Science fiction and innovation – nearly there

Seems a while since I trailed the project I did for NESTA on science fiction and innovation, but it is now about to be published.

I’ve commented on retro-futures here quite a bit. For this piece, I  assembled a little composite, to enliven the beginning of a long review paper. Here it is, as a taster for the whole (quite big) thing.

As you sip your perfect coffee, you scan the morning’s personalised news on your vidscreen. Finance: yields on your undersea city bonds look poor after the pressure seal scare on the prototype dome, but asteroid mining shares are up. Win some, lose some.

Your wrist phone chimes with a message from your spouse. Her business trip to review the Sahara forest project will finish early and she ought to make the noon hypersonic shuttle and be home by teatime. Maybe you can still make the premiere of that new zero-G dance show tonight.

Time to leave. You signal the table to resorb the scant remains of your nutritionally balanced breakfast. The kids couldn’t wait. They are already in the media room for the day’s first lesson – their artificially intelligent tutor-cum-playmate is conducting a virtual reality tour of the first Olympic Games, reconstructed from the latest time probe results. You don’t want to interrupt, so you record a farewell reminder to check their gear for the afternoon’s sub-aqua games at the local leisure park.

The autopilot banks your flying car over the scattered houses, course set for the city, and you see clouds breaking up as the neighbouring county’s early morning shower clears on schedule. Here, robot cultivators tirelessly tend the fields below. On the horizon the nuclear reactor that powers them all gleams in the sun…

And so it never quite came to pass. We slightly jaded, technology fatigued, 21^st century citizens recognise the story I have just invented as a parody of the future as it used to appear. Some of the inventions that earlier writers conjured up really exist. Some don’t. Some they never imagined have also entered our lives. But everyday life is as gloriously imperfect as ever, and few expect that to change.

What does science fiction have to do with any of this?

My answer appears on Thursday, along with a second paper from a team at Sussex U answering the same question. I’ll put up a link then for the download.

 

Publishing futures…

My version of the future is receding into the past, as they all do – but the vagaries of contemporary publishing have made that happen a bit faster than I anticipated.

Yes, folks, Rough Guide to the Future is going out of print. (Shocking, I know.) There may still be a copy in your local bookstore, but you can no longer get the publisher to ship you one.

I mention this partly because I’m giving a talk tonight and the book is named in the blurb, so seems as well to record that it’s now harder to get hold of. Also because, there is a certain wry amusement in the author of a futures book being able to add the following. So acute are my powers of prediction that I also failed to foresee the additional news in the standard regretful email from the esteemed commissioning editor telling me the book was going away. Rough Guides Reference Division is also ceasing to be…  Some of their volumes do remain available but there will be no new titles (and no jobs there), as far as I know.

So…  my book now has a nice double distinction: it was shortlisted for a prize, and it broke the publisher,  or feels a bit like that.

It also leaves an annoyingly untidy situation for any prospective readers at this late date, which I share because it is a small example of where book publishing is at – that is, in a mess. The print rights (which I don’t really care about – update it? No thanks) revert to me now, I think. The eBook rights, maybe not. After all an eBook can’t go out of print… can it? And even if the rights did come to me, that wouldn’t include RG’s design work, or the images and diagrams, so all I would have would be a plain text. Some of that might be worth drawing on for new works, I suppose (feel free to ask), but the whole thing would be dull to swallow.

So rather overpriced eBook – which, stupidly, cost more than the paperback after Amazon’s print book discount – remains on offer from them, and from Rough Guides, and other sellers I guess although I haven’t checked. I doubt that they’ll actually sell any, but then keeping a web page up costs virtually nothing so they aren’t going to lose, either.

I do, as it happens, also have DRM-free PDF and ePub files of the actual book here. It goes without saying these are strictly for my own personal use…

The dreams our stuff is made of – Science fiction and future technologies

I have a new, and somewhat futuristic project on the go

.

NESTA have asked for a review and reflection on the role of science fiction in technological innovation. It will be published in the early Autumn alongside a couple of reports on more, ahem, formal futurological methods. I’ll be blogging thoughts about this here as I go.

Now, though, a simple request for help. There’s obviously stuff I need to know about. I can think of lots of different areas to explore – and will of course be doing a (limited) literature review and compiling a bibliography in academic mode.

But there are too many disciplines relevant here for one person to cover. There is also, I suspect, a fair bit of grey literature – some in print and, perhaps, more on the web.

So a little crowdsourcing seems in order. I’d be very grateful for any pointers to relevant items – research, commentary, discussion, etc – which I should ponder. Assume I will revisit the histories of SF and technology, literature on innovation, and journals in (science fiction) literature, science and technology studies and design. But anything outside those areas which I might miss is of interest.

