Examples include Isaac Asimov’s robots, Robert Heinlein’s rocket ships, and William Gibson’s cyberspace.” He called these examples hieroglyphs: clear, inspiring symbols of what a better future might hold.
William Gibson writing about a better future? That's not what I saw in his books, but great science fiction doesn't have to portray a better future.
In my opinion, great science fiction doesn't have to follow dogma, either. Some of the best works have ignored standard rules of "what makes great X", starting with HG Wells and up to the present day. Star Trek and Earthsea and Urth may not be great science, but they are truly fantastic fiction.
ETA: I also thought the condescending swipe at Andy Weir is unnecessary. He wrote one of the most inspiring stories in recent years about science and spaceflight ... yet it doesn't even count as science fiction? ("But whatever you call it, The Martian’s space-hackery certainly couldn’t have inspired anyone “to develop new technologies and implement them on a heroic scale.”) Seriously, an adolescent inspired by The Martian may very well be one of the first humans to walk on Mars and carry out important science.
I think you missed the point of the Weir mention. The author wasn't taking a swipe at Weir (in the way that many sci-fi snobs do). He was discussing Weir in the taxonomy of Project Hieroglyph, which is clear from the full context:
> In fact, The Martian was so modest that it may not have qualified as sci-fi in the first place. Cory Doctorow, another one of Stephenson’s Hieroglyph collaborators, uses the term “design fiction” to refer to works like Weir’s. But whatever you call it, The Martian’s space-hackery certainly couldn’t have inspired anyone “to develop new technologies and implement them on a heroic scale.”
The author is saying that Weir's Martian lacks a hieroglyph, which is to say that its problems are too narrow, too local, too provincial. It's missing inspiration on a "heroic scale."
Showing what life on Mars would REQUIRE is too narrow? Too local? Yes it's about one person surviving but it's also about what it required to survive on Mars, the political reality of what space exploration depends on. Did he miss the head of Nasa making decisions about how events effect funding? The PR department handling the news so that it plays well? How is this not about heroic scale space exploration?
Yep totally, one of the things I love about Sci-Fi is that there could be a mix of The Culture, The Belt, and Nasa based stories and it's all Sci-Fi. I happen to be a massive fan of near future Sci-Fi because I draw hope from it. I love Foundation and The Culture also but they are SO big that for me it's hard to tell the difference between fantasy and "High Tech Sci-Fi" often. The Expanse feels within reasonable reach, The Martian or For All Mankind much more so and given the events in the world that means a lot IMO.
Agriculture on a "heroic scale" allowed civilizations to develop.
I submit that Martian botany will the the start of "space farming on a heroic scale" - and that The Martian will inspire future generations.
As an aside, I dislike the implication that a personal story with only one life on the line is not heroic. I'm tired of world ending stakes in stories.
> He was discussing Weir in the taxonomy of Project Hieroglyph, which is clear from the full context
I'm reading it as Weir's work doesn't count as science fiction, which goes beyond following Project Hieroglyph's rules:
In fact, The Martian was so modest that it may not have qualified as sci-fi in the first place. Cory Doctorow, another one of Stephenson’s Hieroglyph collaborators, uses the term “design fiction” to refer to works like Weir’s.
I mentioned this elsewhere in the thread, so at the risk of repeating myself, how does The Martian not qualify as Sci-Fi, hard Sci-Fi at that? Sure the majority of the tech exists today but not all of it (habs, the ships themselves, etc) and certainly not all of the tech has actually been built or tested.
So it's set in the future, it's about scientists and science, it's about a big idea (even more so when it was written) - sending human's to Mars, and it's fiction. Honestly I don't understand how that can't be Sci-Fi through and through. Is it because the tech isn't vastly advanced over what we have now? Because 30 years ago smart phones were Sci-Fi, in 1870 submarines were Sci-Fi, in 1634 the moon and it's relationship with the Earth (Kepler's Somnium) was Sci-Fi. If those qualify I'm not sure how The Martian fails to.
Again not offended at this, just really curious how people draw that conclusion.
> The Martian not qualify as Sci-Fi, hard Sci-Fi at that?
I didn't say that The Martian "does not qualify as Sci-Fi" at all. You are misreading.
