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2013. This report examines the relationship between SF and innovation, defined as one of mutual engagement and even co-constitution. It develops a framework for tracing the relationships between real world science and technology and innovation and science fiction/speculative fiction involving processes of transformation, central to which are questions of influence, persuasion, and desire.
- Dennis Cheatham
- Abstract
- I. Introduction
- iii. Influence as a Translation Process
- Elements of a transformational model
- i. The Nature of SF as Genre: Fiction is Not Fact – Not even when it is Science Fiction
- ii. Forms of SF: The Literary and Cinematic Imagination
- iii. SF in the Wild (World)
- A final word:
- How the Database may be used/interrogated:
- Precursors:
- Guide to iPad – iPad as Guide:
- Like city lights, receding3
- Technical aspects of the crawler
- The Crawls:
- Crawls 2 and 3: Consensual Hallucination
- Crawl 4: Omnishambles and the Instant Map
- Crawl 5: Arthur C. Clarke and influence over time
- Conclusions:
- Selective list of search terms:
- Crawl Tool:
George Voss Research Fellow, Faculty of Arts, University of Brighton, Visiting Fellow at SPRU, University of Sussex This report examines the relationship between SF and innovation, defined as one of mutual engagement and even co-constitution. It develops a framework for tracing the relationships between real world science and technology and innova...
Buzz Aldrin, who really did stand on the moon, recently offered a transporter to Mars to a Radio Four programme asking for donations to an imaginary museum. It was received as the first way to ‘hitch a ride into space’... ‘since science fiction’. Aldrin, who has criticized NASA’s priorities, who seeks a Mars programme, and who has been engaged in w...
Taking these aspects of influence as key, we consider influence as a translation process. A fiction can be seen in its entirety and also as having parts -- fictional objects, tropes (story mechanism and themes), descriptions of context or feelings. Either in its entirety, or in parts, fiction travels into new contexts in the real world and also in...
As indicated in the previous section, accounting for SF influence as translation/transformation involves a consideration of (i) the nature and evolution of genre, (ii) the effect of different forms of expression on the audience, and (iii) the ways in which SF may appeal to and be appropriated by its various audiences. These three elements constitut...
What makes SF accounts different from non-fiction? Three defining features of fiction concern poetic language, story telling and attention to aesthetic form. The fourth, combining the three others, concerns the imaginative force the work brings to bear on the world it creates, and - if we understand culture as a part of social relations – the way i...
What are the distinctions between various forms of SF? If one way to explore this is through the genre categories described above, another is to consider form (screen aesthetics and narrative) and format. So, what distinguishes how SF outputs work in book, film, television, or multi-media format? And how do these distinctions relate to questions of...
To grasp how SF influences its audiences and through them the instantiation of science and technology in the world, demands considering readers and audiences and their contexts. Realism and estrangement strategies, along with genre expectations, and also medium specifics, produce SF productions that contain particular kinds of subject matter, that ...
Our final observation concerns the dichotomy between SF and innovation that served as a premise for this project. This dichotomy is at once useful for considering the patterns of traffic and exchange between different communities of ‘creators’ (innovators, authors, and the audience) and problematic in that it perpetuates the idea of separate or dis...
A temporal search indicates where instances of these objects emerge and subside over time between the ‘real’ and the literary, and associated shifts in the quality of these objects (eg. the shift between notions of all-powerful mega-computers in Harlan Ellison’s I have no mouth and I must scream (Ellison 1983) and later notions of the singularity i...
Standing before the Guide and the iPad is a concern with finding new ways to automate access to information in an era of its expansion. Vannevar Bush’s Atlantic Monthly article ‘As We May Think’ (Bush 1945) proposed the Memex, an (imaginary) information device designed to incite thinking about new forms of navigation in an era of information explos...
There are many ways the hitchhiker’s guide has been influential (e.g. the concept of the Babel fish and automatic translation). But the loop traced out here specifically considers the re-making of the book, concentrating on finding relationships and connections between Apple (and Apple’s iPad) and Adams, (and Adams’ Guide). In particular it focuses...
