Hieroglyph (88 page)

Of course as a teenager, I wasn't so able to spot the flaws. I don't think there are any flaws in Fred Hoyle's stories actually.
[Laughing]

This is a two-way street of course. Scientists are influenced by science fiction most often, but not always, when they're young. Then there's a question of how much science fiction writers are keeping up with and are influenced by new ideas and science. That's more of a mixed bag: some are, some aren't. Some people who write science
fantasy,
they might be aware of weird things like quantum locality or something like that, but they're not going to make a huge effort to get it right.

Some do. Stephen Baxter for example. I'm very impressed with the way he's able to follow and write about really pretty advanced stuff in quantum field theory, quantum gravity and so on, and weave a story around that. I think that's very skillful. David Brin as well is able to do this, to pull these things together. Frankly, I'm lost in admiration as to how they're able to do that because, even for a professional scientist, trying to keep abreast of those things can be difficult. To be a fiction writer as well is tremendously impressive.

I also, as you probably know, very much enjoy the books of Ian McEwan, though they're not science fiction. He often writes fiction about scientists. Again, I'm astonished at how well he seems to grasp even stuff at the very forefront of modern physics.

EF:
When Ian McEwan was here visiting ASU, it was quite interesting to hear him talking about the choice that he made at a certain point in his career to pursue writing instead of a career in science, which was I think the alternative for him. He echoed your pleasure in seeing that there is more and more popular science writing. It has allowed him to remain involved in that discourse even though he can't do it professionally because he's too busy writing all those wonderful novels of his own.

PD:
I think that is the point—that science fiction writers are not just there to entertain, not just there to write books for scientists to read in their downtime.
[Laughing]
They really do have an important social role, first of all as part of communicating the science process. A lot of people, particularly young people, first get their glimpse of difficult ideas at the forefront of science from reading science fiction.

In science fiction you're creating a sort of imaginary but plausible world. That can be used as a setting to develop all sorts of social or even political messages. H. G. Wells's
The Time Machine
was really not a book about
time travel
. It was a book about what would happen if society continued to develop its rampant capitalism, and to develop in the far future the division into the haves and have-nots.

It does provide that vehicle for social and political commentary. I guess that science fiction is as varied as any other genre. It'll be everything from an entertaining romp to something with much more serious sociological input.

EF:
I think that's right. The mission of Project Hieroglyph is really to find that sweet spot of science fiction right at the intersection of science, trying in this very deliberate way to put writers directly into contact with scientists and engineers and get them to engage with the latest cutting-edge ideas, the newest research. And still give them the freedom to write stories that explore social, ethical, and cultural questions.

I think that's what science fiction can do in a way that nonfiction science writing often can't: create that imagined world and work out human conflicts in a future landscape where some new discovery or new technology exists. That can be quite powerful. That's how the rest of us can follow along in a sense and start to play out these issues.

I like to think of science fiction as this sort of imagination lab where you can play out scenarios and work through all the different possible consequences in a way that is probably quite difficult when you are focusing on technical problems.

The premise of Project Hieroglyph, the initial call from Neal Stephenson to come up with more optimistic science fiction: I'm curious to hear whether you agree with that and how you see the state of our cultural relationship to the future?

PD:
Almost all futuristic fiction is dystopian. Maybe it always has been. I'm thinking back to H. G. Wells and George Orwell—I don't recall that as science fiction, but I mean it's worse now than he predicted for 1984. That's all coming true.
[Laughing]

Do we see any utopian science fiction? Well, not a great deal. I mean, I think Arthur C. Clarke probably is a counterexample. It's not all utopian, but it's by no means doom and gloom. Science fiction can involve futuristic science, but also our same science but futuristic technology. Just taking what we see coming over the horizon and then imagining, taking it to some extreme in twenty years, fifty years, one hundred years—what would it be like?

Anything that involves truly dramatic transformation of society could be viewed as dystopian, even if it's not. Imagine a future world, as we so often do—
Brave New World,
in which the human reproductive process is managed very differently, and we're creating designer babies, transhumans, posthumans with carefully chosen attributes, controlled systematically by some sort of authority. It seems ghastly to us now.

If it were to
happen,
I could well imagine that in another hundred years, people would say that
our
age was the awful one: rampant overpopulation and plundering of resources and people behaving in a ghastly manner. How much better to have engineered genomes and controlled population, where people are better adapted to their society and to what they can contribute and to what they need from it; and the whole thing is planned and organized.

They might regard that as the Utopia. What is good and bad? It very much depends on the age. There are things that we are doing now in our society that people are comfortable with that would have been regarded as horrific fifty years ago. It's too simple I think to just say that the future is, as told by science fiction, always bleak.

EF:
One of the best things that science fiction can do actually is complicate things a little bit or point out when we're leaning too heavily on certain assumptions. I think it's true in many ways that science fiction is a philosophical literature. The most outlandish, the most dangerous ideas that science fiction proposes often are really moral and philosophical questions rather than some radical new technological invention. It's ultimately about how we as humans use these things.

PD:
You think ahead fifty years and probably the most profound changes will come from aspects of science and technology that we don't even know about yet. Or we might know about them, but we don't appreciate their significance. Time and again when I'm discussing these things about my own youth and reading books about the future, I think of the comics that I used to read and their images of cities in the year 2000 with people with jetpacks on our backs.

