Since science fiction's inception as a literary genre, science fiction
writers have been predicting the information future. Whether you date
the genre's birth from Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, Jules Verne's
imaginary voyages, H. G. Wells's scientific romances, or Hugo
Gernsback's Amazing Stories and his stable of writers who put forth
stories about the gee-whiz gizmo, tales of bug-eyed monsters, and space-
adventure yarns, science fiction has been obsessed with technology and
its implications.
Science fiction writers recognized early on that the scientist, mad or
sane, was the new Prometheus, the creator of a brave new world and a
radical future in which knowledge and mechanical power were intimately
joined. Technology would, like the Enterprise, take us where no one had
gone before.
"But how," asks Marvin Minsky, an expert in artificial intelligence,
"can anyone predict where science and technology will take us? Although
many scientists and technologists have tried to do this, isn't it
curious that the most successful attempts were those by science fiction
writers like Jules Verne and H. G. Wells, Frederik Pohl, Robert
Heinlein, Isaac Asimov, and Arthur C. Clarke?"
Lewis M. Branscomb, former vice president and chief scientist at IBM,
agrees with Minksy. It seems that Branscomb, along with several other
distinguished scientists, was invited by a high-level U.S. government
agency to a secret meeting whose agenda was not announced until everyone
was assembled. Branscomb said, "This agency wanted to know what big
scientific discoveries were in the offing in the next two decades. When
it became clear that the discussion was going nowhere, Murray Gell-Mann
of Caltech volunteered the suggestion that the agency had brought in the
wrong people. 'The people you need here,' said Gell-Mann, 'are the
science fiction writers. They are skilled in telling you what will be
discovered in the next twenty years years.' "
The imaginative, science fiction writer is like a chess player
speculating about a variety of moves that humankind might make. But the
board on which that speculative game is played is scientific
plausibility. The interchange of ideas between science fiction and
technology has generated an extremely valuable cross-fertilization. The
number of scientists who read, write, or have been inspired by science
fiction would be a long list indeed.
Although the foretelling of the future is not what science fiction aims
to do, it has been amazingly prescient. Not constrained by the necessity
of waiting for excellent theories to be proven, science fiction can
extrapolate from what is known, pursue possible outcomes, and suggest
what may, in fact, occur. The technological advances foreshadowed by
science fiction are too numerous to list here, but some of the more
illuminating of the speculations that have come to pass are airplanes,
rockets, submarines, electricity, radio, television, atomic energy, men
on the moon, robots, and thinking machines.
In this way, science fiction has proven a kind of sociology of the
future, and it has immense value as a mind-stretching force for
promoting the habits of anticipation and of foreseeing the consequences
of present actions. It is not the rocket ships and time machines
themselves that are important (they are basically only props); the
importance lies in the imaginative exploration of the jungle of
political, social, and psychological issues that we will most likely
confront in the future.
Science, steeped as it is in logic and mathematical calculations, needs
the alternative perspectives that derive from our hearts and ethical
sensibilities. Often science fiction writers can adopt a
multidisciplinary approach, bringing a more lateralized cognition into
play. Depicting the future teaches us how to exercise our best powers,
our ingenuity, and our compassion: the enlargement of our imaginative
faculties. As Albert Einstein once noted, "Imagination is more important
than knowledge."
As our technology has grown ever more sophisticated and daring, our
literature has, of necessity, established a dialogue with science. Some
of our most complex and compelling contemporary works, such as those by
Vonnegut, Burroughs, Barth, Pynchon, Beckett, McElroy, Silverberg,
Gibson, Sterling, Brin, and Barthelme, are united by either one of two
common themes: Either they focus on some aspect of the recent explosion
in communications and computer technologies, or they confront the deeper
implications of the mechanization of people on some metaphorical level.
Most of us would willingly admit that we cannot keep up with the
advances in science. Few of us would acknowledge that we also are
ignorant of the advances in literature. Ursula K. Le Guin has stated
that between 1960 and 1990, the genre of science fiction came of age,
"moving from modernism to the postmodern." In the most recent edition
(1988) of the Columbia Literary History of the United States, in the
section "The Fictions of the Present," it lists science fiction as
"arguably the most significant body of work in contemporary fiction,"
citing it "as a major literary genre" and one of the "most significant
new directions in recent American fiction."
Connie Willis, recent winner of the prestigious Nebula Award for
Doomsday Book, remarked that "The job of a science fiction writer is to
look for the unforeseen consequences, the problems and kinks and side
effects nobody's really thought about." She agreed with sci-fi writer-
critic Ed Bryant that "If this were 1890, it would take an inventor to
predict the automobile, and it would take a real visionary to predict
highways and gas stations. But it would take a science fiction writer to
predict the traffic jam."