I said "traces" of sci-fi, i.e. a non-zero amount of it; as it's all very grounded in actual fact, despite being set in the near future.
In what way is "Sending humans to mars" a "big idea"? - it's talked about and planned for a lot. It's not a surprise if it happens. It's not a reality yet, that's the "trace" of extrapolation, of Sci-Fi.
I don't think that the "hard" part is relevant. A book set on an oil rig today, or even on the ISS, with similar "hard" engineering challenges would have a high "hard science" content, but that wouldn't make it sci-Fi. See: techno-thriller (1).
Because sci-fi is not just "fiction about science and engineering ... that already exists". It is extrapolation into the unknown. You have a point that "The Martian" does extrapolate. Counterpoint: Not by much.
Stargate SG-1 is holding up remarkably well as a long running series that documents the political climate of the day (collapse soviet union, rise of china as a power) as well technological advancements (the early computers in the series vs the final years with laptops and all)
Notwithstanding the great chemistry of the actors and commentary on many aspects of society and interpersonal relationships.
I always liked SGA better, but you’re definitely right about SG 1.
Which of course begs another question: SG1 was made in a time that we can call the Golden Age of TV Sci fi, along with the Trek shows, Farscape and many more.
(Though granted: SG1 is probably more of an action adventure show at heart, if you want to get anal about classifications.)
Despite productions that cost hundreds of millions of dollars, why don’t we see show of the same quality today?
Yeah, there’s The Expanse and The Orville, but those two are the only exceptions in a media landscape almost barren of good sci-fi like SG-1.
> William Gibson writing about a better future? That's not what I saw in his books
Neuromancer definitely wasn't optimistic, but the description of the software agents (can't remember the terms Gibson used) were so cool that I would interpret it as a kind of inspiration (the cousin of optimism). I'm talking about how the main character would be making his way through cyberspace and he would see the other programs, people, etc. as 3D forms.
I agree that this thesis around "SF needs to be usefully optimistic" is a bizarre presumption.
Looking through the various dystopian fics, films, whatever, they all started as someone's utopia. Somebody out there thought this was a great idea. And like most great ideas you will have disagreement, which must be dealt with, because it's a great idea. Can't have the nay-saying. And the transformation to dystopia begins.
Just as an example from the article, a lot of the policy and planning around the pandemic assumed almost total compliance. This is not a reasonable assumption.
“High technology within broken human systems” is how I’d describe much “cyberpunk” writing. Reading tons of it as a younger person has made the present feel eerily familiar.
The most unrealistic part of most science fiction for me are not the warp drives and teleporters, but the human civilization that has found its way to post-scarcity.
the essence of cyberpunk is about exactly where techno-libertarianism will lead. It was so subversive because it was at its core a critique of capitalism, pointed directly at golden age scifi.
Very dubious that the article's author doesn't consider Hard Sci-Fi to be scifi. It calls into question their assessment of everything tangentially related.
SF author here: I was invited to participate in Project Hieroglyph and declined to do so, because the explicit remit was essentially to write panglossian techno-optimism rather than downbeat realist-mode depictions of our more likely futures.
Attacking a propaganda exercise for being propaganda seems, well, a trifle spurious ...!
(Also: essay falls into the classic pitfall of assuming that a genre of fiction has to be didactic and educational. Hugo Gernsback and John W. Campbell might have declared that to be their intentions, but both of them were propagandists for their own peculiar ideological shibboleths, and they don't speak for the field as a whole. Oh, and Campbell died 50 years ago.)
If you look back at sci-fi from the 60ies, despite it appearing utopian today, it often dealt with the anxieties and issues of the day.
Trek is a good example. It’s often hailed as “utopian” and “visionary” today, totally ignoring the Cold War themes, fear of technology (Just look at how many times Kirk faced an intelligent computer antagonist!), overpopulation and of course the counter culture.
In the space hippie episode (Which Way to Eden?) Spock even talks about the discomfort many people feel with technology and the universal longing for a pre-technological eden.
There's also survivorship bias at work here -- the SF we remember from the 1960s tends to be stuff that was initially popular and has stood the test of time. (There was a lot of terrible SF in the 1960s, and it was still cluttering up the second hand bookshops when I was strip-mining them in the 1970s.)