I am particularly interested in:

• Robots – as a case study
• Design fiction/interaction design/speculative design
• Examples from non-Anglophone countries
• Projects in which tech development organisations (public or private) have dallied with science fiction in various ways.
• and, to ensure the project is as much fun as I intended when I pitched for it, exemplary fictions!

And the questions in NESTA’s original call were about:

• The direct impact of science fiction on those undertaking technological development, and the extent to which it has influenced research, product design, or the ambition and direction of innovation
• The influence of science fiction on the demand for innovation
• The influence of science fiction on the social status of innovation
• The creative processes and techniques that science fiction writers use to imagine and flesh out possible futures.

You might think, at first look, some of these will be easier to tackle than others. Me too…

If anything comes to mind in response to any of the above, do please take a moment to pass it on. If you use the comment space below, others can avoid repeating if they care to read through.

Thanks!

Related articles

• The Future Repeats Itself: What Science Fiction Has to Say About Google’s Fancy Glasses (motherboard.vice.com)

(working already – WordPress’s auto link search just gave me this…)

Styling the future

What does the future look like? Does it matter? A piece of book karma prompts an attempt to amplify a thought I was trying to air last week. Talking to an audience at UCL, including quite a few old friends, I mentioned an idea which has come up here, and in other talks, a few times – that the accumulation of old futures has interesting effects on the way we respond (if we do) to current future talk.

The accumulation is real, and takes various forms – there are quite a few coffee table books. But it is most often encountered, I reckon, in websites, often very nicely curated ones, which feature images and designs from past futures efforts – Worlds Fairs, magazines, comics and so on. As I said on the night, hardly any need to illustrate these. Do a google image search for retrofuture or palaeofuture and you’ll get thousands of them.

Next day I called in on my favourite London odds and ends bookshop, Judd Street Books (don’t look there, incidentally, it’s in Marchmont Street). More or less the first title I set eyes on on the front table was this.

It is a beautifully crafted graphic novel, only published in 2009, which I unaccountably missed when it came out. The narrative is a little didactic, but the imagery covers much of the history of decayed futurity, and comments on it perceptively. There’s a clever, and also nicely realised, interwoven narrative of a made-up comic book which enriches the author’s take on the feelings which were in play in all the episodes he depicts so well, from the New York World’s Fair in 1939 – which I talk about as well – to the final Apollo moon landing in 1975.

I won’t summarise it, as plenty of others have – here and here for example.

But what I like about it is that it takes such trouble to go beyond the images. The very interesting discussion after the talk moved a few times to talk about imagery and design like this and how they get used now. And it seemed to me, though I didn’t formulate the thought clearly at the time, that this is part of the problem. The images are so easy to come by that folks get caught up in talking about the look and style of the future.

I love looking at these pix, but I don’t actually care what the future looks like, or much about changing fashions in futuristic design. What matters is surely how the future might feel, what past futures tales tell us about that and, if we can fathom them, what the mentalities of times past made of their imagined futures.

This book makes a good stab at representing that, going beyond and reworking the images. It has affinities with David Gelernter’s splendid but quirky Lost World of the Fair, but is more accessible. It is well worth getting hold of as a discussion starter.

Incidentally, and back to images again, the notes to the other book point to a fascinating compilation of visitor shot cine of the World’s Fair, at http://www.archive.org

like this 

Death, where is thy sting?

When people suggest that the mood of the times is uncommonly pessimistic – as happens quite often – I tend to think of the depths of the cold war and the months and years before World War Two as the most obvious counter-examples. OK, there are real concerns now about climate change, food supply, biodiversity and WMDs, not to mention the economy. But a little reflection suggests there was more cause for immediate worry during the Cuban Missile Crisis, say – when it was reasonable to believe that civilisation was going to destroy itself within the next few days -  or in the longer period before the outbreak of war in 1939, when there was a pervasive sense of things moving inexorably toward a terrible, necessary conflict. Sample Louis MacNiece’s brilliant Autumn Journal for a sense of what a life lived in that mood was like.

A better example, though, might be the later Middle Ages, because people were not just in fear of apocalyptic times, they were living through them. The fourteenth century, in particular saw a truly dreadful combination of recurrent famines, the Black Death, and the Hundred Years War, a conflict marked by a shift toward wider population involvement in wars and higher mortality rates. In Europe, the net result was a massive die-off, accounting for around half the population.

The population loss is often put lower, but John Aberth’s compelling From the Brink of the Apocalypse argues convincingly for the higher figure. And that is just the average. In many places, it was higher – near total wipe-out. Only the remotest corners of Europe, such as Finland, escaped lightly.