Did she think there would be unforeseen consequences to the information
revolution? You bet she did! After all, she explained, science fiction
writers have been talking about the problem for years. She invoked
Theodore Sturgeon's "And Now the News," which warns about the effects of
"too much media exposure and too much bad news," and Gordon Dickson's
"Computers Don't Argue," which should be self-explanatory. And how could
anyone forget that "star-class worrier, George Orwell, and his 1984"?
Since this is not the first information revolution, what can we learn
from the others? Willis felt that an examination of the introduction of
"talkies" to the movies might serve up some instructive insights. For
example, "Old jobs, like the piano player who'd played the mood music on
the silent set, suddenly became obsolete, and new jobs, like soundman
and electrician, sprang into being. Some people predicted that talkies
were nothing but a passing fad, and some people claimed they would
create a wonderful utopia, educate the masses, and cure the common cold.
Does any of this sound familiar? Like the information revolution we're
in right now, maybe?"
David Brin, whose novel Earth projects a society in which the network
and other high-tech communication devices are an integral part of
everyday existence, has called science fiction writers "the little
literary cabal who form the R&D Division of the Department of Myths and
Legends of the new culture. We are the scouts, the ones who explore the
edges, who point out dangers that may lurk, not just on the horizon but
perhaps some distances beyond it. We warn of possible mistakes and
create chilling scenarios to make them mythically believable. And in so
doing, we hope to prevent them from coming true."
Brin adds, "History warns us to be wary every time a new communications
technology arrives. Some try to use it to uplift and elevate humanity
while others skillfully apply the new medium to the oldest of the
magical arts: manipulating others. The old aristocrats in 1930s Germany
thought they'd control Hitler because they owned the newspapers. He went
around the press, reaching greater masses with the new, hypnotizing
power of radio." Brin cautions that technology is not neutral, that it
should not be in the driver's seat. He even keeps his e-mail address a
secret, explaining, "The machine does not own me. How many of you have
gotten stuck in this tar baby and had hundreds, thousands of your
working hours sucked out of your life by the machine?"
Marshall McLuhan, among others, demonstrated how technologies foster new
human environments. Now, many of us realize that the computer and its PC
offspring are at the heart of the present communications revolution, but
unless you read science fiction, you may not know that the computer is,
in essence, a nonmobile robot! It is basically the brains behind the
operations. Computers activate the mechanisms, direct them, and monitor
their programs. It would not be misleading to say that robots are a
computer's way of getting around.
For most people, the PC is basically a rhetorical device, enabling them
to eschew fixed texts as cultural artifacts, to enhance their ability to
manipulate information, and to sift through mountains of data. In the
unpredictable ways of technological adaptation (which is, by the way, a
major premise of cyberpunk science fiction), it is the lowly function of
word processing that has prepared the college and university faculty to
consider once again the educational possibilities of technology.
The robots are not only coming, they are here! In your kitchen, in your
living room, in the car in the garage. And it will be the PC--the
nonmobile robot disguised as a helpful word processor--that will lead us
into the information future. This multitasked tutor, which
interacts/communicates with other computer/robots and electrical
equipment, will connect us to our destiny of multimedia networks and
electronic community. As Mark Van Doren once said, "The student who can
begin early in life to see things as connected has begun the life of
learning. . . . The connectedness of things is what the educator
contemplates."
Science fiction contemplates the ramifications of science and
technology--the "connectedness of things." James Gunn, science fiction
professor and writer, comments, "Science fiction writers play a unique
role, because their work prepares the world for change." As Isaac Asimov
once pointed out, "No one can say that science fiction readers and
writers put a man on the moon all by themselves, but they provided a
climate of opinion in which the goal of putting a man on the moon became
acceptable." And as Alvin Toffler wrote, "Science fiction is the
sovereign prophylactic against future shock."
Science fiction, then, is a literature of anticipatory processes,
suggesting a spectrum of future worlds and, by this creative act,
reminding society how transient are the patterns of much of contemporary
culture. As the science fiction grand master Frederik Pohl remarked,
"There's no such thing as the future. What there is instead is an almost
infinite range of possible futures." But we must be able to imagine
them, test them in our minds before we set them loose. To wield our
Promethean technology in forging the future, we must be wiser than our
history indicates.
Selections from a Science Fiction Reader's Bookshelf
The following is a list of books that contain imaginative thought-
experiments. This is not a list of predictions! But it should provide
you with some clear visions of possible information futures. Then it's
up to us to guide that future, the one that will serve spaceship Earth
best. (All titles are works of fictions except Barron's Anatomy of
Wonder.) -- Wolf
Anatomy of Wonder by Neil Barron (Bowker, 1987). For those of you who
want to take your own thematic tour of science fiction, this nonfiction,
critical guide provides an excellent starting point. Filled with
elucidating abstracts of science fiction works and insightful essays on
major issues, it can be found in almost any library.
