Hieroglyph

This book came out of Arizona State University’s Center for Science and the Imagination, and is the product of a collaboration effort between science fiction writers and actual scientists. Each short story takes a real piece of current day science or technology and extrapolates it into the future; at the end of each story are links to the relevant real science and discussions from scientists about the story.

The stories themselves are a mixed bunch, I definitely liked some better than others and there's a few that didn't impress me, but there were also a few "wow" stories and the overall premise of the book is really the best side of science fiction writing.

From future houses that are entire self-contained living ecosystems to new social media "Dorians" who personify companies and change appearance and personality (like the fictional Portrait of Dorian Gray) based on a summary of the customers' ratings, to charity work saving endangered elephants by crowdsourcing remote drone monitoring to a network of global volunteers, to much much more ... fascinating ideas and thought provoking. Rather than reading straight through this I've been taking one story at a time for the last few months and thinking about it for a while in between. If you like science and speculative science fiction then this collection is highly recommended. :)

The stories in this book do a fair-to-excellent job of their stated goal: to envision futures in which science and technology have improved the world, instead of destroying it. It's Project Hieroglyph's view that dystopian fiction has become distressingly common and unthinking, and that science fiction is abdicating one of its goals: to inspire beneficial innovation.

As a voracious SF reader in my youth, I have a lot of sympathy for that goal, and for that reading of the problems of modern SF. There are thoughtful, uplifting stories about how we could stand up and grapple with issues that seem unassailable now: global warming, mass extinctions, the tightening of global surveillance, etc. Lee Konstantinou's raggedy band of drone-hacking techno-pagans in "Johnny Appledrone vs. the FAA" is a good example, although the story is too short to offer more than a quick sketch of the characters and their solutions. I'd love to read more about them. The twinned stories that bookend the anthology (Neal Stephenson's "Atmosphæra Incognita," and Bruce Sterling's "Tall Tower") explore the creation and later life of a 20-kilometer tower, a city-sized (and later, city-containing) steel behemoth halfway between the Burj Khalifa and a full-blown space elevator. Vandana Singh's "Entanglement," is the most purely inspiring story, with a globe-spanning vision of a single innovation in network architecture that changes the world on a spiritual level. These are the gems of this collection.

But then there are the others. I was disappointed by Gregory Benford's "The Man Who Sold The Stars." Apparently Benford thinks the REAL problem we face is that governments won't get out of the way of billionaires who, if they weren't forced to pay those darn taxes and stop extracting wealth that isn't theirs, would otherwise colonize the galaxy and solve everyone's (well, their) problems. His Randian business-magnate heroes escape to the stars just ahead of a global populist junta trying to bring them to justice for tax evasion. In the relativity-extended future, this deposed regime is said to have "killed a lot of people." I'm a big fan of Benford's work in other arenas (The Heart of the Comet is fantastic) but this story is a tone-deaf, hyper-libertarian clinker in an otherwise solid anthology. It would be more at home in a 1950s Heinlein juvenile paperback than here. It sure felt dystopian to me. Geoffrey Landis' "A Hotel in Antarctica," has some of the same problems, but at least acknowledges the humanity of the hotel-fighting environmentalists by allowing them on the stage.

At some level, many of these stories either ignore or deny the Problem of the Technological Fix, as outlined capably in Albert H. Teich's non-fiction anthology Technology And The Future. Briefly, this describes a process by which humanity finds a problem (say, hunger and poor crop yields), creates technology to address that problem (pesticides and the Green Revolution), then finds that technology has created another, perhaps more intractable problem (mono-crop reliance, cancer clusters, and pesticide-resistant insects), and the cycle repeats. The best stories here are those that incorporate some awareness of this problem. When that's addressed, these stories do offer the inspiration and hope that is the project's goal.

Books with bonus content are always good! It's worth mentioning this book is part of an ongoing project at the University of Arizona, with message boards and extensive extra material, here.