Aberth’s book, first issued in 2000 but republished in a second edition in 2010, is interested in the cultural effects of all this mayhem and mortality. What did it produce? Well, eventually, the Renaissance. European society, by whatever means,  reconstituted itself, gained a new cultural and economic momentum, and invented the idea of progress. That all took another century and a half or so, but still seems remarkable when you read of the devastated towns, mass graves, incinerated villages, and dormant croplands of the great age of disaster which went before.

How did they manage it? The answer Aberth explores relates to a crucial difference between then and now. It might explain, not how our forebears created the Renaissance and the scientific revolution, but how they coped with the daily reminders of mass mortality. They believed in the afterlife. The culture, as he illustrates at length, was proccupied with death to an unusual degree – understandably so. The image of the times, as featured on the book’s cover, is Breughel’s Triumph of Death. But in art and much other commentary it was usually depicted as a necessary prelude to the life to come. That did not make it welcome, and the century majored in some of the more horrible ways to die, but did perhaps make it easier to bear.

This is a description, not a prescription. Aberth declares there is no possibility of going back to a widespread belief in the afterlife (even in the US). But it offers a connection with another, slimmer, volume I’ve been dipping into again. Robert Heilbroner’s admirably succinct Visions of the Future (1995) also charts the rise and then decline of the belief in progress. He ends with a suggestion that the twentieth century’s interest in futurology is basically a substitute for belief in the afterlife. It is, as he puts it, a “secular analgesic”.

The phrase comes in a passage worth quoting at length:

“It is to find some secular analgesic for what the theologian Paul Tillich called “existential anxiety” that people…  seek to foresee the future. At a primal level it is simply to assure ourselves that human life will go on; at a more rational level, to depict its contours and design as best we can; and at a level that stands in for religious faith, to express what hope we can for the life of humankind.”

Hmm, seem to have arrived at a Futurist thought for the day there, so I’ll stop.

Taking care of the basics…

The first review of the Rough Guide to the Future is a short in New Scientist. The heading “Futurology that’s tied to the present” gives a good sense of the reviewer’s take. He goes on:

As the author drily points out, an accident of branding has made for an apt title: no work about the future can hope to be anything more than a rough guide. Explaining why this should be so makes for a sprightly opening account of futurology’s past and present (but not, as it happens, its future).

The momentum wanes, however, through a succession of chapters on such over-familiar issues as population, climate, energy and food security. Turney has clearly done his homework and deftly uses quotes, facts and asides to enliven the text, but the result nonetheless smacks more of present-day preoccupations than horizon-scanning prescience.

Not much here will be new to dedicated students of the future. A more creative structure might have shown the material off to better advantage, and greater licence to speculate would have helped too. For a rough guide, this is a little too polished.

This is all fair enough, I reckon. I do (not surprisingly) think it misses the point slightly, though. The whole point of a Rough Guide – the brand and the general idea beyond that – is to take care of the basics as smoothly as possible, isn’t it? If you know them all already, and are, indeed, a dedicated student of the future, you probably don’t need to read it, certainly not all the way through. It might be rather more use to other people though. I hope so!

 

Futurist thought for the day

Having invoked death here the other day, here’s a thought on the larger scale significance of death – which is natural selection, obviously.

 

Judging from the past, we may safely infer that not one living species will transmit its unaltered likeness to a distant futurity. And of the species now living very few will transmit progeny of any kind to a far distant futurity; for the manner in which all organic beings are grouped, shows that the greater number of species of each genus, and all the species of many genera, have left no descendants, but have become utterly extinct. We can so far take a prophetic glance into futurity as to foretel that it will be the common and widely-spread species, belonging to the larger and dominant groups, which will ultimately prevail and procreate new and dominant species. As all the living forms of life are the lineal descendants of those which lived long before the Silurian epoch, we may feel certain that the ordinary succession by generationhas never once been broken, and that no cataclysm has desolated the whole world. Hence we may look with some confidence to a secure future of equally inappreciable length. And as natural selection works solely by and for the good of each being, all corporeal and mental endowments will tend to progress towards perfection.

So said Darwin in the penultimate paragraph of the 1st edition of The Origin of Species – as many will probably recall because the last paragraph of all, with its tangled bank, is the most famous in the whole book. I like this one for its disingenuous, double-edged quality. It sounds progressive, as many took evolution to be. But Darwin is departing from his own theory here and slipping into teleology. That “perfection” is not absolute, only perfection of adaptation to a particular environment. And it comes at the price of a large heap of death, in this case death of species -  if there is improvement, it comes at the price of extinction…  H. G. Wells, among many others, got the point.

