Why We Need Big, Bold Science Fiction


By Glenn Harlan Reynolds

Matthew J. Laznicka

April 4, 2012 6:30 AM Text Size: A . A . A
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For a reality check on the state of innovation, I spoke with inventor Dean Kamen, whose many credits include a portable dialysis machine, a DARPA-funded robotic prosthetic arm, and the Segway—along with the FIRST robotics competitions for middle and high school kids. Kamen was more optimistic than my science-fiction writers. From his perspective, the problem is actually that writers are falling behind. "Science-fiction writers aren't being imaginative enough to get ahead of the science," he says. "You walk into a major university medical center and what you find is something way beyond science fiction."

Kamen agrees that we're not making enough progress in space, but says, "That's because of the excitement at home—cloning, curing diseases, extending life." And yet he agrees with Stephenson's argument that the Internet, while obviously a valuable tool, can also be an unfortunate distraction: "We've given people new ways to communicate but nothing worth saying. I wish people understood the difference between data and information. The fact that it's easy, fast, and cheap doesn't mean that it's valuable."

At one level, it's hard to argue that point. Early hominids liked to sit around gossiping. If nowadays we're picking fleas out of each other's hair electronically instead of in person, well, that's sort of an improvement, but it's not a revolutionary one.

On the other hand, I know a lot of people who have created small but flourishing businesses using the Internet to do things that would have been too difficult in the old days of paper mail and landline phones. In addition, some scientists are using social media to speed progress, long before Vinge's superintelligent AI arrives: Video-­gamers recently solved a protein-­folding problem involving the AIDS virus that had baffled researchers for years. And the crowdsourcing of politics is promoting democracy worldwide. Beyond that, video games have educational potential: My daughter learned a lot about budgeting from The Sims.

On balance, though, I have to agree that the kind of progress Neal Stephenson is pushing for is more important. My perspective is informed by something a golden age writer, Robert A. Heinlein, once said: "Earth is too fragile a basket to hold all of our eggs." There are lots of metrics you can use to assess technological progress. But to me, the overarching goal of the next century or so has to be to spread humanity beyond Earth—and, ideally, beyond the solar system.

12 Bold Sci-Fi Books

Between potential natural disasters like asteroid strikes and plagues, and man-made threats like nuclear weapons and biological warfare, the risk that humanity will be destroyed by some catastrophe is unacceptably high. The solution, it seems to me (and to others, like Stephen Hawking), is for civilization to expand so widely that no plausible disaster will wipe us all out.

On this metric, the golden age approach to technology—all those rocket ships and Mars bases—looks better: Facebook probably won't save us from economic stagnation; it certainly won't save us from an asteroid.

Besides, the golden age approach is just more inspiring. Novels about brooding antiheroes may be good literature, but they likely won't inspire teenagers to study physics or engineering. Golden age science fiction—and in particular, those Heinlein junior novels such as Have Space Suit—Will Travel or Rocket Ship Galileo—did that.

Neal Stephenson is putting together an anthology of pro-progress science fiction. And SF writer Sarah A. Hoyt, author of DarkShip Thieves, thinks the balance between utopian and dystopian science fiction is already swinging back toward the positive. As evidence, she points to new works such as Ric Locke's Temporary Duty, written in the spirit of those old Heinlein novels and trumpeting technical knowledge and self-reliance rather than introspection.

"If the friends I have in science are right, computers are about to explode a bunch of fields," Hoyt says. "I think crowdsourcing research and the faster integration of knowledge, as well as the snowball effect of having reached a certain point in knowledge, are about to unlock all sorts of innovations in computing, biology, pharmaceuticals, genetics, and perhaps things that will get private companies into space."

If all that comes to pass, science fiction could take on the role it had decades ago, dreaming of new horizons while helping people understand and adjust to an evolving reality. "I think my field is on the verge of an explosion of forward-looking and outward-­looking works," Hoyt says.

I hope she's right about that too. Science and engineering are about what we can do, but often what we actually wind up doing is driven by the stories we tell. We should make sure they're the right ones.

12 Bold Science Fiction Books >>>


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