They completely missed out on the information revolution, which was there, but it was just out of sight. People didn't understand the significance. That's the fun, isn't it, of trying to pick what's next?

EF:
That's a very interesting question. We are moving so quickly now in so many different arenas of discovery that we have a huge number of new ideas, tools, and systems that we have created, and we haven't realized what a tremendous impact they could have. That's one of the things that excites me the most about the premise of Project Hieroglyph: it's really almost science fiction of the present. What could we do
now
if we simply set our minds to it? Not relying on undiscovered technologies but simply reconfiguring or shifting the cultural frame to say, “This is important and here are these tools. Nobody's put them together yet, but you could really do this if you wanted to.”

PD:
I like to speculate about what we could achieve with current science and technology and the commitment and resources. One that I've been banging on about for years is a one-way mission to Mars. We could set up a Mars colony now with current technology. We don't need some really futuristic thing. We could go to Mars. We have the ability to get there. We could send people there. They may not live as long as they would if they stay behind on Earth, but it's not a suicide mission. We could build Mars colonies starting now.

Is that science fiction? I don't know. I suppose it's conceivable, but at the moment it's fiction. I think what's standing in our way is simply having a good reason to do it, or for nations having the ability to pull together their resources. Most of my career was dominated by the Cold War and the arms race, particularly in physics. To a certain extent, biology. But big science was driven by the military.

Things like particle accelerators, which are very expensive, big projects, or the space program—these things were riding on the coattails of the military budget. They were regarded as, if not directly military, at least sort of part of a national virility contest: your technological prowess to intimidate the opposition. A lot of people spoke in the early days about the peace dividend.

The plan was when we stop spending this obscene amount of money on armaments, you could always spend on really useful stuff like health-care programs, and the nonmilitary science would absolutely flourish. The exact opposite occurred. The peace dividend turned out to be negative once the arms race faded away. Big science became very difficult to fund. It's a bit of a tragedy that humanity can't pool resources in the spirit of cooperation rather than competition.

The truth is you get more out of people by having a race or a competition than you do asking them to cooperate. It says something about human nature, and it's true of individuals and it's true of nations. It's well known that if you want to achieve something, a million-dollar budget, and it's not enough, it's a ten-million-dollar project, you create a million-dollar prize—now I'm thinking the X Prize. It's a great way to get people to go to Mars: give them a prize.

EF:
It's a powerful motivator and it reminds me of the cathedrals. The Cold War provided this frame that made a rational story out of the universe. It wasn't a terribly happy story. It was a story of these two competing superpowers with nuclear missiles poised at each other's cities. But it was a story that made sense, that allowed everybody to pull together and focus on these things. It had those elements of competition and ideology and self-interest.

The Apollo missions were part of the Cold War. The space race was part of this broader military struggle. Of course we had Wernher von Braun and we had our rockets. We weren't just using them to study moon rocks. Yet there was also a beauty and a selfless sort of majesty to the space missions as well, in taking that step for mankind.

I think you're quite right, those framing stories are so important. We seem to be struggling for a new one.

PD:
It's a much more confused picture now. In our present society I think we can recognize something—there's a deep malaise running through our own liberal democracy, Western society, and around the world. Ideological conflicts now are really between the world of traditional Islam and Western democracy, whereas previously it was communism versus capitalism.

For a while people were talking about the New World Order with the end of the Cold War, that maybe it was now possible to have everybody integrated into some sort of common market, and everyone get wealthy together. Things are a lot better than they were, I have to say. People who tend to be gloomy about our present circumstances have forgotten what it was like, say, in the '70s or '80s. I think the world is better. Relatively speaking there is less poverty; it doesn't mean there isn't some. Relatively speaking there's less.

What I see is really the fragmentation of society; it's no longer the case that we can get behind these simple narratives, where it seems like there is an obvious trajectory that we want to follow. And then, if we try hard enough and are not derailed by the opposition or the alternative ideology, we'll get there.

When I talk to young people, they don't seem to have a real grasp of who they are, or what sort of community they're in, or where it's going. There's a terrible sense of living for the moment, of just instant gratification and no real commitment to a well-charted future. Maybe this is where science fiction really can help by giving some sort of structure to the way forward, and getting away from this notion of living in the here and the now and not bothering to plan further down the track.

I'm talking primarily of course about liberal Western democracies. It may be totally different in China.

EF:
China is just beginning to develop a new wave of science fiction. As a cultural concept, it's of course very different. Soviet science fiction was fascinating if you look at something like Tarkovsky's
Solaris
. The way that you imagine the future is always a reflection of the present. We need to build this pathway forward, and not to the distant future, which is still the same as it was fifty years ago.

What's a goal that we could accomplish in the next ten years or twenty years? That was something that we had in previous generations. That was something that the cathedral builders had because they knew that ultimately they were going to finish building the cathedral, and it was going to be better than the cathedral in the city down the road.

PD:
The spirit of the Apollo program was that it was deliverable within a human lifetime, and a big commitment, and everybody got behind it. It's easy to imagine doing things like that now. I mean, I've mentioned there's one way to Mars, but that's maybe a bit harebrained. We could imagine great projects here on Earth that we could do—if there was the commitment, we could do it. What these projects need to do is, in my view, to be unifying and not part of a national competition. What we need is great projects that can bring people together.