Companies commissioning stories has gone on for a long time.
For example, the Isaac Asimov story "My Son, The Physicist" was commissioned by an electronics company to run in an ad in "Scientific American".
Another Asimov example. "Think", IBM's in-house magazine, commissioned Asimov to write a story based on this quote from J. B. Priestly:
> Between midnight and dawn, when sleep will not come and all the old wounds begin to ache, I often have a nightmare vision of a future world in which there are billions of people, all numbered and registered, with not a gleam of genius anywhere, not an original mind, a rich personality, on the whole packed globe
Asimov write the story "2430 A.D." about a world where Priestly's nightmare had come true. (The title comes from his estimate of when human population at its current growth rate would reach the point where the Earth had so many people that there were no resources left for non-human animals).
The funny thing about this story is that "Think" rejected it, because they wanted a story that refuted the quotation. So Asimov wrote another story, "The Greatest Asset", that refuted Priestly, and sent that to "Think".
"Think" then decided they liked the first story better and ran "2430 A.D."!
I'm pretty sure that there was at least one other similar case with Asimov.
I always remember my Grandfather suggesting that Michael Crichton (sp?) wrote a bunch of stuff to order by the government. I was never entirely sure I believed him, but then never entirely dismissed it (as evidenced by this comment).
I had "My Son, The Physicist" in my 9th grade. The mom comes and suggests the son about "continuous conversation" with some astronaut's stuck on Jupiter's moon - Ganymede (if I am not wrong and remember correctly)
"Software engineering researchers have a tendency to be optimistic about the future. Though useful, optimism bias bolsters unrealistic expectations towards desirable outcomes. We argue that explicitly framing software engineering research through pessimistic futures, or dystopias, will mitigate optimism bias and engender more diverse and thought-provoking research directions. We demonstrate through three pop culture dystopias, Battlestar Galactica, Fallout 3, and Children of Men, how reflecting on dystopian scenarios provides research opportunities as well as implications, such as making research accessible to non-experts, that are relevant to our present."
Interesting. I didn't realize this could be a paper material. Also, whatever includes BSG in it, I'm an instant fan :). Thanks for mentioning it; it was a good read.
In your paper, you cite an interesting piece about the optimism bias of people[0]. Skimming through it, it seems to somewhat support my current belief that we need more, not less utopias and optimistic visions. To quote from the ending of the text:
"Overly pessimistic predictions may be demoralizing if these predictions are believed and, if these predictions are fulfilled, the outcomes that are obtained may not be very satisfying. Overly optimistic predictions, however, may confer benefits simply by symbolizing a desired image of success, or more concretely by aiding people’s progress to higher achievements. Given that predictions are often inaccurate at least to some degree, it is possible that people may derive benefits from shifting the range of their predictions to the positive, even if this means introducing an overall higher rate of error into the prediction process. Countering optimistic biases in the name of accuracy may undermine performance without achieving the accuracy that was intended, whereas the maintenance of optimistic predictions may serve to align us, both in thought and in action, more closely with our goals."
Evaluating dystopias can be useful to avoid disastrous failure modes, but I feel we shouldn't dwell too much on them, and instead focus on trying to achieve the optimistic goals the best we can.
I honestly don't care if there is a "sinister" purpose behind the good scifi I've read. Fund the next Iain banks please. In fact - throw me $50k to live for a year and you've got yourself a book - or I can at least guarantee some words on pages mentioning spaceships / robots, etc.
Speaking of whom - a friend and I were the other day wondering Just Why On Earth none of his SciFi appears to have been optioned for conversion to other media. I can imagine scope, complexity and presumably huge budget leaving prospective optioners with slightly soiled breeks, but all the same — not even a hope of one of the tales in The State of the Art?
I don't have much more to offer over the other comments, other than to bolster the requests for more information. Would love to hear about what venue/service you're using for this, and if you're willing to share, how much money you're funneling into this kind of patronage. I'm very supportive of the idea of communities coming together to produce art in this way :)
Seems like it would put you in a position to publish a, say, quarterly collection of the results. Combine that with a Patreon or something similar if other people enjoy the stories that come from the prompts, and you might break even while still getting the stories you like :) Seems like most short story publishers run in a deficit so if you're accepting that from the start you're in a better position than most.
