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.
The Writing on the Wall: Sci-Fi’s Empty Techno-Optimism
31–40 of 79 posts
Re: The Writing on the Wall: Sci-Fi’s Empty Techno-Optimism
#32Techno-optimism? He clearly hasn't read The Expanse, Dune, or Red Rising series (all recommended by the way :)). Honestly I think Sci-Fi is honestly more pessimistic in general than optimistic.
Or even Neal Stephenson’s latest book, attempts to grapple with the clash of techno-optimists and politicians.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Termination_Shock_(novel)
Re: The Writing on the Wall: Sci-Fi’s Empty Techno-Optimism
#33The first sentence I saw when following the link:
"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
Re: The Writing on the Wall: Sci-Fi’s Empty Techno-Optimism
#34Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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, pe…
“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.
Re: The Writing on the Wall: Sci-Fi’s Empty Techno-Optimism
#35Not 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 proble…
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.
Re: The Writing on the Wall: Sci-Fi’s Empty Techno-Optimism
#36I'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.
I wish I could vote this to the top!
Re: The Writing on the Wall: Sci-Fi’s Empty Techno-Optimism
#37Examples 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,…
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…
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?
Re: The Writing on the Wall: Sci-Fi’s Empty Techno-Optimism
#38Stephenson 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.
Re: The Writing on the Wall: Sci-Fi’s Empty Techno-Optimism
#39Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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, pe…
Relevant comic: https://www.butajape.com/comic/sci-fi-predictions/ Make sure you read the description too.
There are some interesting details in the last illustration. Seems like some hints around how the author thinks the real future will actually suck:
* Water only being available in bottles, at a very high price
* Cyborg tech
* Militarized Boston Dynamics robots
* Destroyed moon...?
Re: The Writing on the Wall: Sci-Fi’s Empty Techno-Optimism
#40I 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 probl…
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.