Matrix is a series of podcasts from Cryplogger in which we understand how the digital environment is being transformed with the advent of VR and augmented reality technologies, and we talk about metaverses with pioneers: businessmen, researchers and philosophers. In this issue, philologist Artem Zubov talks about science fiction, the imagination of the future and its limits.
1. It is more interesting to look not at what science fiction writers predicted, but at what “elephants” they missed. For example, computers, or rather the trend towards their miniaturization. If we turn to the science fiction of the 1940s and 60s, then there are more and more computers. Consider Arthur C. Clarke’s famous novel Nine Billion Names of God. There, the computer is a gigantic hulk capable of the most complex calculations, which is asked the fundamental questions of being. Or Harlan Ellison’s canon short story “I Have No Mouth, But I Must Scream.” There’s a supercomputer the size of a planet. In reality, everything turned out exactly the opposite.
Another “elephant” that science fiction writers have not thought much about is the Internet. Global communications often took the form of sophisticated technology using walkie-talkie-like objects; some authors have thought about telepathy. But for some reason, the idea of a worldwide information network was rarely described.
Also, science fiction writers tend to portray technologies as if they successively replace each other. What we do know, though, is more often what the cultural scientist Henry Jenkins calls convergence: old and new technologies coexist. In a world where cars fly, there are still horses.
But the most interesting blind spot is that science fiction writers practically do not reflect on art and culture, including, in fact, literature itself. It turns out that they do not fantasize about what they are doing. This is rather paradoxical. Of course, cultural figures become heroes of science fiction. But writers rarely comprehend, in fact, the role of the author who creates fantastic worlds. Perhaps it happened historically: scientists and inventors became the heroes of science fiction works much more often. It was their activities that were considered important for global political or social change, and not art and cultural practices.
2. The question of how science fiction influences the world around us is a very popular one, but it is almost impossible to answer it. Famous inventors often admit in interviews or autobiographies that they read Jules Verne or H. G. Wells as children and, being inspired, chose the path that led to discoveries in life. Elon Musk said that as a child he loved the novels of Isaac Asimov, Robert Heinlein and others. They allegedly inspired him to become who he is. In essence, these are historical anecdotes. But the situation becomes much more interesting when we understand that the images, ideas, concepts of writers can fall into various kinds of production chains, passing through an extremely difficult path, where there are a lot of stops and branches.
There are cases when manufacturers of certain technologies try to appeal to science fiction, creating in the audience a sense of recognition, fulfillment of expectations. From the screen we are told: “The future is already here.” And they offer a supposedly new product wrapped in sci-fi iconography. There are cases when manufacturers try to initiate this influence. For example, in 2014, Microsoft invited writers to their secret labs to show what they were working on. It was supposed to be such a motivator of imagination – each author, reflecting on what he saw, would write something amazing, and the developers would read and be even more inspired. In reality, it worked just like an advertisement, although the project had a condition that the writers would write for free. Apparently, the lack of a fee also played a role in the fact that nothing interesting happened.
Similar initiatives have arisen before: in 2011, the famous writer Neil Stevenson launched the Hieroglyph project with a social activist message. It was supposed to assemble a team that would generate a positive and more human perspective for the development of the world and society than is usually obtained from science fiction. Several collections have been published, interesting in their own way.
I tell this in order to show that the question of influence can be posed in various ways. The word itself can be understood in different ways. Let’s say a dispute, a challenge is also an influence. There is an extremely clear example here. There was a cult scene in the film The Fifth Element: the blue alien first performs Donizetti’s aria from the opera Lucia di Lammermoor, and then switches to a composition composed especially for this film by composer Eric Serra. This aria was specially written so that a person could not perform it: each note was recorded separately, which is why the work is so amazing. But what happened over time? People took the fantasy scene as a challenge, began to practice and gradually got closer to the original. Now on YouTube there are many live performances of this composition.
3. Science fiction is not about the future, it is always about the present. H. G. Wells wrote an unusual, innovative and very short novel, The Time Machine. The hero, sitting in one room, instantly moves between centuries and millennia. I tried to imagine how a reader of the late 19th century, not familiar with either aircraft or hypervelocities, must have perceived this text. It must have been a strange experience. The writer in this situation turned out to be the one who prepared the reader for the changes that would take place many years later. He, as it were, contributed to adaptation to modernity, which had just begun to advance. Of course, people at the beginning of the 20th century felt that the world was beginning to change at an alarming rate, and it was growing.