Investigating connections between science fiction and real world innovation using data search techniques and visualizations The subject of experimentation was the indicative mapping of the relation between SF and other knowledge domains. Our aim was to explore how web search and data visualization can contribute to understanding the relations betw...
Issue Crawler (IC) was considered as a start point for the research. It is a tool based at the University of Amsterdam, available to researchers on-line, and relatively widely used. The IC begins by accepting in its crawl multiple email addresses (assuming a connection and isolating an issue). However, the IC produces ‘finished’ results (data trawl...
Three waves of crawls were undertaken: Initial crawls tested the parameters of the system, including exploring functionality and feasibility given the hardware and software constraints (size of platforms, memory constraints etc.). Also considered were initial means through which to express the data sets gathered. A second set of crawls began to...
Search term: ‘Consensual Hallucination’ Search origin (A) Sydney morning herald (www.smh.com.au-consensual hallucination). The first of these twin searches suggested the lack of cross-continental traffic and also illustrated a perfect Newspaper Storm. George Wright of Sydney writes on cyberspace – fictional to real - and produces a flow of traf...
Search Term: ‘Omnishambles’ The Omnishambles map produced here did not concern SF directly. We used the search to explore how good the Crawl was at capturing the very rapid translation of a term from a fictional world into the general public sphere. ‘Omnishambles’ is the fictional term used by Malcolm Tucker, a character in the The Thick of It (n...
Search term: ‘Arthur C. Clarke’ In this search we were interested in how the idea of influence is mapped. Clarke is known by reputation as one of those rare SF writers to have contributed directly to ‘real science’ with his SF writing; notably via the concept of Geostationary satellite orbits. This connection is well known – and is traceable throug...
The Crawls indicated both the possibilities and the difficulties of using the visualization and crawl tools to map influence and connection. As might have been expected, one of the findings of the exercise was the degree to which media organizations (e.g. Wired) contain, map to, and organize data around their sites. Very little escapes these Black ...
Soylent green Pigoon Invisibility Cloak Consensual Hallucination Singularity Muon Catalysis Geo-stationary orbit Hitchhiker’s Guide OmniShambles Homeopathy Ansible Intrusion Blood music Oryx and Crake Neuromancer Hydrogen Sonata Ken Macleod Charles Stross Iain M Banks Arthur C. Clarke Ursula le Guin
The Crawl tool was written by Andy Holyer who also contributed fully in designing the Crawl experiments.
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SCIENCE FICTION 4 technology and the sciences, science fiction writers might be capable of forecasting future developments (although many prophecies were incorrect). However, science fiction might as well have a causal influence on real-life technological innovation. Unfortunately, there is
2011, Proceedings of International Conference of ESERA (European Science Education Research Association) (pp. 118-122) Abstract: This study refers to the research conducted with primary school students examining whether they can identify the issues raised by the ethics, moral and political aspects of Technology through analyzing science fiction texts (short stories).
- Ioanna Stavrou, Constantine Skordoulis
Thereafter, students read and analyzed the following science fiction short stories: «Memorial» (1946) by Theodore Sturgeon «The King of the Beasts» (1964) by Philip Jose Farmer «The Dragon XXXX» (1960) by Stanislaw Lem «Computer Virus» (2001) by Nancy Kress The above texts were chosen on the basis of the following criteria: a) they were written by acclaimed and awarded science fiction ...
- Constantine Skordoulis, ioanna stavrou
Feb 15, 2016 · We therefore conduct a detailed media content analysis of twenty-seven movies that examines the role of software development in science fiction by identifying and investigating new approaches to ...
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Oct 5, 2021 · Science-fiction (SF) has become a reference point in the discourse on the ethics and risks surrounding artificial intelligence (AI). Thus, AI in SF—science-fictional AI—is considered part of a ...
