It is always fascinating to see how much influence authors and scientists have had on each other throughout history.
You sometimes see clear examples of how fiction fuels technology, and sometimes technology inspires fiction.
As a writer who hasn’t been published yet, I find that most of my stories start by imagining where today’s science might take us next, though every now and then, I catch a glimpse of something that feels truly original.
I'm curious if others here feel the same. Is the future mostly written by visionaries in fiction, or by the engineers and scientists bringing it to life? Or maybe it’s a union, intended or not, between both sides.
>Is the future mostly written by visionaries in fiction, or by the engineers and scientists bringing it to life?
I find Charles Stross' blog to be quite informative.
He has a tendency to predict a thing, write a book demonstrating how it will be good, and then absolutely hate the real world implications of the technology.
Famously he picked up Nick Szabo's old whitepaper on smart contracts, and envisaged a world where the technology would be used to disrupt an evil US government. Making it too hard for them to examine complex business structures.
By the time we got smart contracts, he was dead set against their use. And has written a lot about how corporations are in fact evil AI running on the operating system of the government.
He also has a variant of crypto currency in one of his novels, used to trade at light speed (so incredibly slowly) against distant space colonies. He is quite anti crypto, and I believe if such a system were deployed he would be quite against it.
The problem I guess is that its fun to imagine a thing, but not as fun always to live with it.
In general, people being people, it is always safe to assume that some will use a thing for its best purpose and others for its worst possible purpose.
That’s an interesting point you make, and a great example with Charles Stross. It’s a good reminder that ideas and inventions can have surprising real-world effects, sometimes not what the creators hoped for.
I’m dreading the day I hear, “I’m sorry Ed, I’m afraid I can’t do that.” (kidding).
as a high schooler I took a summer class in “reading & writing scifi” offered by MIT Junction. it was very influential on my intellectual development and after that I focused myself on learning software and electronics, the only crafts I saw that could give me the power to pull parts of the visions into the present.
a few weeks ago I started on a focused read of historical scifi, in chronological order, that had something to say about intelligent machines and AI. I feel like the best story for our moment might be “The Master Key,” where a boy wise beyond his years rejects powers too advanced for humanity to adapt.
all my interest in building https://rbg.systems came from wanting the sort of powerful, resilient, reflective software systems that show up in fiction all the time but are so far from the reality. it’s pretty boring stuff to try and reach something like the ship described in Aurora by Kim Stanley Robinson.
In a similar vein, I really liked "Robot" by Adam Wiśniewski-Snerg, first published in 1973. It doesn't really mention AI itself, but it is about the relationship between humans and artificial life/intelligence. The central theme is the question of knowing if you're "real" in an artificial world. Not the easiest read and can be quite dark at times, but one of my favorite works of classical science fiction. Very underrated!
Thanks for your comment, that’s exactly what I was wondering about.
For me, I actually tend to see things the other way around where authors often inspire tech. Example, engineers who watched Star Trek as kids and ended up designing the first flip phones. Sometimes we build things simply because technology finally makes them possible, and only later do we realize it’s straight out of a story we grew up with.
Especially when a whole generation grows up with the same sci-fi stories, certain ideas just start to seem “normal” or even become things people expect to see for real. A kind of relationship between our collective dreams and the inventions that follow, i guess.
while i agree in principle, you seem to make it sound like without a science fiction story, some things would not have been invented. but i disagree with that. the thing is that science fiction is the imagination of humans of how the future could look like but new ideas in tech come from the same source. that is, while star trek may have predicted phones and tablets they were not invented because of star trek. they would have been invented anyways simply because it is part of the imagination of humans. just like multiple authors can come up with the same plot lines or settings, multiple people can invent the same tech.