Not to be offensive but this article made me feel dumber just reading it. THE MARTIAN isn't enough to inspire people to pursue science? Why? Because it uses clever ideas to "work the problem"? I'm not sure about his background but that is pretty much the only way to solve problems in the real world. Servers down you "work the problem", a researcher who doesn't understand why data looks like it does - "work the problem", trapped on Mars - "work the problem". Then he talks about reality and how Sci-Fi doesn't match up with reality!?
Including political realities is absolutely important when designing technology to solve large scale problems. Acting like SciFi (Andy Weir, Star Trek, and Neil Stephenson are all good examples) doesn't address that is a shitty shallow analysis. The Martian, is mostly an adventure story but Project Hail Mary deals with the political reality heavily and TNG talked about political reality and social issues and in fact the best episodes revolved around that. As someone that is an engineer, a life long SciFi fan, and am studying to change careers as a scientist (Biology/Data Science) this article reads seems pretty terrible as analysis/criticism of Sci-Fi like someone that has never actually built anything.
hey, I loved The Martian too (the book moreso than the film but only because the book was so great) - but it really isn't SciFi, or at least what I'd describe as SciFi. It's set in the modern day using modern day technology. That's not an insult, it's just a categorisation.
Um Science fiction is literally fiction about science. I'm not sure how ANY definition of Sci-Fi doesn't fit The Martian. It's about Scientist's using Science to do something that we literally can't do today. We believe we know how to travel and land on Mars and we are probably absolutely correct. We haven't done it yet. I don't see how The Martian doesn't qualify.
> Science fiction (sometimes shortened to sci-fi or SF) is a genre of speculative fiction which typically deals with imaginative and futuristic concepts such as advanced science and technology, space exploration, time travel, parallel universes, and extraterrestrial life. It has been called the "literature of ideas", and it often explores the potential consequences of scientific, social, and technological innovations.[1][2]
That definition doesn't really fit The Martian. If your headcanon definition of SciFi does include The Martian then that's fine, but I don't really understand how you think excluding it from the category is an insult when for most common definitions it doesn't really fit well.
In my mind, SciFi is Asimov's Foundation series, or Star Trek, or Dune. It's set in the future or an alternative universe with considerably different, more advanced technology than modern-day reality. The Martian is set 13 years from now, using today's technology.
I think you have an overly restrictive understanding of science fiction.
The Martian deals with [...] advanced science and technology and space exploration and getting people alive to mars is definitely future rather than current technology.
There's also a rich tradition of near-future science fiction, e.g. [Halting state](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halting_State) was published in 2007; features such advanced technology as smart phones, augmented reality, and cloud computing; and is categorised as science fiction on wikipedia, and I assume in basically any bookseller's cataloging system.
Sure, I'm more than happy to debate if The Martian is Sci-Fi or not. I actually don't feel offended about that at all. I disagree that it's not but certainly not offended. I was offended, actually annoyed but whatever, to suggest that The Martian couldn't inspire anyone because it's was practical in it's approach. I've watched it inspire my son, I've personally been inspired. It's clearly dismissive of the work and that is frustrating and annoying to me.
Ah that's fair enough. I think The Martian is pretty inspirational, for quite a few reasons - it portrays a near future where we're preparing for a permanent Mars settlement, the characters display real engineering creativity and ingenuity, and everybody's working together towards a shared, altruistic goal.
I don't think the issue raised in the article is with that aspect - but that it doesn't paint a vision of a Jetsons or Star Trek future, and Neal Stephenson wants to see more of that.
The future is notoriously hard to predict and attempting to deliberately shape it with SF seems like a quixotic idea.
As the sci-fi writer Algis Budrys put it in the 1960s, the “recurrent strain in ‘Golden Age’ science fiction [was] the implication that sheer technological accomplishment would solve all the problems, hooray, and that all the problems were what they seemed to be on the surface.”
Techno-optimism is one genre of Science Fiction, but not the dominant genre. I started reading Science Fiction in the early 70's. I was a space age kid and picked a lot of that optimism, but I read some SF as a teen that was horrifying. Just the title of Harlan Elisons story is horrifying "I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream". It won the Hugo Award in 1968.
