Why sci fi is good

Yuval Noah Harari, author of the best-selling books Sapiens and Homo Deus , is a big fan of science fiction, and includes an entire chapter about it in his new book 21 Lessons for the 21st Century. But he thinks that too much science fiction tends to focus on scenarios that are fanciful or outlandish. He believes that science fiction authors and filmmakers need to do everything they can to change that.

And check out some highlights from the discussion below. So would you be able to reinvent yourself four, five, six times during your life? In this context, McEwan looks like something of a stubborn holdout — but there is evidence that, even as the silos start to collapse, readers remain highly attuned to genre conventions, and that writers can be punished for breaching them.

Or was the problem that convincing novelistic psychology fatally undermined the world-building of sci-fi? That she is, you might say, too round for it — so that when she steps into it, somehow it all shrinks to a shiny tin gadget?

One solution is the pseudonym: Iain Banks would add an M between his names to signal that he was working in space mode. Not everyone agrees that science fiction would be improved by being more respectable.

As a student, the American writer Joanna Russ was taught that women lacked the universal perspective from which to create literature one of those who taught her was Nabokov. Ridley Scott's television series Prophets of Science Fiction explores the power of fiction to both advance and complicate our ideas about the future , and Stephen Hawking is hosting the Science Channel's Stephen Hawking's Sci-Fi Masters.

What's remarkable about these items is not that science fiction is suddenly entering the mainstream presumably every human on the planet has now received at least one transmission from the Star Trek universe. The surprising shift is that public figures who traditionally kept a safe distance between their work and the flying saucers—scientists, highbrow writers, and serious journalists—are now embracing science fiction not as a form of escapism but as a tool for learning things about the real world.

As it turns out, science fiction is a great educational tool for getting people to think seriously about the future. It's easy to dream up press releases about the future with no people in them, no problems, no trash in the streets or religious discord—politicians do it all the time! But when you actually write stories with characters, you are confronted with all the difficult questions.

Imagining a world with actual people in it forces you to create not just the technologies of the future but societies with blind spots and ethical challenges. A narrative requires tensions and problems, which forces you to consider a spectrum of potential futures and the role of human agency in making the world better or worse.

Here at Arizona State University we are investing in the role of science fiction to create positive change in a number of ways. It could be a good life for future humans in a shared and interdependent biosphere. It could be extreme climate change, a mass-extinction event, agricultural collapse and intense deadly conflicts among desperate human groups, including nuclear war.

To grapple with this bizarre breadth of possible futures, I tend to take it one story at a time. And I deploy a set of organizing ideas. Science fiction is the realism of our time. It describes the present in the way a skeet shooter targets a clay pigeon, aiming a bit ahead of the moment to reveal what is not yet present but is already having an impact.

This gives us metaphors and meaning-systems to help conceptualize our moment. So, as with any other realist art, you pluck just one strand out of the fabric of the total situation, and follow where it leads. Because a novel is not a world. Even if it is about a world. We read fiction to have two science-fictional experiences: time travel and telepathy. And science fiction can describe any time, from tomorrow to billions of years hence. Space operas set in the distant future use the whole Universe as a story space, sometimes to spectacular effect.

Near-future science fiction is the proleptic realism I describe above. In between these, say from about one to three centuries from now, there exists a less-populated story zone that I find interesting. You could call it future history. Stories set in this zone resemble nineteenth-century social novels: the characters interact not just with each other, but with their societies and even their planets.

Possibly, confronted with the mind-boggling complexity of our present, describing events a century from now allows us to de-strand chosen elements for closer examination.

It has, rather, a double action, like the lenses of 3D glasses. Through one lens, we make a serious attempt to portray a possible future. But relax your eyes, and the results can be startling in their clarity. Look around: where are the moon colonies or cranial ports for wandering the Matrix? I spent a considerable part of my career as a sort of historian of technology primarily for the benefit of litigants in patent and trade-secret disputes. My own diagnosis is that our attempts to imagine the future are thwarted by the fact that the evolution of technology is dominated by false starts, chance encounters and path dependence.

Yet we cannot accept our essential fallibility in the face of the unpredictable future. We must devise unverifiable theories and tell just-so stories that retroactively construct a sensible narrative; this then makes the path that we did take seem ordained.

We humans are trapped by the narrative fallacy. The physical world may be irreducibly random, but our minds have evolved to assign causation to correlation, to see patterns in noise, to comprehend history not as one damned thing after another, but as the unfolding of some grand plan — perhaps the work of an Author. The pace of invention seems to be speeding up, and advancing technology amplifies the power of every individual in our complex world, for good and ill.

The world has grown only more random and unpredictable. Science fiction has reacted with ever more imaginative predictions. Will genetic engineering allow us to live for hundreds of years? Will we be uploaded into the cloud to live as digital gods?

Will a super artificial intelligence enslave us? Or will we devise a post-scarcity creative economy so that aliens will finally show up to welcome us to the Galactic Republic?

Chances are, none of these futures will transpire. They are too easily derived from the trajectory of the present. The real world of mass surveillance and corporate propaganda may be much more sinister and complicated than the worlds imagined by George Orwell in and Aldous Huxley in Brave New World. That remains timeless.