Interesting they mention and get quotes from the author of the Three Body Problem series. I just finished reading that series, and the whole time I had the feeling that it was written more to convince people of something than to actually entertain the reader.
The ideas in the books were pretty amazing, unique, and imaginative; but the story and writing itself was quite sub-par.
edit: I listened (audio books) to the English versions. I thought the translation was excellent. I don't want to spoil anything, but the author has a very dark vision of mankind and kept having his characters ostracized to the extreme which got old pretty quick. I didn't feel like the books were missing anything descriptive from lack of translation.
I also really enjoyed the books, but definitely more from a "these are cool ideas" perspective than from great narrative storytelling. Something was probably lost in translation, but the ideas were really great. I especially like (and hate) the concept of the Dark Forest.
Did you read it in the original Chinese, or the English translation? I haven't read either, but it's possible that the English version misses a lot of nuance from the original version.
(It's also quite possible the original is crap, and the translation is doing a very adequate job.)
Wasn't there something about Clancy being working with the CIA to massage their image?
Military and intelligence and politics have always manipulated media...
Also, recall "Americans army" was being ostensibly used as a recruiting/psyche-molding tool...
---
Finally: look at cyberpunk, and the top five writers in that category, as well as anime (ghost in the shell, etc) which have in-formed modern reality with all the millions of tech-workers from around the globe have worked since their childhoods to create aspects of those worlds into current reality...
Is the totalitarian police-surveillance state an emergent feature of such a reality?
All crazy military capability comes from able-minded imaginations saying "wouldn't it be cool if..." without the discernment of the far-reaching implications...
There’s a big difference between paying for speculative fiction about your own industry as a form of long-term brainstorming (what the article is about) and paying authors to publicly produce works that further your political agendas.
As I understand it, the works discussed in the article aren’t published in the traditional manner, and are for the use of those who commissioned them.
> Also, recall "Americans army" was being ostensibly used as a recruiting/psyche-molding tool...
IIRC, "America's Army" was initially created as an internal training tool for the Army. Then the Army decided to have the creator adjust it a bit and publish it as a video game, sort of as a recruiting tool.
As far as adjustments, apparently the video game audience doesn't really like waiting 2 minutes for a smoke grenade to actually produce a huge cloud of smoke.
This is actually part of the plot of the movie (Three Days of the Condor) and book (Six days of the Condor). The protagonist works at a CIA site where they read basically everything released and break down the plots to see if it has any strategic value and/or state secrets.
If I had to guess, this still goes on at the state level, but this article is about making this sort of data (minus the state secrets awareness) available to the corporations able to afford it.
I'd also say that I think this might be an amusing reversal of the old mantra: Ideas have no intrinsic value. This business is pretty much about the expression of ideas. Maybe they have value because they are writing them down and marketing them.
Yeah this reminds me a lot of Michael Crichton's Sphere, which starts with a professor, funded by the military, who was tapped to analyze in great detail how to deal with first contact with aliens.
It's a more detailed article. I've only done a couple of stories for SciFutures. The topics are interesting. Unfortunately we usually don't get to see what other writers wrote.
If you want to read a concrete example rather than the generic relevant novels mentioned in the article the Directorate of Land Strategic Concepts, National Defence Canada, commissioned Karl Schroeder [1] in 2005 to write an SF novel to help explore them future doctrine and concepts. PDF is available at [2]. He wrote a second (post 2010) but I don't have the reference now (a 'friend' never returned it). I recall that it involved a CAF unit operating in a trans-national mega city (somewhere in Asia) having to subvert the all pervasive city AR so that they could complete their mission. I was impressed!
Visualizing and communicating how things will be used is very powerful and important.
My memory may be faulty, but I think it's Alan Cooper's "About Face" that basically advised not just describing the interface and how it'll be used, but how Bob the 73 year old luddite who hates all computers is going to interact with it (context in flight movie systems). Creating characters and having them interact with technology that doesn't exist yet is what SF writers DO.
I have a copy of About Face on my desk that I keep meaning to read, but I have read Alan Cooper's "The Inmates Are Running The Asylum" which definitely discusses an in-flight entertainment system to be used by, amongst others, an elderly gentleman who really has got better things to do than burrow through menus and directories to find a movie to watch. Could you be thinking of that? Maybe they both used that example (although I think for Cooper, it was personal history rather than example).