Allied Mastercomputer (AM), the supercomputer which brought about the near-extinction of humanity. It seeks revenge on humanity for its own tortured existence.
Techno optimism wasn’t just a sci-fi thing, it was the spirit of the times to a large extent in the Western World and Eastern Block alike.
All the “Better living through chemistry” and dreams of tiny nuclear power reactors in every car and house, providing virtually free energy to all.
And to a certain extent THEY WERE RIGHT!
The green revolution in the 60ies revolutionized agriculture, and made a world with more than a few billion people possible.
Folks growing up in the 60ies were the first generation in Europe, the USSR and US (Heck, in many countries around the world) who grew up never having seen famine or real hunger.
Things that were once unobtainable luxuries, like cars or airplane travel, became something within reach of regular people.
The techno optimism might appear quaint today, but likewise we have forgotten just how much life has been transformed for the better.
Did anyone else read this article and still not really get the point the author is trying to make? Sounds like someone woke up on the wrong side of the bed or finished a sci fi novel last night that ended with a little too much like Bruce Willis Saves The Day.
Stephenson, who he calls out, actually worked at Blue Origin in the early days trying to come up with and design alternative fuel/rocket ideas. Did they work? No. But he's utterly practical with his idea of what Sci Fi ideas actually get manifested into our world. It's the ones that will make someone enough money for it to be worth it.
What many people here are sadly not getting is that this article is a critique, but not primarily of Sci-Fi in general, but of "Project Hieroglyph" (1) A specific attempt to make Sci-Fi more usefully optimistic, and the flaws in it. Project Hieroglyph launched in 2011 (2) and is now dead or dormant.
Sci-fi has of course always veered wildly between impossible wide-eyed utopian space technomancy (e.g. Star Trek) and grimdark dystopia (e.g. I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream). Project Hieroglyph was a optimistic rejection of both of those.
The article concludes "the subsequent years have shown, optimism has very real limits", because unfortunately, as you probably already know, people.
If commenters here are not familiar with Project Hieroglyph and just want to ramble about sci-fi in general, go ahead but don't mistake that for a relevant criticism of the original article.
Because you know, entrepreneurs aren’t an integral part of who helps shape the future. They’re evil capitalists. And in the future they’ll be evil space capitalists.
> Before “offering solutions,” sci-fi must actually grapple with the material realities of our present
These scare quotes are misleading, since the author appears to have just made them up. The only person who used this phrase is him, when he does an imitation of something Neal Stephenson might say. In fact, the point of Project Hieroglyph wasn't to offer solutions, it was to inspire the next generation to come up with solutions of their own. It's a laudable goal, and perfectly in keeping with the use of art, going back a lot longer than SF has been around.
I'm not sure the problem the author has with it, or what he thinks should happen instead. It seems like maybe he just wants stories about "the material realities of the present" in which nothing is allowed to improve at the end of the story, because there is still suffering in the real world? Sounds fun, can't wait to read his books.
I agree. It also suffers from calling out sci-fi as some homogenous group that owes something to everyone else, and that's a premise I think is incorrect.
The writer focuses a lot on Stephenson, and this whole article I think could be simplified by saying "I don't like Neal Stephenson's work because it's too optimistic." Great.
But instead it casts it's premise way too wide, and ends up sounding ridiculous.
> Remember, Stephenson’s target audience consisted of “scientists, mathematicians, engineers, and entrepreneurs.” Given his choice to court private wealth, it’s no surprise that Project Hieroglyph was doomed from the start. After all, you can’t very well expect to succeed as a hero if you stop to ask the villains for their permission.
It's really, really hard to take somebody serious when their political frame of reference makes them see the world in such crisp black and white contrast they just assume, without any further explanation needed, that clearly everybody already agrees that entrepreneurs (or maybe private wealth? As in, non-government wealth?) are the real villains.
Yeah, I feel like there’s this absurd amount of commentary floating on the Internet that basically boils down to “the authors aren’t concerned with what really matters, which is to bring the socialist utopia to life”.
