want to live in? … and I can think of no better questions to try and answer.
• • • •
CHAPTER 2
Religious Robots and Runaway Were-Tigers: A Brief Overview of the Science and the Fiction that Went Into Two SF Prototypes
First, a little background.
The blending of science fiction and science fact is nothing new. Their symbiotic relationship stretches back in history for hundreds of years. No one would really argue that scientific research and technology inspires writers to dream up thrilling stories and amazing new worlds. Likewise, generations of scientists have had their imaginations set on fire by science fiction stories, inspiring them to devote their lives to science.
I was speaking a while back at a science convention not too long ago about the link between science fiction and science fact and SF prototypes. After my talk, at least five different roboticists pulled me aside and told me that the real reason they had gotten into robots in the first place was because of C3PO and R2D2 in George Lucas’ 1977 space opera classic, Star Wars. When each of these incredibly intelligent scientists confessed this to me, they spoke in a hushed voice as if they were telling me a dirty little secret. But I quickly laughed and told them that they were not alone!
It is well documented that science fiction has inspired generations of scientists, researchers and even astronauts. British science fiction author, inventor and futurist, Arthur C. Clark, summed it up this way in his essay “Aspects of Science Fiction”: “All of the pioneers of astronautics were inspired by Jules Verne, and several (e.g., Goddard, Oberth, von Braun) actually wrote fiction to popularize their ideas. And I know from personal experience that many American astronauts and Soviet cosmonauts were inspired to take up their careers by the space travel stories they read as children (one of my proudest possessions is a little monograph, Wingless on Luna, bearing the inscription, ‘To Arthur, who visualized the nuances of lunar flying long before I experienced them!—Neil Armstrong’)” (Clark, 1999).
Clark’s story does a good job of showing that science fact and fiction have been explicitly intermingled for most of the twentieth century. Physicists and rocketry pioneers, Robert Goddard, Hermann Oberth and Wernher von Braum, used stories as a way to popularize their thinking, while astronaut Neil Armstrong was inspired and driven by Clark’s writing.
The writer J.G. Ballard said, “Science Fiction is the only true literature of the twentieth century.” This is a provocative and challenging statement. Is it true? Looking back, science fiction captured the wonder and promise of the magnificent world that many believed and hoped our scientific advances would bring us. With the end of WWII and the development of the atomic bomb, science fiction gave us an outlet to explore our darkest fears that may be by splitting the atom that the human race had overstepped its bounds, unleashing a demon that would eventually wipe us all off the face of the earth. After the 1960s, life seemed to imitate science fiction; we landed on the moon, robots built our cars, AI’s landed out planes and ultimately the Internet changed our lives. All of this was imagined first in science fiction.
In the 1970s, an entire sub-genre of science fiction sprang up around writers that aligned themselves closely with what many people call the “hard sciences.” What they mean by hard science are things like computer science, astronomy, physics and chemistry. American science fiction author, Alan Steele, defines the subgenre as “the form of imaginative literature that uses either established or carefully extrapolated science as its backbone” (Steel, 1992). In the chapter “Becoming an SF author” from The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Publishing Science Fiction, the authors point out that, “Much of the wonder in hard SF comes from discovering just how wild and fantastic the natural world is. It’s also fun to explore what’s possible for the future of humanity, and this is what hard SF excels at. Some of the possibilities are mindboggling, but hard SF requires that we consider them as real possibilities—things like nanotechnology, genetically engineered immortality, interstellar travel and artificial intelligences that surpass our own” (Doctorow and Schroeder, 2000).
Many critics see hard SF as the only true science fiction because it is based on real science as opposed to pseudoscience or even science fantasy which concerns itself with notions of time travel, extrasensory powers and super heroes. Regardless of where you stand in this debate, it is clear that scientific research, theory and practice have a considerable and sometimes polarizing effect on science fiction.
The 21st century has brought us some fascinating explorations into the specific relationship between science fiction and actual technologies that are being built. Two people who have done some really interesting work in this area are Bell and Dourish. Dr. Genevieve Bell is a cultural anthropologist and head of the Interaction and Experience Lab at the Intel Corporation. Paul Dourish is as professor of Informatics in the Donald Bren School of Information and Computer Sciences at the University of California, Irvine. In 2009, these two wrote a paper called “Resistance is Futile: Reading Science Fiction and Ubiquitous Computing.” In the paper, they explore how understanding science fiction, in their case popular British and American television shows like Dr. Who and Star Trek, is essential when designing new technologies.
Bell and Dourish think that science fiction can be employed as a tool for design. They think that the futuristic visions expressed in science fiction television shows can be used to understand people’s collective imagining of what future technologies might look like. Looking at Star Trek and Dr. Who and understanding their effect on TV viewers would allow technology developers and software programmers to develop technologies and products that are easily understood and used by people.
Arguably, a range of contemporary technologies—from PDAs to cell phones—have adopted their forms and functions from science fiction. As in the famous case of British science fiction author Arthur C. Clark’s speculative “invention” of the communications satellite, science fiction does not merely anticipate but actively shapes technological futures through its effect on the collective imagination. At the same time, science fiction in popular culture provides a context in which new technological developments are understood. Science fiction visions appear as prototypes for technological environments.” (Dourish and Bell, 2009)
Artist and technologist, Julian Bleecker, takes this idea and runs with it in Design Fiction: A short essay on design, science, fact and fiction. Bleecker thinks that using science fiction and future visions can be an incredibly productive tool for developing new technologies. He sees the interplay between science fiction and science fact as a fertile ground for the inspiration and creation of physical prototypes, conceptual inventions and actual technology. Bleecker imagines that scientists and technologists could use these prototypes to expand their thinking. Sometimes, the creations can be real functioning devices, but sometimes they can just be wildly new concepts. These prototypes become a design tool that is both real and fake, operational and symbolic, serious and ironic. Bleecker describes them as a “conflation of design, science fact and science fiction…an amalgamation of practices that together bends the expectations as to what each does on its own and ties them together into something new.”
Like Bleecker’s Design Fictions, SF prototypes seek a productive middle ground between fact and fiction. But when we say prototype what exactly do we mean? How are we defining prototype?
WHAT IS A PROTOTYPE?
There is a lot of debate as to what a prototype actually is. The word prototype
