Project Hieroglyph: Fighting society's dystopian future
Pop culture has painted a darkly dystopian vision of the future. But a new book hopes to harness the power of science fiction to plot out a more optimistic path for the real world.
Just glancing at this week's movie listings, those in the US can see humans battling super apes for world domination, a gang of Marvel misfits fighting against the universe's certain doom, or a young boy tasked with keeping all memories of a society that has done away with individuality.
The future, according to Hollywood, doesn't look so good. Successful dystopian science fiction television shows like HBO's The Leftovers and books like The Hunger Games trilogy add to the notion that bad news is very much in store.
Acclaimed science-fiction writer Neal Stephenson saw this bleak trend in his own work, but didn't give it much thought until he attended a conference on the future a couple years ago.
At the time, Stephenson said that science fiction guides innovation because young readers later grow up to be scientists and engineers.
But fellow attendee Michael Crow, president of Arizona State University (ASU), "took a more sort of provocative stance, that science fiction actually needed to supply ideas that scientists and engineers could actually implement", Stephenson says.
"[He] basically told me that I needed to get off my duff and start writing science fiction in a more constructive and optimistic vein."
That conversation spawned a new endeavour called Project Hieroglyph, which seeks to bring science fiction writers and scientists together to learn from, and influence, each other - and in turn, the future.
Renowned writers such as Bruce Sterling and Cory Doctorow were tasked with working with scientists to imagine optimistic, technically-grounded science fiction stories depicting futures achievable within the next 50 years.
Those stories, collected in a book also entitled Hieroglyph, will be released on 9 September.
"We want to create a more open, optimistic, ambitious and engaged conversation about the future," project director Ed Finn says.
According to his argument, negative visions of the future as perpetuated in pop culture are limiting people's abilities to dream big or think outside the box. Science fiction, he says, should do more.
"A good science fiction story can be very powerful," Finn says. "It can inspire hundreds, thousands, millions of people to rally around something that they want to do"
(continued, ignore the dials kids and dream big....)