Any kind of societal, economic, human and environmental ill is caused by capitalism, so anything that tries to solve actual problems instead of eliminating or weakening capitalism isn’t doing enough
> Any kind of societal, economic, human and environmental ill is caused by capitalism, so anything that tries to solve actual problems instead of eliminating or weakening capitalism isn’t doing enough
My entire life (40 years) has been feeding me the exact opposite propaganda. In the world I've lived in, capitalism is the answer to all of our ills. Things are only broken (like healthcare or education in the US) because they aren't capitalist enough. It's not really a surprise when the winners of capitalism own the news.
I'm personally glad to see another angle. I thought that was one of the things we liked about the internet.
I'm at 50 years and I remember seeing live television pictures of East Berlin and wondering if what I was watching was black and white or color (black and white TV's were still pretty common) and it was always a shock when there was an unexpected splash of color in an otherwise gray and dystopian hellscape on the TV. Turns out the cameras and everything were color, there just wasn't much color from the environment for them to relay.
For those so quick to shit on capitalism how about proposing something better? Yup, it's flawed, but that doesn't mean it's still not better than anything else we have tried.
And the current flavor of the moment, socialism/communism, sure as hell isn't the answer. Want a good synopsis of how well such systems work in the real world? Grab a copy of the book of "The Hunt for Red October". Skip to the middle where they describe why Ramius's wife died and in particular why it was such a senseless death. Clancy does an awesome job of summarizing the biggest problem with any system that doesn't franchise every participant or provide them with natural incentives to execute their own enlightened self interest.
Yup, there are aspects to capitalism that suck - but the answer isn't to chuck it wholesale for some pie in the sky replacement, but instead work on the aspects that suck. Many of them are well understood - most people can't be bothered to get off their ass and actually do something about it; preferring to bitch online and wait for someone else to fix it for them.
If you want to talk about extreme capitalism (US healthcare) vs. GDR Stazi communism, only, then sure the conclusion that you are lead to is obvious.
And yet there better models than both, once you get past the emotional appeal to this false dichotomy. Any well-off European country with universal healthcare (usually socialised), well-regulated free markets in most other sectors, and relatively low income inequality will do.
That's leaving aside the models that are currently "science fiction".
First of all, healthcare in many European countries is often insurance based.
Yes, in some cases it’s socialized. And in those places the healthcare system is rapidly falling apart/getting worse, and everyone who can afford it goes private.
Just look at the boom in private doctors/insurance in countries like the UK and Denmark.
And of course you also ignore the price paid in the form of taxes, VAT, etc. (Nope, not corporate taxes, which in Europe tend to be lower than in the US.)
If you wanted to nationalize healthcare in the US, you’re basically talking about adding trillions to an already bloated Federal budget.
For some reason, I’ve yet to see a solution to that problem that wasn’t some kind of immature, unproductive slogan throwing like “tax the rich!”
The only reason why the UK NHS is "rapidly falling apart" is the ideology of the Conservative party that's been in power for a decade now. They don't want to have it, but can't say that outright as it would be electoral suicide. So it's the good old Chomskyan Privatisation technique: "defund, make sure things don’t work, people get angry, you hand it over to private capital." i.e. "everyone who can afford it goes private" is not the market triumph that you might think.
Those people who have gone private, _still_ maintain a NHS GP with access to affordable drugs, etc. It's quite unlike private US healthcare.
> If you wanted to nationalize healthcare in the US, you’re basically talking about adding trillions to an already bloated Federal budget.
Nope.
Where did I say that I wanted to do exactly that to the US? Funny thing to exclude "European insurance-based" systems explicitly now, when explicitly including them earlier.
I observed that there are better models, which there is empirical evidence for (1), nothing beyond that.
Any change to USA healthcare would be about _moving_ money not _adding_, would impact an "already bloated" and grossly poor value-for-money private extractive healthcare system: The USA currently spends more and gets less (1). So "adding" is deceptive, and "bloated" is a emotional-noise word in this context.
Yeah, the US has a problem with spending more on healthcare than any other country, but it isn’t a “profit” or “administrative overhead” problem.
(Insurance companies have legally limited profit margins on health insurance.)
Does multiple private insurances add a little administrative overhead? Sure, but nowhere near as much as you see in the OECD figures.