In the preface to the reprint of The Left Hand of Darkness, Ursula Le Guin says that science fiction certainly does not predict or show the world of the future. It involves a metaphorical reading of modernity, it is a metaphor for the problems, sensations, feelings of a person living here and now. A few years later, the philologist and literary critic Fredric Jamieson reproduced the same idea. He said:
“The most characteristic works of science fiction do not seriously attempt to imagine a ‘real’ future. Rather, these manifold fake “futures” are called upon to fulfill a completely different function: the function of transforming our own present into a certain past of some future.
The meaning is the same: science fiction conveys the experience that we are now experiencing through the prism of our projection into the future. Accordingly, reading this kind of literature literally does not make sense – this is the most frustrating experience, since it becomes outdated in five to eight years. But if you understand it metaphorically, it turns out much more productive.
The world around us is woven from words. Science fiction offers a new language to describe it. Case in point: the word “rocket” at first denoted a projectile, sometimes a weapon. It took science fiction writer Jules Verne to rethink the projectile as a mode of transport. That is, it took the imagination of a writer, a person working with words, to produce a metaphorical transfer. The same thing happened with the word “ship”. The phrase “spaceship” seems natural to us. However, it arose only at the beginning of the 20th century, when writers were faced with the need to talk about the unfamiliar – about the cosmos. And then the universe was correlated with the sea, and what moves through it, with the ship. Further, the cultural meanings that the concept of a ship sailing the seas and exploring unknown lands carries in itself were transferred to a spaceship. And it turned out that their crews are doing the same thing as Columbus. They open up new frontiers. Why was it necessary? To domesticate and bring the unknown closer.
4. Cyberpunk remains relevant because it helps people make sense of their own experiences. For example, incorporeal communication. Cyberpunk has become a phenomenon that arose not only in literature, but immediately in cinema and other art forms. This is a transmedia phenomenon: speaking of it, we mean not only plots and narrative structures, it has a special visual aesthetic associated with fogs, doorways, detectives in raincoats, neon, oriental hieroglyphs.
The idea that text should evoke visual associations most likely originated in the late 1970s with Star Wars. The film first made science fiction a mainstream phenomenon, accompanied by a heap of visual associations and narrative tropes. A similar story happened with cyberpunk: it immediately captured very different media spheres.
Neuromancer by William Gibson was released in 1984 as the main cyberpunk novel. He defined a new face of science fiction: before him, it was one, and then it became another. It must be borne in mind that in the first half of the 1980s there was a struggle between different groups of writers. One was led by the cyberpunks William Gibson and Bruce Sterling, and the other, the so-called “humanist group,” was led by Kim Stanley Robinson. Literary awards determined the primacy – they can be used to trace how one group receives a prestigious prize for a story, another – for a story, then again for a story, and then finally William Gibson receives the main prize for a novel. All victory. And then, as you know, in the early 1990s, Bruce Sterling suddenly informedthat cyberpunk is dead.
What a strange fate – from the avant-garde to death in a few years? It is clear that by “death” it was not meant that no one writes like that now. Vice versa. But the genre has stabilized, all the socio-critical pathos has gone, leaving a set of stable visual and narrative conventions: those same fog, cigarette, raincoat, neon, hieroglyphs. The very fact that we can enumerate it so easily was, for Sterling, a symptom that the living phenomenon was over, and there was a set of stamps that could be reproduced indefinitely. Of course, the writer here behaves like a “gatekeeper” who wants to dictate the rules of the game. He acts as the bearer of the truth about how it should be in reality.
But if the images begin to actively conventionalize and resonate with the audience, this indicates that there is definitely “something” in them. They convey a specific experience that is important to a wide audience. It is probably no longer necessarily associated with a critique of capitalism or with a fight against transnational corporations. Perhaps we are talking about a more “eternal” experience that we can comprehend for ourselves through cyberpunk images. For example, intimate experience. Cyberpunk raises the question of what corporeality is without a body. Or contact without touching, which virtual space “allows” us. Communication outside the body – apparently, this is what we want, and at the same time what we fear.
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Cryplogger Newsletters: Keep your finger on the pulse of the bitcoin industry!