science fiction represents the full breath of human inventiveness, and tech inventions the part that can realistically be built. in that sense the first airplane was also inspired by historical scifi
basically, someone has an idea, and either, like you, they write about it, or, if it is realistic enough, and they know how to do it, they set out to build it. and any idea that is written about but can be realized (and is practical enough to be useful) will eventually be realized. but ideas are cheap, and i feel we give far to much credit to people having an idea because a thousand others probably had the same idea, but only a few write about it and a few more are able to build it, while the remaining 995 stay silent and do nothing about it.
so i credit star trek not for inspiring the tablet, but for predicting it, and more so, for popularizing the idea. the flip phone less so, because the original communicator is just a wireless handset with a cover. very different from what a flip phone actually does. (you'll notice that the flip phone is not listed in the above wikipedia page, and even the tablet has been described more than a decade before it appeared in star trek TNG)
I get what you’re saying, and it makes total sense. I’d lean toward it being the best (and worst) of both worlds: sometimes stories spark inventions, sometimes inventions spark stories, and we can probably agree it’s rarely just one-way.
In my case, my imagination pulled me into writing, where I conjure things up, so I definitely feel that inspirational side, even if the ideas themselves aren’t always “original.” To the creator, though, they can feel original.
As I write fiction, I notice I often end up predicting futures where humans might go next. So you’re right, writing can be as much about prediction as inspiration. But I also like to think that, every now and then, a truly new paradigm emerges, something unpredictable, that most people didn’t even realize was needed until it existed. Sometimes, society doesn’t know what it needs until it’s already here.
That novella was so enduringly influential that noted SF authors Stephen Baxter (a collaborator with, and sort of heir to, Clarke,) and Alastair Reynolds wrote a very good sequel a few years ago: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Medusa_Chronicles
Kind of hard for SF stories featuring organic life (i.e. humans) to be based around Jupiter because of the planet's incredibly strong magnetic field and hence killing radiation belts - like the Van Allen belts around Earth, but much worse. Probes to the Jovian system have to be heavily hardened.
If anybody is into sci-fi, I highly recommend The Three Body Problem series. I'm being very elusive here to avoid spoilers, but let's just say that there are some very fascinating challenging with establishing technology (and especially human life) around Jupiter, what with it's gravity, the radiation, it's moons, distance from the sun, etc. As a space nerd, those books were highly enjoyable
The tech/fantasy parts are great and were novel back then. But the characters were shallow, story so-so and ended in big meh, and overal it feels like chinese propaganda re freedom and future.
Any non-chinese character is evil for example, only chinese will inherit the right for their future. Western culture moved from such properly bad cliches long time ago for the better.
I think it's more that western cultural cliches become invisible to western audiences rather than moving on. E.g. the "superhero" is definitely a western cliche. "A lone operative defies the rules to do the right thing because might is right if you're right. Individual exceptionalism triumphing etc". Somewhat shallowly examined in some films but still turns up all over the place.
The opening scene of the first novel during the cultural revolution I recall as being absolutely fantastic. The rest of that novel was a big rather dull Asimovian deus ex, and then the rest of the series was more of that.
Big disappointment, very much not what I think of as hard sci-fi which is what it often gets billed as, and I absolutely do not get the love for it here.
Don't get me wrong, there's some total dross out there that I adore, but this ain't it for me.
There's a fantastic Ray Bradbury short story from 1948 called "Jonah and the Jove-Run" that I hardly see referenced anywhere. It's about Jupiter being the next frontier after colonizing Mars and the complexity of navigating the asteroid belt on supply runs.
It's a great quick read. Though it hardly attempts the sort of scientific justification as in The Three-Body Problem.
In case anybody’s interested, Malka Older has a really enjoyable series (two books so far) of short novels set on habitats in Jupiter’s atmosphere (so not breathable atmosphere, but also not vacuum). They’re solid mystery stories with fun characters and an intriguing setting. The first is called “The Mimicking of Known Successes” and the second is “The Imposition of Unnecessary Obstacles”.