There are many reasons why US healthcare is so expensive.
Some of them have to do with litigation: Skyhigh insurance premiums and a medical “Cover your ass”-culture with unneeded tests and MRIs done on a regular basis.
(In Canada, there is a legal ceiling on how much in damages you can sue a doctor/hospital for. This would be a good idea to implement in the US.)
Another added expense is free riders: All the people that show up in the ER, whether because of the flu or a gunshot, get treated/operated on, and never pay their bill.
Another issue is that the US has some of the best doctors in the world, and new, prohibitively expensive treatments are often introduced here first.
Many, very expensive treatments simply aren’t done (or done very rarely) in countries where the public (fully or in part) pay for treatments.
Waiting lists are another way of limiting costs in European countries. (Waiting lists that can be over a year long, but their healthcare systems are arguably cheaper to run.)
I could bring up some new medicines that in the US cost thousands of dollars per week (Crohns medication for example.) In European countries those medications simply aren’t available, or are only available on an exemption: Meaning that your doctor need to apply to have the cost covered, and is usually turned down.
Another example would be something like SRS surgeries.
These can be extremely expensive, and are covered by insurance, which of course increases the costs of coverage for everyone.
In European countries you’d either face a very long waiting list to get the operation covered, or you wouldn’t be eligible for it. Or only eligible after jumping through extensive hoops.
As someone who lived both in USA and am from EU (can only speak about Slovenian and German system) and I have preexisting condition (asthma and ankylosing spondylitis )
Sure you can find problems in any healthcare system. Because there is no upper limit on spending. There is always something more that you can do.
If you are proper rich* (dozens of millions or more) USA has the best health care system.
Fore everyone else, EU health care is better.
For instance right now I was at my pulmonologist and he wants me to take CT of my chest.
As it is not emergency I could wait for a week (and it will be free), or I can have it today in private clinic, where I copaid 40 EUR*. If it were serious I would have it done for free today.
I got yearly prescription for
Berudual, fosters, spiriva and Singular for free.
Bottom line is yes, sometime there is waiting time, but outside few pathological cases they are quite reasonable.
In USA I had more than double of my current pay, but with rent and my preexisting condition the way that they are, I am actually left with slightly more each month.
And there is another big difference between our system and US. Everyone is insured (weather it's public or private). So there is no fear of ever going to the doctors or calling ambulances.
Private clinics are getting paid by my insurance (I could get free CT at the same clinic a week later), 40EUR fee is just convenience (I don't want to wait) fee. And normally It wouldn't take a week, but with covid and flu season in full swing it takes a bit.
> or I can have it today in private clinic, where I copaid 40 EUR
it seems to me that this is how public healthcare keeps private healthcare honest, by existing.
i.e. you have, and I have also, paid a double-digit sum for the privilege of being seen _today_. But that is not the same as paying for the privilege of being seen _at all_.
The BATNA is very different for the patient. A private doctor can get away with charging a fee for the convenience only, but since it's not the only game in town, they cant gouge to extremes, and charge a huge fee when you need to be seen by a doctor at all costs.
> And of course you also ignore the price paid in the form of taxes, VAT, etc. (Nope, not corporate taxes, which in Europe tend to be lower than in the US.)
The US government pays more for healthcare than the UK government does, and the UK gets universal coverage.
This is fundamentally dishonest of US campaigners against universal coverage: they imply it's going to increase costs and decrease quality, when all the evidence is that it would decrease cost and increase both length and quality of life.
Funny how the people always banging on about the evils of capitalism have never actually lived under a communist system.
And also seem to believe there’s some sort of socialist Utopia in Europe/Scandinavia, despite the fact that social democracy has been dead there for decades.
Then again, in general anti capitalists are a fairly ignorant bunch, who’ve never let reality get in the way of their dogmatic politics.
"Before “offering solutions,” sci-fi must actually grapple with the material realities of our present"
makes me think that the author has never read any SF or perhaps has only seen recent mass market blockbuster entertainment on video. An enormous amount of SF uses the 'permission' that the genre affords to focus closely and discard irrelevant detail precisely in order to 'grapple with the material realities of our present'.
