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Ed. note: The following remarks were made at the event celebrating 50 years since the publications of the Whole Earth Catalog.

Thank you to everyone involved with Whole Earth for the inspiring conversations you’ve sparked over the years, including the ones happening on this stage tonight. I feel honored to be here with you, and particularly to share the stage with Stephanie Mills.

I come from the Back to the Future generation. In just a few decades, we’ve made advances in technology that have put super computers in our pockets that we can charge with the power of the sun. Things we only dreamed of in science fiction and that feed the sense that someday, maybe when we have hover cars, the world will be different.

Throughout my life, there’s always been this deification of technology, this belief that technology will save us all, whether it’s from our own mortality or the damage we’ve done to the planet and other species. But there is no high-tech silver bullet that can change the realities of nature, including the fact that we’re part of it and that it has its limits.

Technology has done amazing things. Despite its drawbacks, I enjoy being part of the Age of Information as much as the next daily google user and I look forward to the longer life span that technology promises me. And there’s a long list of advances like solar energy and water purification that are a key part of mitigating decades of environmental exploitation.

But technology isn’t our savior. It’s a tool – and not even the most important one. We don’t need to wait for technology to save us, nor can we afford to do so.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Pulling the magical lever

September 6, 2018

Pulling the magical lever

A critical analysis of techno-utopian imaginaries

Image: Pixabay

Ideas about the importance of the imagination in an age of political and ecological crisis are popping up everywhere: in the arts, in activism and other forms of politics, and in a wide range of academic disciplines and fields. This blog is one example.

In addition to creative efforts to imagine other futures, we also need critical analyses of such visions. This is because imaginative responses to crises cover a broad spectrum of politics and worldviews—and even our dreams of a better future can be constrained by the political structure and ideologies of the present. A critical approach to utopian imaginaries is essential for any rethinking of political futures; without it, we risk being trapped in the same old stories even as we see ourselves as thinking outside the old story box.

Even our dreams of a better future can be constrained by the political structure and ideologies of the present.

In this essay, I discuss one category of future visions: techno-utopianism. There are plenty of techno-utopian fiction and nonfiction stories to choose from. Three that have caught my attention and that have some interesting similarities and differences are British campaigner and lobbyist Jonathon Porritt’s design fiction book The world we made, futurist Jacque Fresco’s The Venus project, and the movement for Fully Automated Luxury Communism.

To see how viable these visions are, I’ll analyze their narrative and argumentative logic and also connect the basic assumptions in these visions to the modernization hypothesis—the idea that human history is a process of evolution towards modernity through economic development and technological progress. Several schools of thought in the critical social sciences have emerged in reaction to this widespread conviction about progress.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

What science fiction ought to be

June 22, 2018

What science fiction ought to be

Science fiction has become the dominant genre of the last four decades – the biggest film of the year has been sci-fi almost every year in my lifetime. Of those, some are simply swashbuckler fantasies set in space, like Star Wars, while others are the very entertaining superhero fantasies that have become as ubiquitous as Westerns or musicals once were. Each year, however, brings a new wave of dystopian post-apocalyptic films – in the last year we’ve had Blade Runner 2049, Ready Player One, War for the Planet of the Apes, Geostorm, and later this year we can expect Alita and Mortal Engines

I say “dystopian,” because science fiction used to be creating utopian futures in which mankind had solved most of its problems – Star Trekbeing one of the only survivors of that age. In the time that science fiction has dominated our culture, though, it has been about something else: telling us how hopeless our future is, and how we’re all doomed.

They have a point; we have created a society that runs on coal and oil, which won’t last forever. Even the amount we’ve burned so far has changed the air so much that it is literally changing the weather around the world, creating more intense storms, harsher droughts, and greater extremes of heat and cold. Anyone who walks along the Irish shoreline can see the other main product of our civilisation, the plastic and other rubbish that now clutters the world’s seas, or piles up in landfills that have become the largest man-made structures on Earth.

Yet apocalyptic stories assume that our modern car-driving, computer-using culture will collapse overnight in some catastrophe, whether a robot Armageddon, climate disaster or Rapture – and the fact that we make entertainment about such horrors means that they are not really our fears, but our fantasies.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

“The Future” as a sales pitch

March 2, 2016

“The Future” as a sales pitch

No one can know the future. But it turns out we can invent a place called “The Future” and invite people to inhabit it.

In order to inhabit “The Future”–which is really just an enactment of our ideas about the future–you need the right accessories. For starters you’ll need the basics: the latest iPhone with the latest social networking app, a fully electric car (if you can afford it), and a FitBit watch. To that you can add your own personal drone, personal robot, and a farm cube for growing your own lettuce indoors.

In fact, before the pageants we call trade shows (such as the Consumer Electronics Show, coverage of which is linked above), we had world fairs that allowed us to “see the future.” Perhaps the most important thing to note about such events is that they began by focusing mostly on scientific and technical progress and its resulting consumer products. At these events our future political and economic system apparently remains unchanged. This is, in part, because political and economic reform cannot be packaged and sold like consumer products.

Of course, I could fill up this entire piece just listing all the other futuristic devices and even places that are available to us today and not scratch the surface. We are a society that venerates progress and that always has its eyes on the future. We think of ourselves as innovative and regard innovation as almost invariably good.