Kinda funny to think that maybe, just maybe, the social network was sponsored by Google or Twitter as an attempt to make the competing platform less desirable.
Last days the defcon issue, and this week for some particular reason we have a few similar articles here and there talking about how fabulous and great would be for a 'good nerd' to work for the military, government, etc...
I used to take some employees to Defcon. Though, technically, I had no good reason to go, personally. I just thought it was neat.
Anyhow, two games we used to play:
Spot the Fed.
Name That Influence.
The first was to see who looked like, and acted like, a federal agent. We'd sometimes do some work to confirm it, but we usually discussed it at the bar.
The second was trickier, and often just conjecture - again, over drinks. Who paid for the research, what did they say, what did they not say, and what does it imply?
We weren't the only ones to play these games. I'm going to guess they're still playing them.
[+] [-] tzs|8 years ago|reply
For example, the Isaac Asimov story "My Son, The Physicist" was commissioned by an electronics company to run in an ad in "Scientific American".
Another Asimov example. "Think", IBM's in-house magazine, commissioned Asimov to write a story based on this quote from J. B. Priestly:
> Between midnight and dawn, when sleep will not come and all the old wounds begin to ache, I often have a nightmare vision of a future world in which there are billions of people, all numbered and registered, with not a gleam of genius anywhere, not an original mind, a rich personality, on the whole packed globe
Asimov write the story "2430 A.D." about a world where Priestly's nightmare had come true. (The title comes from his estimate of when human population at its current growth rate would reach the point where the Earth had so many people that there were no resources left for non-human animals).
The funny thing about this story is that "Think" rejected it, because they wanted a story that refuted the quotation. So Asimov wrote another story, "The Greatest Asset", that refuted Priestly, and sent that to "Think".
"Think" then decided they liked the first story better and ran "2430 A.D."!
I'm pretty sure that there was at least one other similar case with Asimov.
[+] [-] Ntrails|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] godelmachine|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bbctol|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rahulpandita|8 years ago|reply
http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2983986
Pasting abstract here
"Software engineering researchers have a tendency to be optimistic about the future. Though useful, optimism bias bolsters unrealistic expectations towards desirable outcomes. We argue that explicitly framing software engineering research through pessimistic futures, or dystopias, will mitigate optimism bias and engender more diverse and thought-provoking research directions. We demonstrate through three pop culture dystopias, Battlestar Galactica, Fallout 3, and Children of Men, how reflecting on dystopian scenarios provides research opportunities as well as implications, such as making research accessible to non-experts, that are relevant to our present."
[+] [-] TeMPOraL|8 years ago|reply
In your paper, you cite an interesting piece about the optimism bias of people[0]. Skimming through it, it seems to somewhat support my current belief that we need more, not less utopias and optimistic visions. To quote from the ending of the text:
"Overly pessimistic predictions may be demoralizing if these predictions are believed and, if these predictions are fulfilled, the outcomes that are obtained may not be very satisfying. Overly optimistic predictions, however, may confer benefits simply by symbolizing a desired image of success, or more concretely by aiding people’s progress to higher achievements. Given that predictions are often inaccurate at least to some degree, it is possible that people may derive benefits from shifting the range of their predictions to the positive, even if this means introducing an overall higher rate of error into the prediction process. Countering optimistic biases in the name of accuracy may undermine performance without achieving the accuracy that was intended, whereas the maintenance of optimistic predictions may serve to align us, both in thought and in action, more closely with our goals."
Evaluating dystopias can be useful to avoid disastrous failure modes, but I feel we shouldn't dwell too much on them, and instead focus on trying to achieve the optimistic goals the best we can.
--
[0] - https://sci-hub.cc/10.1017/CBO9780511808098.021
[+] [-] ironic_ali|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] divbit|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] detritus|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cryoshon|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] RodericDay|8 years ago|reply
If you don't care, and encourage initiatives like these, you will never get it.