Well, life on Jupiter is possible, but "organic" life seems way less likely. "Organic" means carbon compounds, and there's not a whole lot of carbon on Jupiter.
Of the four big ones, Callisto at 0.01 rem/day is probably the least deadly. Io is the worst, not only for radiation but being basically one huge volcano, powered by tidal stresses.
Jupiter and Saturn moons always make inspiring hostnames. Right now, I have Callisto, Europa, and Ganymede. Ganymede has the most powerful setup. Yesterday, I decommissioned Io.
Reading this post reminded me of another book I read a few years ago: Curious Moon [0].
It is written as a novel that teaches PostgreSQL by exploring the dataset of the Cassini orbiter around Enceladus, Saturn's moon. Highly recommended and fun read.
It is always fascinating to see how much influence authors and scientists have had on each other throughout history.
You sometimes see clear examples of how fiction fuels technology, and sometimes technology inspires fiction.
As a writer who hasn’t been published yet, I find that most of my stories start by imagining where today’s science might take us next, though every now and then, I catch a glimpse of something that feels truly original.
I'm curious if others here feel the same. Is the future mostly written by visionaries in fiction, or by the engineers and scientists bringing it to life? Or maybe it’s a union, intended or not, between both sides.
>Is the future mostly written by visionaries in fiction, or by the engineers and scientists bringing it to life?
I find Charles Stross' blog to be quite informative.
He has a tendency to predict a thing, write a book demonstrating how it will be good, and then absolutely hate the real world implications of the technology.
Famously he picked up Nick Szabo's old whitepaper on smart contracts, and envisaged a world where the technology would be used to disrupt an evil US government. Making it too hard for them to examine complex business structures.
By the time we got smart contracts, he was dead set against their use. And has written a lot about how corporations are in fact evil AI running on the operating system of the government.
He also has a variant of crypto currency in one of his novels, used to trade at light speed (so incredibly slowly) against distant space colonies. He is quite anti crypto, and I believe if such a system were deployed he would be quite against it.
The problem I guess is that its fun to imagine a thing, but not as fun always to live with it.
>And has written a lot about how corporations are in fact evil AI running on the operating system of the government.
I would say his view of them is more Lovecraftian than "evil", but here's the speech (as a blog entry): https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2018/01/dude-yo...
In general, people being people, it is always safe to assume that some will use a thing for its best purpose and others for its worst possible purpose.
Pretty much.
I also get the impression that as people age they place an increasing value on safety and comfort. Change is the antithesis to that.
Also good to remember that groups of people are not people, they think and act differently than any of the individuals that make them up.
That’s an interesting point you make, and a great example with Charles Stross. It’s a good reminder that ideas and inventions can have surprising real-world effects, sometimes not what the creators hoped for.
I’m dreading the day I hear, “I’m sorry Ed, I’m afraid I can’t do that.” (kidding).
as a high schooler I took a summer class in “reading & writing scifi” offered by MIT Junction. it was very influential on my intellectual development and after that I focused myself on learning software and electronics, the only crafts I saw that could give me the power to pull parts of the visions into the present.
a few weeks ago I started on a focused read of historical scifi, in chronological order, that had something to say about intelligent machines and AI. I feel like the best story for our moment might be “The Master Key,” where a boy wise beyond his years rejects powers too advanced for humanity to adapt.
all my interest in building https://rbg.systems came from wanting the sort of powerful, resilient, reflective software systems that show up in fiction all the time but are so far from the reality. it’s pretty boring stuff to try and reach something like the ship described in Aurora by Kim Stanley Robinson.
> “The Master Key,” where a boy wise beyond his years rejects powers too advanced for humanity to adapt.
