ELECTED OFFICIALS WOULD ADHERE TO THIS(the closing statement).
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waddlesbluhealer, heh, you got that right!
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I’m off to Wiscon tomorrow, and expect to hear about great new SF to keep me reading for another year!
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Jeanne, lucky you! Have fun! I hope you make a full report on your blog when you return! š
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It seems only natural that scifi would spark the imagination of scientists, with all its “what ifs.” I’ve just recently started reading science fiction, having started with The Invasion of The Body Snatchers earlier this year and then moving on to Jules Verne. Good post. (although, Stef, as much as I agree with you that Patrick Stewart is a well-preserved oldie…a wife who is young enough to be his granddaughter? Well, it’s none of my business. Nevertheless, it’s very famous Hollywood guy stereotypical…non?)
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Grad, oh, you are starting with the classics! Fun, isn’t it? I admit though I haven’t read much of Verne but I will eventually. Heh, I admit to being rather surprised Stewart’s wife was only 35. She is also his third which was also a bit disappointing.
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Yes, great article and the whole issue is better than usual!
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rhapsody, I agree, there are more than the usual number of especially interesting articles in the issue.
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I remember when Star Trek DS9 first started desperately wanting the sort of electronic pad that Jake used to read and write on. I have three of them now!
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Alex, LOL, yes! I always thought something like that would be cool too and now I’ve got my iPad! What I am waiting for next are the holographic computers that all the scifi shows seem to have these days. š
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Ooh, I have that issue–am so behind in my magazine reading, but I will check that article out! I still want to read some Sci Fi this year….. (I say that every year it seems–maybe those Atwood books, though….do they count?).
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Danielle, I am really behind on magazines too. I have a National Geographic and few others from April and May I haven’t even opened yet! Atwood doesn’t call herself scifi, but I disagree with her definition and think her books count as SF š
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Good article. The idea that science fiction drives a lot of science really hit home for me when I read China Mieville’s Kraken, where he took it to an extreme, but he made the point that science fiction and real science are feeding and inspiring the same audience of geeks that grow up to try to make the fiction a reality. Tablets, credit cards, 3d printing, Internet of Things — all sci-fi ideas.
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Isabella, glad you enjoyed the article! Oh, thanks for the reminder that I haven’t read Kraken yet! I’m going to have to figure out a way to fit it into my summer reading š I really want one of those holographic computers like they have on Agents of Shield and other SF movies and shows. I suspect there is someone out there working on the technology.
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STEPH, WHEN YOU CONSIDER THAT THE FIRST OF OUR COMPUTERS WAS A CITY BLOCK LARGE, AND NOW IT HAS BEEN REDUCED TO A CHIP NO LARGER THAN A PEA…YOU CAN BE ASSURED THAT THEY’RE WORKING ON THE TECHNOLOGY TO EXCEED THIS AND OTHER INOVATIONS. MY HOPE IS THAT THEY WILL NOT BECOME SO ADVANCED THAT MAN CANNOT KEEP UP WITH THE CHANGES; ALTHOUGH IT IS WISE TO REMEMBER WE MUST FIRST LEARN TO CRAWL BEFORE WE WALK. I TOO , LOOK FORWARD TO READING THE ISSUE YOU REFERENCED. IT SOUNDS FASCINATING! LOL.
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