Thanks to all those who helped (see the acknowledgements), but especially to Cheryl Morgan, who knows far more about SF and the people who write it than I do.

You can download it from here.

There’s an interestingly complementary companion piece from the Sussex group who looked into the same question here.

If you’d just like to know where my review of all this ends up, here’s the conclusion…

…the stories embodied in technologies, or designs, and fiction form an intricate, evolving web. Efforts to pinpoint causes and effects are rarely convincing. They might not be especially useful even if they were. We are discussing the weaving of culture, and no individual case is likely to be repeatable. But there does seem to have been a gradual, general movement over time.

It can be roughly summarised.

Technology, and plans for technology, revolve around stories. These, minimally, say: we will make a thing that does this.

 Science fiction asks, if we made a thing like this, how might the world look? What effects might it have?

 Design fiction says: here is a thing we could make: what do you feel about a possible world that has such things in it?

These kinds of stories are not mutually exclusive. Each can influence the other. Technologists promoting their projects can adopt ideas from science fiction to say: the thing we will make will be like this. In film, they can sometimes insert the image of what they hope to make. People who want to discourage particular technological projects can of course do likewise. Design fiction is more like an open question. If the capacity to make things like this comes about, what would we like to do with it? Nor do any of the stories necessarily have the effects their authors hope for. But all three benefit from the illimitable flexibility of fiction. As Rudy Rucker put it, before design fiction was conceived: “The reason why fiction thought experiments are so powerful is that, in practice, it’s intractably difficult to visualize the effects of new technological developments. Only if you place the new tech into a fleshed-out fictional world and simulate the effects on reality can you get a clear image of what might happen.” Or, more briefly, when it comes to technology assessment, “inspired narration is a more powerful tool than logical analysis”.

And a concluding question about where one might take all this…

The collection of diverse items – texts, discussions, projects, artworks, events and videos – which can be gathered under the heading of design fiction also deserve more investigation. It is not easy to know what effect or impact they have had, individually or collectively. Have they influenced any subsequent real-world design projects or prototypes? What has been their public reach compared with other influences on public attitudes to technology, or other images of possible futures – including more conventional science fiction texts? Finally, what scope it there for making more use of design fiction, and who might support such efforts? There are interesting affinities emerging, for example, between design fiction and art/science/design projects intended to provoke discussion about synthetic biology – an area of technology which promises to make design a meaningful notion in the life science. For example, Alexander Ginsberg’s Irrational Genome Project is, in effect, a challenge to others to create design fictions drawing on the ambitions of synthetic biologists. It also points toward other, more participatory modes related to design fiction, such as biohacking

There seem to be an increasing number of routes to using our increased awareness of the importance of images of possible future technologies in shaping what actually gets developed. More research and thinking about the whole collection, gathered under the heading of design fiction, might help us see more clearly how they can be exploited to help selection and development of technologies which can be part of our preferred futures.

I hope some will read the whole thing. It’s a discussion paper, so any reactions are welcome – I think there’ll be some discussion on NESTA’s  blog, or you can  comment in the space below.

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.

Doing so, a distant memory stirred. I wrote a thing, didn’t I? Yup, a mere 22 years ago. It came out of a conference celebrating the 25th anniversary of the Science Policy Research Unit at Sussex, and turned into a long feature for New Scientist.

As innovation, and innovation policy, is in its way about the future, it might interest a few people who follow this little blog. And someone (not me) has fished it out of the New Scientist archive and made it into a PDF, which you can read here.

I guess I still quite like the piece, or I wouldn’t put up the link. It also makes me wonder a couple of things. One, which I don’t have much of an answer to as I haven’t paid much attention to this literature since, concerns the “linear model” whose obituary this piece offers, not for the first time. Are people still trying to stop the coffin lid springing open and this simple view of the matter dancing into the conversation yet again? (I suspect they are). Suggestions for best update on the field welcomed…

The other is whether today’s New Scientist would ever run a 4,000 word through written piece (a cover feature no less) on a topic like this. Pretty sure I know the answer to that one (no). I remember being slightly surprised it ran at that length even in 1991. Was fun to write, though.

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…

I wasn’t quite sure where they were starting from, or where we might want to take the discussion in a single 90 minute session, so in the end I provided a selection. These are not samplings from the Dark Mountain, or cornucopian blatherings, more entries into some kind of conversation about how we think about the future, and why. Aside from that

The criteria were fairly simple arbitrary:

not by me

not too long

interesting

easily available

exemplifying different approaches/points of view

on my hard drive already

It occurs to me they might be of use to a few other people, so here is the list, with web links.

