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Big Companies and the Military Are Paying Novelists to Write Sci-Fi for Them
11–20 of 173 posts
Re: Big Companies and the Military Are Paying Novelists to Write Sci-Fi for Them
#12Visualizing 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 that doesn't exist yet is what SF writers DO.
Re: Big Companies and the Military Are Paying Novelists to Write Sci-Fi for Them
#13Wasn't there something about Clancy being working with the CIA to massage their image?
Military and intelligence and politics have always manipulated media...
Also, recall "Americans army" was being ostensibly used as a recruiting/psyche-molding tool...
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Finally: look at cyberpunk, and the top five writers in that category, as well as anime (ghost in the shell, etc) which have in-formed modern reality with all the millions of tech-workers from around the globe have worked since their childhoods to create aspects of those worlds into current reality...
Is the totalitarian police-surveillance state an emergent feature of such a reality?
All crazy military capability comes from able-minded imaginations saying "wouldn't it be cool if..." without the discernment of the far-reaching implications...
Re: Big Companies and the Military Are Paying Novelists to Write Sci-Fi for Them
#14Re: Big Companies and the Military Are Paying Novelists to Write Sci-Fi for Them
#15I posted something similar on HN nearly a year ago: https://www.fastcompany.com/3063187/scifutures-probes-your-c... It's a nice complement to this New Yorker article :-)
It's a more detailed article. I've only done a couple of stories for SciFutures. The topics are interesting. Unfortunately we usually don't get to see what other writers wrote.
Re: Big Companies and the Military Are Paying Novelists to Write Sci-Fi for Them
#16Kinda funny to think that maybe, just maybe, the social network was sponsored by Google or Twitter as an attempt to make the competing platform less desirable.
Re: Big Companies and the Military Are Paying Novelists to Write Sci-Fi for Them
#17I posted something similar on HN nearly a year ago: https://www.fastcompany.com/3063187/scifutures-probes-your-c... It's a nice complement to this New Yorker article :-)
It's a more detailed article. I've only done a couple of stories for SciFutures. The topics are interesting. Unfortunately we usually don't get to see what other writers wrote.
Out of curiosity, did you have any published writing prior to working with/for SciFutures? I'm quite interested in contributing...
Re: Big Companies and the Military Are Paying Novelists to Write Sci-Fi for Them
#18This is part of the plot by Armada by Ernest Client (which was also heavily influenced by Ender's Game)
Also Footfall by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle. It even has a Robert Heinlein cameo.
Re: Big Companies and the Military Are Paying Novelists to Write Sci-Fi for Them
#19Wasn't there something about Clancy being working with the CIA to massage their image? Military and intelligence and politics have always manipulated media... Also, recall "Americans army" was being ostensibly used as a recruiting/psyche-molding tool... --- Finally: look at cyberpunk, and the top five writers in that category, as well as anime (ghost in the shell, etc) which have in-formed modern reality with all the…
There’s a big difference between paying for speculative fiction about your own industry as a form of long-term brainstorming (what the article is about) and paying authors to publicly produce works that further your political agendas.
As I understand it, the works discussed in the article aren’t published in the traditional manner, and are for the use of those who commissioned them.
Re: Big Companies and the Military Are Paying Novelists to Write Sci-Fi for Them
#20The US Army Lab has solicited sci-fi stories and awarded grants to build the tech they describe.