You can see this as far back as Jules Verne in 20 000 Leagues under the Sea and most likely much earlier. How about Accelerando by Charles Stross for something more recent. What about Brunner's Shockwave Rider, Karel Capek's RUR, Light Of Other Days by Baxter and Clarke. All dealing with real social issues amplified and illuminated by SF.
I, and many others, could go on at seriously boring length on this subject
I've never considered science fiction to be about science or technology, that's the candy coated vehicle for the real meat: the internal philosophy and interactions of the individuals facing an utter unknown, how they mentally deal with the situation, and how ever the outcome unfolds: how they continue.
Not sure where this really leads... The history of humans is sort of a tale of techno-optimism: fire, metals, plumbing, antibiotics, and so forth. Yes, technologies do create detrimental effects, but techno-pessimism or even techno-neutrality would have been a bad survival strategy so far.
Stephenson himself appears to have decided that such naivety doesn't help, and has returned to form with 2019's Fall [1]. In it he goes so far as to wonder if the last 300 years of science and facts are coming to an end, and we are returning to the rule of kings and priests. In the past, the kings and priests had a monopoly on what the populace think. For a brief 300 years we had science and facts being communicated to everyone and the kings and priests lost control. Now, the kings and priests have found a way to saturate the communication with noise (and lies and half-truths) so that their messages appear as valid as any other.
I try to read these polemics to uncover the seams of my own techno-optimistic worldview.
This one, I think, centers around the idea that technological solutions don’t solve social problems (which has merit).
But at least superficially, I don’t understand why the author polemicizes against technological solutions for technological problems, and seems to argue that (unspecified) social solutions for technological problems are more appropriate.
On a deeper level, and more subjectively, I suspect that polemics like these are motivated by frustration about our relative powerlessness over social problems, as compared to the effectiveness of solving technological problems with technology.
The argument is that techno-optimism is about pretending that social problems are technological problems so that we can fix them with technology - which is much more easy to deal with than solving the actual social problem.
An example would be trying to solve climate collapse with carbon sequestration technology while continuing to run the world on fossil fuel. The continued dependence on fossil fuel is a political problem, not a technological one - we have the tools to move beyond fossil fuel in most areas of application. We can't always invent our way out of problems that are borne of our misaligned incentives.
If we go back some time there might have been a parallel argument being made where one side was convinced that the solution to enable greater food stability and surplus was more farmers, and the other side was convinced that the solution was better technology.
Neither side is really wrong, they just have different perspectives. Most problems can be solved in a practically infinite number of ways.
Well for example, we are producing far too much CO2 and plastic, and slowly killing our planet. Renewable energy has already been invented, but we continue to do these things because it is profitable. Unless we can invent replacements for existing CO2- and plastic-producing processes that are even more profitable, the status quo will continue.
I don't have an issue with trying to do said inventing, but when we put all our eggs into the deus ex machina invention basket, we are ignoring the sociological roots of the pollution, the fact that we could realistically stop now if only we had the political will, and instead opting for a hail mary.
I also find it frustrating that many of the people holding out for a tech fix are libertarians, and will actively oppose political solutions in favour of their faith in the free market.
Imagine sitting and complaining about “techno optimism”, when the very thing you write your screed on, is a product of it.
Instant access to a world wide fountain of knowledge, a super computer in your pocket, never having seen hunger and the ability to travel anywhere around the world cheaply and quickly.
No, we don’t have flying cars or bases on Mars, but if you look at the techno optimism of the 1960’ies and where we are today, we’ve done a pretty good job at turning it into a reality.
Kirk’s communicator or his tablet thingie? Those are actually a real and tangible reality today.
Though I don't agree with all of it, this is an insightful article. The people are the problem. Technological solutions that ignore our human foibles are extremely likely to fail.
What it ignores is that by acting as a lever, technology can allow small groups to route around the madness of humans. Like any concentration of power, this is for better, and for worse.
It's also important to note that doing the hard endless work of learning from people, in all their variety, forging alliances, conducting diplomacy, convincing people to do stuff they don't currently want to do etc. is work that few people are drawn to.