[+] [-] jermaustin1|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] CodeCube|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] DKnoll|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jff|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] YCode|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rayalez|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] brandonmenc|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] akvadrako|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] toisanji|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] legohead|8 years ago|reply
The ideas in the books were pretty amazing, unique, and imaginative; but the story and writing itself was quite sub-par.
edit: I listened (audio books) to the English versions. I thought the translation was excellent. I don't want to spoil anything, but the author has a very dark vision of mankind and kept having his characters ostracized to the extreme which got old pretty quick. I didn't feel like the books were missing anything descriptive from lack of translation.
[+] [-] Jemaclus|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] skrebbel|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] QuercusMax|8 years ago|reply
(It's also quite possible the original is crap, and the translation is doing a very adequate job.)
[+] [-] Sangermaine|8 years ago|reply
Yeah, that's the vast, vast majority of sci-fi in a nutshell.
[+] [-] jacobolus|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] samstave|8 years ago|reply
Military and intelligence and politics have always manipulated media...
Also, recall "Americans army" was being ostensibly used as a recruiting/psyche-molding tool...
---
Finally: look at cyberpunk, and the top five writers in that category, as well as anime (ghost in the shell, etc) which have in-formed modern reality with all the millions of tech-workers from around the globe have worked since their childhoods to create aspects of those worlds into current reality...
Is the totalitarian police-surveillance state an emergent feature of such a reality?
All crazy military capability comes from able-minded imaginations saying "wouldn't it be cool if..." without the discernment of the far-reaching implications...
[+] [-] djrogers|8 years ago|reply
As I understand it, the works discussed in the article aren’t published in the traditional manner, and are for the use of those who commissioned them.
[+] [-] ufmace|8 years ago|reply
IIRC, "America's Army" was initially created as an internal training tool for the Army. Then the Army decided to have the creator adjust it a bit and publish it as a video game, sort of as a recruiting tool.
As far as adjustments, apparently the video game audience doesn't really like waiting 2 minutes for a smoke grenade to actually produce a huge cloud of smoke.
[+] [-] vinayak|8 years ago|reply
The book itself can be downloaded at https://news.microsoft.com/futurevisions/
[+] [-] schlipity|8 years ago|reply
If I had to guess, this still goes on at the state level, but this article is about making this sort of data (minus the state secrets awareness) available to the corporations able to afford it.
I'd also say that I think this might be an amusing reversal of the old mantra: Ideas have no intrinsic value. This business is pretty much about the expression of ideas. Maybe they have value because they are writing them down and marketing them.
[+] [-] MattSayar|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pagnol|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cpete|8 years ago|reply
It's a nice complement to this New Yorker article :-)
[+] [-] DocSavage|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tabtab|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] smilbandit|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] zitterbewegung|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] KineticLensman|8 years ago|reply
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karl_Schroeder
[2] http://www.kschroeder.com/foresight-consulting/crisis-in-zef...
[+] [-] fencepost|8 years ago|reply
My memory may be faulty, but I think it's Alan Cooper's "About Face" that basically advised not just describing the interface and how it'll be used, but how Bob the 73 year old luddite who hates all computers is going to interact with it (context in flight movie systems). Creating characters and having them interact with technology that doesn't exist yet is what SF writers DO.
[+] [-] EliRivers|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wodenokoto|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pvaldes|8 years ago|reply
Can we spot a pattern here? PR damage control?
[+] [-] KGIII|8 years ago|reply
Anyhow, two games we used to play:
Spot the Fed.
Name That Influence.
The first was to see who looked like, and acted like, a federal agent. We'd sometimes do some work to confirm it, but we usually discussed it at the bar.
The second was trickier, and often just conjecture - again, over drinks. Who paid for the research, what did they say, what did they not say, and what does it imply?
We weren't the only ones to play these games. I'm going to guess they're still playing them.
[+] [-] rurban|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] travmatt|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] charlieo88|8 years ago|reply
I don't know why, but this is really disturbing.
"Hey Siri, find me a widget"
"I've found three locations with widget in your area. Would you like me t... WHOA! Check out the bytes on that ad!"
[+] [-] Gotperl|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lolive|8 years ago|reply
- Amiga is behind the novel "Ready Player One" (so they will make a craaaazy comeback)
- Trump paid GRRM for ASOF&I (so the people enjoy the mix of politics and mental illness)
- Hollywood is highly connected with cigarette manufacturers, liquor manufacturers and (of course) the US army.