20 Ways the Future has Let Us Down

One of those, where’s my flying car? pieces…  LINK

A Primer on Futures Studies, Foresight and the Use of Scenarios  Dr Joseph Voros, Swinburne University of Technology LINK (pdf)

The Future of Humanity Nick Bostrom

Big picture/deep time thinking from Oxford LINK (pdf)

H. G. Wells – “The future is as fixed and determinate as the past”

(or: The Discovery of the Future) as printed in the New York Times, 1913 LINK (pdf)

The Future and How to Think About It.

(old Cabinet Office Paper – gives flavour of some government thinking in UK) LINK (pdf)

Outsights – 21 Drivers for the 21st Century

A flavour of independent consultancy in this area. LINK

Paul Saffo – Six Rules for Effective Forecasting

Harvard Business Review 2007  LINK

And I’ll add a couple of very recent documents which result from large scale, institutional foresight efforts from establishment global elite points of view -

The World Economic Forum – Global Risks 2013 LINK

US National Intelligence Council – Global Trends 2030: Alternative Worlds

(latest in a series dating back some years) LINK

Also very thought-provoking is this new essay in the American Historical Review on the conflicted roots of post WW2 futurology. LINK

Feel free to add others which might be better in the comments…

As is the way of these things, some of the futures think pieces they commissioned (not mine – old journos do deadlines) took longer to produce than originally planned. So we are having a meeting to discuss them tomorrow, and think about what it all means.

Intriguingly, I learn that the SF and Innovation commission ended up doubled. That is, another contractor got some money to examine the same question. Neither of us, I think, knew the other (the other team in their case) was at work.

That means we both spent time reviewing the same literature, which may or may not be beneficial, but also (and better) that if our conclusions are similar they may gain force from independent verification. We may talk about that tomorrow as well.

The whole set of projects will be published, I believe, as NESTA working papers, but not until some time next year. All the folk who helped me do mine will be properly acknowledged then, but thanks to all now as well – and especially to Cheryl Morgan for advice on science fiction and authors.

Frau im Mond – ready for launch, unlike this report

Meantime, and in advance of the meeting, here is a 12 point version of the quite long (15,000 word) paper I’ve ended up with.

Science fiction and technological innovation -

1. Science fiction and innovation influence each other

(although that could just be ‘cos “everything influences everything else”)

2. Technology, at the design stage, is a kind of story-telling

(a point I’ve taken from David Nye, among others)

3. SF is a characteristic mode of story-telling of industrial society

(or “the dreamtime of industrial society – W Gibson)

4. This affinity promotes their mutual influence

5. SF’s treatment of technology has a history

(and that is a story itself)

6. Most (but not all) simple stories of SF inspiring, or even influencing technology fall apart on close examination

7. Past influence has been largely positive

(though not because the balance of depictions is positive – but cheerleading works better than doomsaying and awful warnings)

8. Mass exposure to SF has now moved into the cinema, where some depictions of technology have qualities which lend them particular influence

9. Contemporary SF authors neither predict nor, in the main, attempt to influence technology

(they said, when asked)

10. Nevertheless, a growing self-consciousness about SF and technologies mutual influences has arisen

(among media, critics, corporations, and all)

11. One of its most striking manifestations is design fiction

(which comes under various other names, but all are trying to open up a conversation about possible futures)

12. This approach might be developed to deepen relations between fiction and technology, and enrich public debate about technological futures.

If anyone wants to see the whole thing now in late draft, for comment or just for interest, or nab the references (the bibliography is quite long, too)  email me and I’ll let you have a not-for-distribution PDF.

I am even inclined to react to the common 21^st century observation that we now live in a science-fictional reality with the raised eyebrow of a simple soul pedant. If it’s reality, it ain’t fictional.

But working on the current project for NESTA on SF and innovation has brought home more strongly that fact and fiction are deeply interwoven in some areas of science and technology.

The prime exhibit here, I think, is nanotechnology. It is a hard case to analyse clearly because the term is so vague. It is partly an extension of materials science, with finer control over the composition of the product, down to the molecular or even atomic level. It is also a label for a much broader collection of ideas, involving nanometre scale devices – equipped with some power source and computing and communication capacity – which would be able to do many wonderful things. The ostensibly non-fiction accounts of the latter prospectus often draw on science fiction tropes, a habit that extends on occasion to government reports.

These science-fictional roots of the more exotic possibilities of nanotechnology have attracted much attention. Conclusions about their significance differ widely. Some say that nanotechnology concepts are inherently science fictional, and this is a bad thing. Others maintain that it is true but does not matter. Science fiction either helps or hinders funding, confuses or informs policy-makers, inspires support, or raises unrealistic expectations and evokes public fears. Maybe all of these things have been true at some point, I don’t know. But it seems inescapably true that discussion of nanotechnology and its potential has always been a science fiction discourse, even when the point being made is that some claims are “science fiction” and therefore illegitimate. I like Chris Toumey’s formulation here: “Nanotechnology needs a language that describes the future because, no matter how good the science is now, most of the technology is still over the horizon.” That language is inherently science-fictional.