Matrix is a series of podcasts from Cryplogger in which we understand how the digital environment is being transformed with the advent of VR and augmented reality technologies, and we talk about metaverses with pioneers: businessmen, researchers and philosophers. In this issue, philologist Artem Zubov talks about science fiction, the imagination of the future and its limits.
1. It is more interesting to look not at what science fiction writers predicted, but at what “elephants” they missed. For example, computers, or rather the trend towards their miniaturization. If we turn to the science fiction of the 1940s and 60s, then there are more and more computers. Consider Arthur C. Clarke’s famous novel Nine Billion Names of God. There, the computer is a gigantic hulk capable of the most complex calculations, which is asked the fundamental questions of being. Or Harlan Ellison’s canon short story “I Have No Mouth, But I Must Scream.” There’s a supercomputer the size of a planet. In reality, everything turned out exactly the opposite.
Another “elephant” that science fiction writers have not thought much about is the Internet. Global communications often took the form of sophisticated technology using walkie-talkie-like objects; some authors have thought about telepathy. But for some reason, the idea of a worldwide information network was rarely described.
Also, science fiction writers tend to portray technologies as if they successively replace each other. What we do know, though, is more often what the cultural scientist Henry Jenkins calls convergence: old and new technologies coexist. In a world where cars fly, there are still horses.
But the most interesting blind spot is that science fiction writers practically do not reflect on art and culture, including, in fact, literature itself. It turns out that they do not fantasize about what they are doing. This is rather paradoxical. Of course, cultural figures become heroes of science fiction. But writers rarely comprehend, in fact, the role of the author who creates fantastic worlds. Perhaps it happened historically: scientists and inventors became the heroes of science fiction works much more often. It was their activities that were considered important for global political or social change, and not art and cultural practices.
2. The question of how science fiction influences the world around us is a very popular one, but it is almost impossible to answer it. Famous inventors often admit in interviews or autobiographies that they read Jules Verne or H. G. Wells as children and, being inspired, chose the path that led to discoveries in life. Elon Musk said that as a child he loved the novels of Isaac Asimov, Robert Heinlein and others. They allegedly inspired him to become who he is. In essence, these are historical anecdotes. But the situation becomes much more interesting when we understand that the images, ideas, concepts of writers can fall into various kinds of production chains, passing through an extremely difficult path, where there are a lot of stops and branches.
There are cases when manufacturers of certain technologies try to appeal to science fiction, creating in the audience a sense of recognition, fulfillment of expectations. From the screen we are told: “The future is already here.” And they offer a supposedly new product wrapped in sci-fi iconography. There are cases when manufacturers try to initiate this influence. For example, in 2014, Microsoft invited writers to their secret labs to show what they were working on. It was supposed to be such a motivator of imagination – each author, reflecting on what he saw, would write something amazing, and the developers would read and be even more inspired. In reality, it worked just like an advertisement, although the project had a condition that the writers would write for free. Apparently, the lack of a fee also played a role in the fact that nothing interesting happened.
Similar initiatives have arisen before: in 2011, the famous writer Neil Stevenson launched the Hieroglyph project with a social activist message. It was supposed to assemble a team that would generate a positive and more human perspective for the development of the world and society than is usually obtained from science fiction. Several collections have been published, interesting in their own way.
I tell this in order to show that the question of influence can be posed in various ways. The word itself can be understood in different ways. Let’s say a dispute, a challenge is also an influence. There is an extremely clear example here. There was a cult scene in the film The Fifth Element: the blue alien first performs Donizetti’s aria from the opera Lucia di Lammermoor, and then switches to a composition composed especially for this film by composer Eric Serra. This aria was specially written so that a person could not perform it: each note was recorded separately, which is why the work is so amazing. But what happened over time? People took the fantasy scene as a challenge, began to practice and gradually got closer to the original. Now on YouTube there are many live performances of this composition.
3. Science fiction is not about the future, it is always about the present. H. G. Wells wrote an unusual, innovative and very short novel, The Time Machine. The hero, sitting in one room, instantly moves between centuries and millennia. I tried to imagine how a reader of the late 19th century, not familiar with either aircraft or hypervelocities, must have perceived this text. It must have been a strange experience. The writer in this situation turned out to be the one who prepared the reader for the changes that would take place many years later. He, as it were, contributed to adaptation to modernity, which had just begun to advance. Of course, people at the beginning of the 20th century felt that the world was beginning to change at an alarming rate, and it was growing.