Futurist thought for the day

I’ve often noted that within the first thirty seconds of a conversation about the future the past usually comes up to support a prediction.

This is how Gregory Benford opens his introduction to the splendid new volume The Wonderful Future that Never Was. The words

caught my eye because I have been saying just the same thing for the last few years. So I take their appearance in print as independent verification of the observation. As he goes on to say (and he’s definitely not the first here), all our knowledge is about the past, but all our decisions are about the future.

 

 

 

 

The book is recommended – a nice combination of lavish illustration and acute commentary, even though the emphasis on the occasional “correct” predictions is a little unpersuasive a times. It is a worthy addition to the growing genre of retro-future publications which has been highlighted here before. Its only limitation is that it is all culled from a single magazine, Popular Mechanics. That is a fab source, but a volume like Dregni and Dregni’s Follies of Science: 20th Century Visions of Our Fantastic Future,  is worth tracking down for its rather wider coverage, and richer illustrative material.

Future shock from the past

Future shock is a term coined in the 1960s, but the idea wasn’t new. The main difference was that in earlier periods when there was a perception of rapid change (certainly justified for the years between, say, 1860 and 1910), it was more often celebrated.

The Futurists’ reputation is tarnished by their later sympathy with Italian fascism, but they were good at nailing some things about the contemporary world in ways which sound interestingly familiar.

Consider:

Futurism is grounded in the complete renewal of human sensibility brought about by the great discoveries of science. Those people who today make use of the telegraph, the telephone, the phonograph, the train, the bicycle, the motorcycle, the automobile, the ocean liner, the dirigible, the aeroplane, the cinema, the great newspaper (synthesis of a day in the world’s life) do not realize that these various means of communication, transportation and information have a decisive influence on their psyches.

An ordinary man can in a day’s time travel by train from a little dead town of empty squares, where the sun, the dust, and the wind amuse themselves in silence, to a great capital city bristling with lights, gestures, and street cries. By reading a newspaper the inhabitant of a mountain village can tremble each day with anxiety, following insurrection in China, the London and New York suffragettes, Doctor Carrel, and the heroic dog-sleds of the polar explorers. The timid, sedentary inhabitant of any provincial town can indulge in the intoxication of danger by going to the movies and watching a great hunt in the Congo. He can admire Japanese athletes, Negro boxers, tireless American eccentrics, the most elegant Parisian women, by paying a franc to go to the variety theater. Then, back in his bourgeois bed, he can enjoy the distant, expensive voice of a Caruso or a Burzio.

This is part of the preamble to Marinetti’s essay on The Futurist Sensibility. The date? 1913.

You can read the whole thing here

Fictional predictions – Asimov’s psychohistory

Predictions, predictions…  Following on from William Gibson reiterating that it is no part of the job of science fiction writers to predict, despite the culture’s persistence in casting them in that role, it is interesting, perhaps, to take another look at one famous story in which prediction is the order of the day – but as something which is possible in the fictional world. Just because we cannot predict the future, only tell stories about possible futures, that sad (or heartening) fact does not stop you telling stories in which the future is predictable.

The most famous of these in classic science fiction is Isaac Asimov’s Foundation trilogy, written between 1942 and 1952. (He produced more Foundation novels toward the end of his life, and the sequence has since been continued by others).

The trilogy portrays the fall of a galactic empire – one with innumerable fictional descendents. But the key to the books is the science of “psychohistory”, developed by Hari Seldon – who may have looked like this.

Image via Wikipedia

Seldon’s Foundations (yes, there are two: one open, one covert) are set up to guide action toward a revival of empire, using his foreknowledge of events.

How did Asimov, whose own scientific training was in biochemistry, depict psychohistory?  Pretty vaguely. It is supposed to be statistically based, on the principle that individuals are unpredictable but the behaviour of masses of people can be calculated – the insurance industry relies on the same idea, and it has been explored in other contexts in Philip Ball’s excellent Critical Mass. But the mathematical breakthroughs which allow Seldon to take the principle further are not really described.

And when you read closely, the results are a mite contradictory. Psychohistory is only supposed to yield probabilities, but they turn out to be amazingly exact – an impression reinforced by Seldon turning up on archived video at various points and, rather annoyingly,  telling people what is about to happen.  There is also a strong sense that his science offers a way of reading laws of history, which have inevitable outcomes. In which case it is less clear why the Foundation needs to intervene. The whole thing is a good yarn, partly because  Seldon’s Plan knits together a narrative which spans centuries, while other characters die off.  But the attempt to figure psychohistory as a science seems less and less convincing as time passes. Seldon is Nostradamus with knobs on.