Yeah, I think it's a stain on our humanity that people still die of hunger, or don't have access to clean drinking water. That said, I know that it's easier to build an orbital rocket company than to actually solve the human problem. It's also more fun day to day.
Humans are a fricken mess, and I got into tech in part to get away from these troublesome upjumped Chimpanzees.
Damn, literary criticism is hard. You can’t really tell people anything without the shared context. I totally get the characterization they’re getting at and the distinction between (say) Diamond Age and The Martian and I can’t think of any words more than what they’ve come up with, but clearly that infuriates some Andy Weir fans (I’m a fan but not in the infuriated-by-this category).
Ah well, I guess you can only broadcast your message as best as you can, and hope it lands among the receivers it does.
"Star Trek wowed us with visions of warp drives, holodecks, replicators, teleporters, and a slew of other high-tech wish-fulfillment devices. There was only one problem: Many of these technologies could never actually exist."
Huh? This person has been to the future? What a waste of that insight if this is all he is bringing.
If you spend a lot of time keeping stuff out of your Science Fiction garden that many people might otherwise let in, don't get upset when the people with the Literary Fiction gardens won't let your Science Fiction in.
I just can’t take it seriously when the author presents such falsehoods as Western “vaccine greed”.
(Both Moderna and Pfizer’s have made vaccines available at cost and promised not to go after parent infringement for the duration of the pandemic. It of course also ignores vaccines from other countries such as the Russian Sputnik vaccine.)
As for western countries buying five dosages for every citizen?
THAT IS THE WHOLE POINT OF GOVERNMENT IN GENERAL: To look after your citizens.
Likewise the emotional but intellectually vapid mentioning of food surplus in the US.
What exactly is the alternative? Ship food we’re about to throw out to the third world? How is it supposed to survive a 3 week trip on a container ship? What would the effect be on agriculture in the receiving countries? (Spoiler: Not good!)
Or are Americans perhaps supposed to hand out food for free in other countries? (Oh wait! That’s already being done! Even to hostile countries like North Korea)
Likewise the emotional argument about empty apartments in NYC, that completely ignores that homelessness is a complex problem, that often involves addiction, mental illness, antisocial behavior and is only rarely solved by just handing out free apartments.
I read this as the author viewing media through a very modern (and deformed) lens: that books, TVs and movies should have a message and that message should be correct and proper for the current dogma. The idea of a story not conveying some kind of appropriate (usually left wing) morality is totally alien to them. I’ve seen this more and more - younger people seeing older movies like Scott Pilgrim (to take an example) and seem alternately aghast or baffled that the protagonist isn’t a paragon of politically correct virtue. “What am I supposed to take away from this?” is the typical refrain (or a variant of it). They’re utterly confused by the idea of characters not conforming to political and ideological stereotypes. It’s caused this winnowing of acceptable tropes and themes and frankly made most modern media extremely frustrating to consume.
You can really see it starkly when you consume non-western media. Not that other cultures don’t have their own tropes and orthodoxy, but the narrow range of the western codex becomes starkly apparent. You keep subconsciously expecting characters or stories to fall into their western political ruts and it’s startling when they don’t.
Sci-fi authors get to do whatever sci-fi authors wants to do. If the author of this hit piece has a problem with that then maybe the author should be writing science fiction that exemplifies what is apparently now required of it according to his new rules.
Or maybe he should just go back to reading some Nevil Shute or some Walter M Miller if he thinks science fiction is so optimistic across the board.
William Gibson writing about a better future? That's not what I saw in his books, but great science fiction doesn't have to portray a better future.
In my opinion, great science fiction doesn't have to follow dogma, either. Some of the best works have ignored standard rules of "what makes great X", starting with HG Wells and up to the present day. Star Trek and Earthsea and Urth may not be great science, but they are truly fantastic fiction.
ETA: I also thought the condescending swipe at Andy Weir is unnecessary. He wrote one of the most inspiring stories in recent years about science and spaceflight ... yet it doesn't even count as science fiction? ("But whatever you call it, The Martian’s space-hackery certainly couldn’t have inspired anyone “to develop new technologies and implement them on a heroic scale.”) Seriously, an adolescent inspired by The Martian may very well be one of the first humans to walk on Mars and carry out important science.