For those stumbling by- that's a 1901 novel by L. Frank Baum, who also wrote The Wizard Of Oz! Here's a synopsis: https://oz.fandom.com/wiki/The_Master_Key
For those intereseted. Here's the link to "The Master Key" on Gutenberg https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/21526
In a similar vein, I really liked "Robot" by Adam Wiśniewski-Snerg, first published in 1973. It doesn't really mention AI itself, but it is about the relationship between humans and artificial life/intelligence. The central theme is the question of knowing if you're "real" in an artificial world. Not the easiest read and can be quite dark at times, but one of my favorite works of classical science fiction. Very underrated!
That is interesting. I might have to find some time to check out the book. Thanks for sharing your experience.
I feel the same way, although I think technology's inspiration on fiction is stronger. Today's fiction, as you said, is simply tomorrow's science.
Thanks for your comment, that’s exactly what I was wondering about.
For me, I actually tend to see things the other way around where authors often inspire tech. Example, engineers who watched Star Trek as kids and ended up designing the first flip phones. Sometimes we build things simply because technology finally makes them possible, and only later do we realize it’s straight out of a story we grew up with.
Especially when a whole generation grows up with the same sci-fi stories, certain ideas just start to seem “normal” or even become things people expect to see for real. A kind of relationship between our collective dreams and the inventions that follow, i guess.
while i agree in principle, you seem to make it sound like without a science fiction story, some things would not have been invented. but i disagree with that. the thing is that science fiction is the imagination of humans of how the future could look like but new ideas in tech come from the same source. that is, while star trek may have predicted phones and tablets they were not invented because of star trek. they would have been invented anyways simply because it is part of the imagination of humans. just like multiple authors can come up with the same plot lines or settings, multiple people can invent the same tech.
science fiction represents the full breath of human inventiveness, and tech inventions the part that can realistically be built. in that sense the first airplane was also inspired by historical scifi
basically, someone has an idea, and either, like you, they write about it, or, if it is realistic enough, and they know how to do it, they set out to build it. and any idea that is written about but can be realized (and is practical enough to be useful) will eventually be realized. but ideas are cheap, and i feel we give far to much credit to people having an idea because a thousand others probably had the same idea, but only a few write about it and a few more are able to build it, while the remaining 995 stay silent and do nothing about it.
what makes scifi interesting is to predict inventions that at the time can't yet be realized: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_existing_technologies_...
so i credit star trek not for inspiring the tablet, but for predicting it, and more so, for popularizing the idea. the flip phone less so, because the original communicator is just a wireless handset with a cover. very different from what a flip phone actually does. (you'll notice that the flip phone is not listed in the above wikipedia page, and even the tablet has been described more than a decade before it appeared in star trek TNG)
I get what you’re saying, and it makes total sense. I’d lean toward it being the best (and worst) of both worlds: sometimes stories spark inventions, sometimes inventions spark stories, and we can probably agree it’s rarely just one-way.
In my case, my imagination pulled me into writing, where I conjure things up, so I definitely feel that inspirational side, even if the ideas themselves aren’t always “original.” To the creator, though, they can feel original.
As I write fiction, I notice I often end up predicting futures where humans might go next. So you’re right, writing can be as much about prediction as inspiration. But I also like to think that, every now and then, a truly new paradigm emerges, something unpredictable, that most people didn’t even realize was needed until it existed. Sometimes, society doesn’t know what it needs until it’s already here.
Thanks for the link, really interesting list!
The author of that article somehow managed to miss the most famous Jupiter story of all. Arthur C. Clarke's "A Meeting with Medusa." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Meeting_with_Medusa
That novella was so enduringly influential that noted SF authors Stephen Baxter (a collaborator with, and sort of heir to, Clarke,) and Alastair Reynolds wrote a very good sequel a few years ago: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Medusa_Chronicles
The Author also missed the fact that in the 2001 Movie they went to Jupiter, whereas in the book they went to Saturn.
https://scifi.stackexchange.com/questions/177/why-is-the-des...
Kind of hard for SF stories featuring organic life (i.e. humans) to be based around Jupiter because of the planet's incredibly strong magnetic field and hence killing radiation belts - like the Van Allen belts around Earth, but much worse. Probes to the Jovian system have to be heavily hardened.
