The Writing on the Wall: Sci-Fi’s Empty Techno-Optimism

<i>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.</i><p>William Gibson writing about a better future? That&#x27;s not what I saw in his books, but great science fiction doesn&#x27;t have to portray a better future.<p>In my opinion, great science fiction doesn&#x27;t have to follow dogma, either. Some of the best works have <i>ignored</i> standard rules of &quot;what makes great X&quot;, 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.<p>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&#x27;t even <i>count</i> as science fiction? (&quot;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 <i>The Martian</i> may very well be one of the first humans to walk on Mars and carry out important science.

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.<p>Attacking a propaganda exercise for being propaganda seems, well, a trifle spurious ...!<p>(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&#x27;t speak for the field as a whole. Oh, and Campbell died 50 years ago.)

Not to be offensive but this article made me feel dumber just reading it. THE MARTIAN isn&#x27;t enough to inspire people to pursue science? Why? Because it uses clever ideas to &quot;work the problem&quot;? I&#x27;m not sure about his background but that is pretty much the only way to solve problems in the real world. Servers down you &quot;work the problem&quot;, a researcher who doesn&#x27;t understand why data looks like it does - &quot;work the problem&quot;, trapped on Mars - &quot;work the problem&quot;. Then he talks about reality and how Sci-Fi doesn&#x27;t match up with reality!?<p>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&#x27;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&#x2F;Data Science) this article reads seems pretty terrible as analysis&#x2F;criticism of Sci-Fi like someone that has never actually built anything.

The future is notoriously hard to predict and attempting to deliberately shape it with SF seems like a quixotic idea.<p><i>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.” </i><p>Techno-optimism is one genre of Science Fiction, but not the dominant genre. I started reading Science Fiction in the early 70&#x27;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 &quot;I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream&quot;. It won the Hugo Award in 1968.<p><i>Allied Mastercomputer (AM), the supercomputer which brought about the near-extinction of humanity. It seeks revenge on humanity for its own tortured existence.</i><p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;I_Have_No_Mouth,_and_I_Must_Scream" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;I_Have_No_Mouth,_and_I_Must_Sc...</a><p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;wjccschools.org&#x2F;wp-content&#x2F;uploads&#x2F;sites&#x2F;2&#x2F;2016&#x2F;01&#x2F;I-Have-No-Mouth-But-I-Must-Scream-by-Harlan-Ellison.pdf" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;wjccschools.org&#x2F;wp-content&#x2F;uploads&#x2F;sites&#x2F;2&#x2F;2016&#x2F;01&#x2F;I...</a><p>I didn&#x27;t even discover PK Dick until later in life.

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.<p>Stephenson, who he calls out, actually worked at Blue Origin in the early days trying to come up with and design alternative fuel&#x2F;rocket ideas. Did they work? No. But he&#x27;s utterly practical with his idea of what Sci Fi ideas actually get manifested into our world. It&#x27;s the ones that will make someone enough money for it to be worth it.

&gt; Before “offering solutions,” sci-fi must actually grapple with the material realities of our present<p>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&#x27;t to offer solutions, it was to inspire the next generation to come up with solutions of their own. It&#x27;s a laudable goal, and perfectly in keeping with the use of art, going back a lot longer than SF has been around.<p>I&#x27;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 &quot;the material realities of the present&quot; 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&#x27;t wait to read his books.

&gt; Remember, Stephenson’s target audience consisted of “scientists, mathematicians, engineers, and <i>entrepreneurs</i>.” 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.<p>It&#x27;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.

The first sentence I saw when following the link:<p>&quot;Before “offering solutions,” sci-fi must actually grapple with the material realities of our present&quot;<p>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 &#x27;permission&#x27; that the genre affords to focus closely and discard irrelevant detail precisely in order to &#x27;grapple with the material realities of our present&#x27;.<p>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&#x27;s Shockwave Rider, Karel Capek&#x27;s RUR, Light Of Other Days by Baxter and Clarke. All dealing with real social issues amplified and illuminated by SF.<p>I, and many others, could go on at seriously boring length on this subject

I&#x27;ve never considered science fiction to be about science or technology, that&#x27;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&#x27;t help, and has returned to form with 2019&#x27;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.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.amazon.com&#x2F;dp&#x2F;B07KL61VYS" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.amazon.com&#x2F;dp&#x2F;B07KL61VYS</a>

I try to read these polemics to uncover the seams of my own techno-optimistic worldview.<p>This one, I think, centers around the idea that technological solutions don’t solve social problems (which has merit).<p>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.<p>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.

Imagine sitting and complaining about “techno optimism”, when the very thing you write your screed on, is a product of it.<p>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.<p>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.<p>Kirk’s communicator or his tablet thingie? Those are actually a real and tangible reality today.

Though I don&#x27;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.<p>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.<p>It&#x27;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&#x27;t currently want to do etc. is work that few people are drawn to.<p>Yeah, I think it&#x27;s a stain on our humanity that people still die of hunger, or don&#x27;t have access to clean drinking water. That said, I <i>know</i> that it&#x27;s easier to build an orbital rocket company than to actually solve the human problem. It&#x27;s also more fun day to day.<p>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) <i>Diamond Age</i> and <i>The Martian</i> 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).<p>Ah well, I guess you can only broadcast your message as best as you can, and hope it lands among the receivers it does.

&quot;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.&quot;<p>Huh? This person has been to the future? What a waste of that insight if this is all he is bringing.<p>What a poor article.

If you spend a lot of time keeping stuff out of your Science Fiction garden that many people might otherwise let in, don&#x27;t get upset when the people with the Literary Fiction gardens won&#x27;t let your Science Fiction in.

I just can’t take it seriously when the author presents such falsehoods as Western “vaccine greed”.<p>(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.)<p>As for western countries buying five dosages for every citizen?<p>THAT IS THE WHOLE POINT OF GOVERNMENT IN GENERAL: To look after your citizens.<p>Likewise the emotional but intellectually vapid mentioning of food surplus in the US.<p>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!)<p>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)<p>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 <i>not</i> 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.<p>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.

Techno-optimism? He clearly hasn&#x27;t read The Expanse, Dune, or Red Rising series (all recommended by the way :)).<p>Honestly I think Sci-Fi is honestly more pessimistic in general than optimistic.

Yeah yeah, everything has to reflect your own political opinions, and all cultural failures are due not doing it enough. Read this piece many times.

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.<p>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.