My interest in “The Future” as a sales pitch comes from a series of conversations with a good friend, James Armstrong, who is currently teaching a course in science fiction film. One of the films he’s showing is 2001: A Space Odyssey.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

The Flutter of Space Bat Wings

December 10, 2015

The Flutter of Space Bat Wings

You don’t actually know a time or a culture until you discover the thoughts that its people can’t allow themselves to think. I had a reminder of that the other day, by way of my novel Star’s Reach.

I’m pleased to say that for a novel that violates pretty much every imaginable pop-culture cliché about the future, Star’s Reach has been selling quite well—enough so that the publisher has brought out two more SF novels set in deindustrial futures, and is looking for other manuscripts along the same lines. What’s more, Star’s Reach has also started to inspire spinoffs and adaptations: a graphic novel is in the works, so is a roleplaying game, and so is an anthology of short stories by other authors set in the world sketched out in my novel. All of this came as a welcome surprise to me; far more surprising, though ultimately rather less welcome, was an ebullient email I received asking whether Star’s Reach was available to be optioned for a television miniseries.

For a variety of reasons, some of which will become clear as we proceed, I’ll call the person who got in touch with me Buck Rogers. He praised Star’s Reach to the skies, and went on at length about wanting to do something that was utterly faithful to the book. As I think most of my readers know by now, I haven’t owned a television in my adult life and have zero interest in changing that, even to see one of my own stories on the screen. I could readily see that people who like television might find a video adaptation entertaining, though, and no doubt it would make a welcome change from the endless rehash of overfamiliar tropes about the future that fills so much of science fiction these days.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

The World of Philip K. Dick is Almost Here

May 5, 2015

The World of Philip K. Dick is Almost Here

Holographic Computers and Self-Directing Bullets

Philip K. Dick was long viewed as a mere genre hack, although his fans always knew better of course. He used the medium of science fiction originally because it was the only way for him to make money as an independent author. His non-SF novels and stories (which have been published posthumously) would have been far more difficult to sell. And so he went and packaged his philosophical ideas into science fiction novels, which we can be eternally grateful for.

The man was brimming with ideas of what the future might look like. Hollywood has tried to bring some of them to the big screen in its adaptations of his novels (none of which Dick himself lived to see), such as e.g. the talking ads in “Minority Report”, which recognize every passer-by and address him by name. Modern-day internet advertising has already come close to this vision.

Dick not only described a fantastic future and displayed an uncanny sense of the things that would one day become reality (the “internet of things”? Try the talking doors in UBIK, which ask apartment owners to deposit money before they will open for them!), he often wrote about a dystopian future in which all these fantastic toys would be abused by seemingly nigh omnipotent governments.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

THE SCIENCE FICTIONAL FOUNDATION UNDER PAUL KRUGMAN, PART ONE

April 11, 2015

THE SCIENCE FICTIONAL FOUNDATION UNDER PAUL KRUGMAN, PART ONE

Paul Krugman, a few years ago, wrote at length to extol the magnum opus of science fiction grandmaster, Isaac Asimov, the Foundation Trilogy. Prof. Krugman’s reflections thereon are of keen interest.

I met Asimov once, 40+ years ago, at a world science fiction convention. I even got him to autograph my Science Fiction Book Club copy of “The Foundation Trilogy.” This compilation of three novels is an SF classic. I, then and since, found it too dull to read in full. (Asimov’s I, Robot then was much more engaging to this long-ago SF geek. But nothing Asimov wrote really rivaled Heinlein’s early, nor Arthur C. Clarke’s best, novels.)

Prof. Paul Krugman, galactically more influential than me, declares that he found the the Foundation Trilogy his formative inspiration. Therein hangs a tale: one of technocracy, which he exalts, versus mere common sense.

Prof. Krugman’s reflections were published in the UK Guardian at the end of 2012: Paul Krugman: Asimov’s Foundation novels grounded my economics (apparently, a reprint of Prof. Krugman’s introduction to the Folio Society edition of the same). Prof. Krugman there wrote, “I grew up wanting to be Hari Seldon, using my understanding of the mathematics of human behaviour to save civilisation.”

There is an unsubtle irony to Prof. Krugman’s opening observation that:

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

The View From Outside

March 19, 2015

The View From Outside

Recently I’ve been reacquainting myself with the stories of Clark Ashton Smith. Though he’s largely forgotten today, Smith was one of the leading lights of Weird Tales magazine during its 1930s golden age, ranking with H.P Lovecraft and Robert Howard as a craftsman of fantasy fiction. Like Lovecraft, Howard, and most of the other authors in the Weird Tales stable, Smith was an outsider; he spent his life in a small town in rural California; he was roundly ignored by the literary scene of his day, and returned the favor with gusto. With the twilight of the pulps, Smith’s work was consigned to the dustbin of literary history. It was revived briefly during the fantasy boom of the 1970, only to sink from sight again when the fantasy genre drowned in a swamp of faux-medieval clichés thereafter.

There’s no shortage of reasons to give Smith another look today, starting with his mastery of image and atmosphere and the wry humor that shaped the best of his mature work. Still, that’s a theme for another time, and possibly another forum. The theme that’s relevant to this blog is woven into one of Smith’s classic stories, The Dark Age. First published in 1938, it’s among the earliest science fiction stories I know of that revolves around an organized attempt to preserve modern science through a future age of barbarism.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

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