In the preface to the reprint of The Left Hand of Darkness, Ursula Le Guin says that science fiction certainly does not predict or show the world of the future. It involves a metaphorical reading of modernity, it is a metaphor for the problems, sensations, feelings of a person living here and now. A few years later, the philologist and literary critic Fredric Jamieson reproduced the same idea. He said:
“The most characteristic works of science fiction do not seriously attempt to imagine a ‘real’ future. Rather, these manifold fake “futures” are called upon to fulfill a completely different function: the function of transforming our own present into a certain past of some future.
The meaning is the same: science fiction conveys the experience that we are now experiencing through the prism of our projection into the future. Accordingly, reading this kind of literature literally does not make sense – this is the most frustrating experience, since it becomes outdated in five to eight years. But if you understand it metaphorically, it turns out much more productive.
The world around us is woven from words. Science fiction offers a new language to describe it. Case in point: the word “rocket” at first denoted a projectile, sometimes a weapon. It took science fiction writer Jules Verne to rethink the projectile as a mode of transport. That is, it took the imagination of a writer, a person working with words, to produce a metaphorical transfer. The same thing happened with the word “ship”. The phrase “spaceship” seems natural to us. However, it arose only at the beginning of the 20th century, when writers were faced with the need to talk about the unfamiliar – about the cosmos. And then the universe was correlated with the sea, and what moves through it, with the ship. Further, the cultural meanings that the concept of a ship sailing the seas and exploring unknown lands carries in itself were transferred to a spaceship. And it turned out that their crews are doing the same thing as Columbus. They open up new frontiers. Why was it necessary? To domesticate and bring the unknown closer.
4. Cyberpunk remains relevant because it helps people make sense of their own experiences. For example, incorporeal communication. Cyberpunk has become a phenomenon that arose not only in literature, but immediately in cinema and other art forms. This is a transmedia phenomenon: speaking of it, we mean not only plots and narrative structures, it has a special visual aesthetic associated with fogs, doorways, detectives in raincoats, neon, oriental hieroglyphs.
The idea that text should evoke visual associations most likely originated in the late 1970s with Star Wars. The film first made science fiction a mainstream phenomenon, accompanied by a heap of visual associations and narrative tropes. A similar story happened with cyberpunk: it immediately captured very different media spheres.
Neuromancer by William Gibson was released in 1984 as the main cyberpunk novel. He defined a new face of science fiction: before him, it was one, and then it became another. It must be borne in mind that in the first half of the 1980s there was a struggle between different groups of writers. One was led by the cyberpunks William Gibson and Bruce Sterling, and the other, the so-called “humanist group,” was led by Kim Stanley Robinson. Literary awards determined the primacy – they can be used to trace how one group receives a prestigious prize for a story, another – for a story, then again for a story, and then finally William Gibson receives the main prize for a novel. All victory. And then, as you know, in the early 1990s, Bruce Sterling suddenly informedthat cyberpunk is dead.
What a strange fate – from the avant-garde to death in a few years? It is clear that by “death” it was not meant that no one writes like that now. Vice versa. But the genre has stabilized, all the socio-critical pathos has gone, leaving a set of stable visual and narrative conventions: those same fog, cigarette, raincoat, neon, hieroglyphs. The very fact that we can enumerate it so easily was, for Sterling, a symptom that the living phenomenon was over, and there was a set of stamps that could be reproduced indefinitely. Of course, the writer here behaves like a “gatekeeper” who wants to dictate the rules of the game. He acts as the bearer of the truth about how it should be in reality.
But if the images begin to actively conventionalize and resonate with the audience, this indicates that there is definitely “something” in them. They convey a specific experience that is important to a wide audience. It is probably no longer necessarily associated with a critique of capitalism or with a fight against transnational corporations. Perhaps we are talking about a more “eternal” experience that we can comprehend for ourselves through cyberpunk images. For example, intimate experience. Cyberpunk raises the question of what corporeality is without a body. Or contact without touching, which virtual space “allows” us. Communication outside the body – apparently, this is what we want, and at the same time what we fear.
Found a mistake in the text? Select it and press CTRL+ENTER
Cryplogger Newsletters: Keep your finger on the pulse of the bitcoin industry!