If anybody is into sci-fi, I highly recommend The Three Body Problem series. I'm being very elusive here to avoid spoilers, but let's just say that there are some very fascinating challenging with establishing technology (and especially human life) around Jupiter, what with it's gravity, the radiation, it's moons, distance from the sun, etc. As a space nerd, those books were highly enjoyable
The tech/fantasy parts are great and were novel back then. But the characters were shallow, story so-so and ended in big meh, and overal it feels like chinese propaganda re freedom and future.
Any non-chinese character is evil for example, only chinese will inherit the right for their future. Western culture moved from such properly bad cliches long time ago for the better.
I think it's more that western cultural cliches become invisible to western audiences rather than moving on. E.g. the "superhero" is definitely a western cliche. "A lone operative defies the rules to do the right thing because might is right if you're right. Individual exceptionalism triumphing etc". Somewhat shallowly examined in some films but still turns up all over the place.
The opening scene of the first novel during the cultural revolution I recall as being absolutely fantastic. The rest of that novel was a big rather dull Asimovian deus ex, and then the rest of the series was more of that.
Big disappointment, very much not what I think of as hard sci-fi which is what it often gets billed as, and I absolutely do not get the love for it here.
Don't get me wrong, there's some total dross out there that I adore, but this ain't it for me.
As a hard sci-fi fan, I thoroughly enjoyed the books. They're a lot "harder" than most popular sci-fi books out there.
Then I can only assume that you and I have very different definitions of "hard sci-fi"
There's a fantastic Ray Bradbury short story from 1948 called "Jonah and the Jove-Run" that I hardly see referenced anywhere. It's about Jupiter being the next frontier after colonizing Mars and the complexity of navigating the asteroid belt on supply runs.
It's a great quick read. Though it hardly attempts the sort of scientific justification as in The Three-Body Problem.
https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/64420/pg64420.txt Bradbury, Jonah of the Jove-Run
In case anybody’s interested, Malka Older has a really enjoyable series (two books so far) of short novels set on habitats in Jupiter’s atmosphere (so not breathable atmosphere, but also not vacuum). They’re solid mystery stories with fun characters and an intriguing setting. The first is called “The Mimicking of Known Successes” and the second is “The Imposition of Unnecessary Obstacles”.
You may also enjoy Farewell Horizontal K. W. Jeter, takes place on a giant floating cylinder
Well, life on Jupiter is possible, but "organic" life seems way less likely. "Organic" means carbon compounds, and there's not a whole lot of carbon on Jupiter.
Read "Call me Joe". Short story so you may be able to find a text dump of it with a little google-fu.
What kind of life are you thinking of?
I have no idea! Maybe ammonia or methane based? Seems somewhere between unlikely and fantastical, but maybe?
Are the moons toast from it too? Which ones would be amenable to life?
Of the four big ones, Callisto at 0.01 rem/day is probably the least deadly. Io is the worst, not only for radiation but being basically one huge volcano, powered by tidal stresses.
Jupiter and Saturn moons always make inspiring hostnames. Right now, I have Callisto, Europa, and Ganymede. Ganymede has the most powerful setup. Yesterday, I decommissioned Io.
The VAX cluster at my university used Saturn (the most powerful member of the cluster) and its moons as hostnames.
Reminds me we named our sprints on these moon names
Reading this post reminded me of another book I read a few years ago: Curious Moon [0].
It is written as a novel that teaches PostgreSQL by exploring the dataset of the Cassini orbiter around Enceladus, Saturn's moon. Highly recommended and fun read.
[0] https://sales.bigmachine.io/curious-moon
Similar idea for intro to sql for people - https://selectstarsql.com
>He observed a trio of lights near the planet
>He had discovered four of Jupiter’s moons
okay then..
edit: flagged?? refer to above