The US Army Lab has solicited sci-fi stories and awarded grants to build the tech they describe.
The Marines have hired historians to write manuals on how their great works.
Big Companies and the Military Are Paying Novelists to Write Sci-Fi for Them
21–30 of 173 posts
Re: Big Companies and the Military Are Paying Novelists to Write Sci-Fi for Them
#22Congrats. The .mil & .biz folks have been acknowledged in what has been implicit in every advancement I've seen in the last 40 years. sci-fi pop fiction postulation and conjecture based on the science community brain trust. Most of these guys were consultants or engineers anyway and empowered to write. There are iconoclasts like Ellison and the visionaries but the hard science guys always get paid for their visions.
Re: Big Companies and the Military Are Paying Novelists to Write Sci-Fi for Them
#23Visualizing and communicating how things will be used is very powerful and important. My memory may be faulty, but I think it's Alan Cooper's "About Face" that basically advised not just describing the interface and how it'll be used, but how Bob the 73 year old luddite who hates all computers is going to interact with it (context in flight movie systems). Creating characters and having them interact with technology…
I have a copy of About Face on my desk that I keep meaning to read, but I have read Alan Cooper's "The Inmates Are Running The Asylum" which definitely discusses an in-flight entertainment system to be used by, amongst others, an elderly gentleman who really has got better things to do than burrow through menus and directories to find a movie to watch. Could you be thinking of that? Maybe they both used that example (although I think for Cooper, it was personal history rather than example).
Re: Big Companies and the Military Are Paying Novelists to Write Sci-Fi for Them
#24We proposed something similar for the field of software engineering research.
http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2983986
Pasting abstract here
"Software engineering researchers have a tendency to be optimistic about the future. Though useful, optimism bias bolsters unrealistic expectations towards desirable outcomes. We argue that explicitly framing software engineering research through pessimistic futures, or dystopias, will mitigate optimism bias and engender more diverse and thought-provoking research directions. We demonstrate through three pop culture dystopias, Battlestar Galactica, Fallout 3, and Children of Men, how reflecting on dystopian scenarios provides research opportunities as well as implications, such as making research accessible to non-experts, that are relevant to our present."
Re: Big Companies and the Military Are Paying Novelists to Write Sci-Fi for Them
#25Reminds of this story from a while ago: the head writer for Call of Duty switched to working at a think tank, given his experience imagining the future of warfare. http://foreignpolicy.com/2014/09/22/call-of-duty-star-video-...
It's the opposite of when Valve hired a Chief Economist in 2012[1]. We've come full circle.
[1]http://www.slate.com/blogs/moneybox/2012/06/18/yanis_varoufa...
Re: Big Companies and the Military Are Paying Novelists to Write Sci-Fi for Them
#26Based on the article about Neil Stephenson that was posted here not long ago I'd been thinking along these lines, didn't realize someone already made a business out of it. Interesting.
Re: Big Companies and the Military Are Paying Novelists to Write Sci-Fi for Them
#27My wife watches police "procedural" stories (Law & Order, CSI, NCIS, etc.). I've long thought that some of their plot lines would make for interesting "what if" training cases for real cops.
Re: Big Companies and the Military Are Paying Novelists to Write Sci-Fi for Them
#28This is the worst story I've read all week. Capitalism is destroying our culture.
Re: Big Companies and the Military Are Paying Novelists to Write Sci-Fi for Them
#29Not terribly surprising. People forget that Neuromancer was a commission.
Re: Big Companies and the Military Are Paying Novelists to Write Sci-Fi for Them
#30Based on the article about Neil Stephenson that was posted here not long ago I'd been thinking along these lines, didn't realize someone already made a business out of it. Interesting.
A quick HN search (via Google) didn't turn up the article for me; please link. Thanks in advance!