The Shockwave Rider by John Brunner (Harper, 1975). In a world highly
organized and controlled (all with the best intentions) by sophisticated
information technology, privacy becomes an almost antisocial act.
Inspired somewhat by Toffler's Future Shock, Brunner fears for
individual freedoms and the psychological imbalance caused by the
increasing pace of technological change.
When Harlie Was One by David Gerrold (Doubleday, 1972). An engaging
story of a humanistic computer scientist, who creates, more by accident,
a sentient computer at the corporation where he works. The education of
this computer, called Harlie, into the ways of people constitutes a
brilliant analysis of the human condition, as well as a summary of the
potential consequences of our creating artificial intelligence (AI) in
our own image. In an attempt to show people its gratitude, Harlie
designs an even more powerful AI.
Neuromancer by William Gibson (Ace, 1984). With this book Gibson almost
single-handedly gave birth to cyberpunk science fiction, which takes as
its territory the highly urbanized near future permeated by
microelectronic technology and sentient software. Much of the action
takes place in cyberspace, the "consensual hallucination that was the
matrix." By means of neurally implanted devices, one "jacks in" to the
global information network, surfing a virtual reality created by man and
machine. The encrypted information matrix is ruthlessly controlled and
policed by the corporations, who absolutely don't believe in free
access. The anti-hero is a console cowboy who hacks the Net. A seminal
book that the TV miniseries "Wild Palms" attempted to co-opt.
Arachne by Lisa Mason (Morrow, 1990). A former corporate lawyer turned
science fiction writer, Mason has a staggering conception of the role
that artificial intelligence most likely will play in the future.
Combining a dazzling array of computer/robotic characters with a human
race that spends more time online than not, Mason skillfully holds up a
mirror to the unrelenting momentum of technological culture. Deftly
negotiating the gridlocked information superhighways of the future, her
main protagonist exhibits the exhaustion of information overload and
data burnout.
The Cybernetic Samurai by Victor Milan (Arbor House, 1985). A must-read
for anyone interested in the world of computer hackers and the espionage
rampant in the global information market. Milan brings to life a race
that is already taking place between Japan and the United States (and a
few others) to determine who can field the first sentient computer. And,
like the Sputnik challenge, the hand that rocks the artificial
intelligence cradle has a good chance of determining the information
future and reaping substantial economic rewards.
Hyperion by Dan Simmons (Doubleday, 1989). A highly literate pilgrimage-
-a la Chaucer--in a far-future galaxy connected by a sophisticated
information "Web" and supported by an artificially intelligent society
that maintains its own distinct culture. Interplanetary commuting, by
means of "farcaster portals," is taken for granted--as is the virtual
reality of the datasphere, the absence of which on rural planets means
the poverty of unenlarged artificial consciousness. Messages can be sent
both forward and backward in time, creating what appears to be reversed
predestination in which the future determines the past. An imaginative,
metaphysical tour de force by a master storyteller.
Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson (Bantam, 1992). This is not a book for
people who think hackers are criminals and illiterates and lack a sense
of humor. But if you suspect that an "infocalypse" is possible in a
near-future America that has been privatized beyond the wildest dreams
of the Republican Party, you will chuckle your way through some worst-
case scenarios that will enlighten, and enliven, your understanding of
the role that information now plays. Juxtaposing Sumerian culture with
futuristic suppositions, Stephenson merges the Library of Congress and
the Central Intelligence Agency into the Central Intelligence
Corporation and the Internet into the Metaverse, creating a virtual hall
of mirrors that reflects the evanescent reality of cyberspace.
Mirrorshades: The Cyberpunk Anthology, Bruce Sterling, ed. (Morrow,
1986). Sterling, in his unofficial role as spokesperson for the
cyberpunk movement, serves up not only an excellent offering by writers
in this subgenre but a compelling manifesto of purpose in his
introduction. "Cyber" derives from "cybernetic," the Norbert Weiner
study of communications in animal and machine, and "punk" from 1970s
rock-'n'-roll terminology, meaning, "streetwise, alienated, and hip."
Central to much of the genre is an emphasis on "bodily metamorphosis,
media overload and destructive sex." Data networks are its subject
matter, and density of information infiltrates the text like a pall over
a London cemetery--or the backdrop in the film Blade Runner. A perusal
of this material will "rewire" your conceptual position.
True Names by Vernor Vinge (Bluejay, 1984). An intellectually satisfying
journey into cyberspace and virtual reality that reveals the wizardry
and fantasy possible within the data matrix of the world's computers.
The concept of downloading one's personality into the data stream
becomes an alternative to mortality. Vinge, a mathematics professor,
makes it impossible to ever read your e-mail again without wondering
about the world behind the screen. This is Dungeons and Dragons at its
most sophisticated level.