Now I’m wondering whether there is a category of technologies which are inherently science fiction in a similar way. They would need to be things which were realisable in principle (or someone claims are realisable – which is where many of the nano-disputes arise) but not yet achievable in practice. I’d rule out faster than light travel or time travel, as our current scientific understanding doesn’t offer any basis for thinking they will happen. That may change, but for now they are more simply fictional.

A clearer example of what I mean is terraforming. There are reasonable scenarios for how it might be done. We perhaps know enough geophysics and atmospheric chemistry to map routes to altering suitable planets to make them more hospitable than we find them. The topic remains inherently fictional as we do not have any planets to try out these ideas on.

Set dressing the atmosphere processor for Aliens. We may assume the real thing will be larger.

Or do we? Terraforming as an intellectual problem blends seamlessly with geoengineering, which is still imaginary but could become a usefully real prospect before the century is out. We might need to do some terraforming on Earth.

In which case, it is interesting to ask how SF accounts of refashioning other planets might influence ideas about geoengineering. The same authors have certainly touched on both topics. James Lovelock, originator of Gaia theory, turned to fiction – with co-author Michael Allaby – to describe the terraforming of Mars. Later on, he proposed schemes for geoengineering on Earth to combat the effects of climate change. Kim Stanley Robinson, whose Mars trilogy has probably the most detailed account of terraforming, went on to elaborate some geoengineering scenarios in his subsequent near-future Earth trilogy about climate change. Gregory Benford has written both fiction and non-fiction about terraforming, citing Heinlein as an inspiration there, and was an early proponent of geoengineering as a possible response to climate change, in 1997.

Then there are films, which as usual will have been seen by more people. Does that make them more influential? No idea. Terraforming is going on in Aliens (“we call them shake and bake planets”), and we see a vast industrial plant which is the colonists’ “atmosphere processor”, though don’t get any discussion of what it is actually doing. The wondrously silly scene at the end of Total Recall when Mars has its atmosphere reoxygenated in about half a minute also comes to mind, but only as a cheerful trashing of the laws of physics.

It would be interesting, though, to catalogue these and similar depictions and consider what effect they may have had on broader discussion of the merits of geoengineering. Which other examples should go on the list? Matt Williams has an interesting post on this, starting with Olaf Stapledon and working through Arthur Clarke (who turns Phobos into a Sun!) Heinlein, Asimov and Robinson. Any more?

But there is one obvious example where it does seem possible to find reasonably persuasive conclusions. Commentators often say that Japanese attitudes to technology in general are somehow different from those in the West, though usually at the not very interesting level of implying enthusiasm for gadgetry (those elaborate toilets usually get a mention, too). The strongest case, though, seems to apply to one kind of technology, and its fictional representations, in particular: robots.

A tradition of charming automata – related to earlier puppetry, combined with Buddhist and Shinto influences that blur the boundaries between animate and inanimate things, has apparently engendered a largely benign view of robots in Japan. This is reflected in fiction, especially in the two most important creations: Mighty Atom and Mobile Suit Gundam. The first, AKA Astro Boy,  is a super-powered, world-saving, peace-making robot of astounding cutesiness, conceived by Osamu Tezuka in 1951. He looks like this.

The first appearance of Astro Boy

The second, later, label refers to a whole raft of giant weaponised robots, “piloted” by teenagers – who also generally seem to end up saving the world. These anime superstars look more familiar, and less friendly…

Both have inspired big media franchises  - embracing comics, film and TV, toys and kits, and much other merchandise. And both feed into a general enthusiasm for robots and robotics, and research into making new ones.

As one academic engineer put it, “The difference between Mighty Atom and Terminator shows the differences between how Japanese and Westerners view robots. Westerners tend to have this sense of alarm or wariness, Japanese are unique in the world in their unique affinity and love for robots.”

This is an oversimplification, inevitably. Early audiences cheered Arnie’s Terminator, not Sarah Connor. And the print corpus of Western SF, and even film to some extent, includes an enormous range of possible robots, and possible responses to them. Still, there is lots of testimony that many Japanese engineers were enthused by Astro Boy when young, and set out to build something like him when they grew up.

The result is a wonderfully blended culture of research projects, design exercises, hobby clubs, toys, stories, and commercially available bots. Other influences are easily incorporated. ASIMO (which stands for Advanced Step in Innovative Mobility, of course), has done a thousand corporate stunts, but there is still something touching about the small figure bringing a bouquet to the bust of Karel Capek in Prague.

But there definitely seem to be specifically Japanese influences at work here. The best source I’ve found so far on this is Timothy Hornyak’s Loving the Machine (where the Prague photo appears). There is some useful incidental stuff in Peter Carey’s Wrong About Japan, too. Any other useful reading would be good to hear about…

See also this, for more examples:

• Robots of the East (vekinnotebook.wordpress.com)

.

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…)

The event was a conversation (with the always apocalyptically cheerful Anders Sandberg and writer Sara Wheeler)– generally a  better way of doing these things than getting panellists to speak separately. But, in the way of conversation, it provoked some second thoughts. So here are a few of the things I said, or thought I might have said, in some sort of order.

Are we safe?

No, of course not. We are mortal. We live in a peculiarly fortunate culture where, for quite long spells, many of us can forget about this. But, in Larkinesque fashion, it is a truth which always comes back.

But what of existential risk – in the sense of threats to the whole of humanity? Individual responses to this tend, in my view, to be determined by a combination of temperament and circumstance.

How so? Well, we are talking about the probability of lots of inevitable individual deaths happening all at once, adding up to the death of a species (ours), or extinction.

We do have some information that bears on that, but not enough to give a very clear answer on how likely it is. So the way we feel about it tends to reflect our intuition about some related questions: is human life fragile or robust, the cosmos friendly or unfriendly, hospitable or inhospitable?

At the moment, we can find reasons for answering that question about equally convincingly either way.

Good things: the constants of the universe are tuned to just the right combination which allows life to exist. (The Goldilocks principle). We seem to live in a cosmos which is disposed to allow the emergence of  complexity – in ever more wondrous forms. In some sense, perhaps, we are meant to be here. In Stuart Kauffman’s phrase, we’re at home in the universe.

Notsogood: one of the main processes which allows that complexity to emerge – natural selection – is rather scary when you look at how it works. I don’t mean Nature red in tooth and claw: evolution has a place for co-operation as well as competition. However, although natural selection sounds neutral, or even benign, the agent of selection is death – of individuals and, on the larger scale, the death of species. Extinction is just what happens to species, in the end. Endurance beyond a few tens of millions of years is very much the exception, and those species that have lasted for a few hundred millions years are heroic survivors. (Afterthought to the afterthought – I wonder if that is true if you include the microbial world, where the concept of species is in any case pretty hard to apply…)

Of course, a species can leave descendents on the path to extinction, as we may do. But in its original form it has still quit the scene. At our current point, where culture – in the shape of technology – is a more powerful evolutionary force than natural selection, that seems an increasingly likely outcome. Whether you terribly much mind that idea depends on whether you think Homo sapiens in our present form are such an adornment to the cosmos we ought to be around for ever, or if it is OK we are just a stage on the way to something else. That something has a post-human form we cannot quite define. But we’ll know it when we see it.

Aside from how evolution actually works, other features of the cosmos suggest that a middle of the road position is justifiable. The universe is more or less hospitable, but risky.

It is interesting to contemplate the latest results on star systems with planets, for example. Amazingly, our observations now have such fine resolution that we can detect planets orbiting distant stars, and not just gas giants but even smaller, possibly Earth-like ones. It looks more and more as if there are an enormous number of solar systems out there, and a heck of a lot of Earth like planets. That surely makes it more likely that there is complex life spread, however thinly, through the galaxy, maybe all galaxies in the observable universe.

Then consider gamma ray bursts. We don’t understand them very well, but we do know by observation that, occasionally, there are absolutely enormous energy releases, with no warning that we know how to register, that rip through large regions of space.

So if life, even intelligent life, is ubiquitous, every now and again one of these gamma bursts takes out a civilization. (Oliver Morton wrote about this eloquently in Prospect a decade or so ago, when the search for extra-solar planets was less well on than it is now.) The universe, if you like, is welcoming to life, then takes random shots at it for sport.

Against that background, the risks we face on Earth at the moment seem relatively manageable. Bad things will happen. Perfectly terrible things may happen, in the future as in the past. A person who predicted that the sky would fall 65 million years ago, before an asteroid impact caused a mass extinction, would have been right. A person who predicted crop failure, pandemic and the death of between a third and a half of the population of Europe in the 14^th century would have been right. Those who foresaw a a terrible conflict in Europe in the late 1930s (read Louis MacNiece’s Autumn journal for the atmosphere) were correct.

On the other hand, plenty of possible dire events did not come to pass. No nuclear holocaust (yet). No billions starving before 2000, pace Professor Ehrlich.

So, there will be good and bad. But, assuming gamma ray bursts are not coming our way, the end of humanity is not coming any time soon, probably…

(Thanks to Georgina Ferry for the invitation to Oxford.)

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