What sci-fi can tell us about the future
economist.com
economist.com
No one in his right mind seeks the psychological truth about crime in detective stories. Whoever seeks such truth will turn rather to Crime and Punishment. In relation to Agatha Christie, Dostoevsky constitutes a higher court of appeal, yet no one in his right mind will condemn the English author's stories on this account. They have a right to be treated as the entertaining thrillers they are, and the tasks Dostoevsky set himself are foreign to them.
If anyone is dissatisfied with SF in its role as an examiner of the future and of civilization, there is no way to make an analogous move from literary oversimplifications to full-fledged art, because there is no court of appeal from this genre. There would be no harm in this, save that American SF, exploiting its exceptional status, lays claim to occupy the pinnacles of art and thought. One is annoyed by the pretentiousness of a genre which fends off accusations of primitivism by pleading its entertainment character and then, once such accusations have been silenced, renews its overweening claims. By being one thing and purporting to be another, SF promotes a mystification which, moreover, goes on with the tacit consent of readers and public.
If you need a deep(er) view of a murderer's soul, you open Crime and Punishment, also a literary work and not a piece of academic research, and find it there.
For SF in 1970s, there was no such higher tier; there was no literary futurology. Lem himself was one of the biggest figures in the field of literary futurology, framed as SF. "Hard SF", like the works of Peter Watts or Greg Egan, did not yet exist.
Imagineering empire: how Hollywood and the US national security state ‘operationalizes narrative’ https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/016344371989054...
(was Lem's writing translated?)
https://www.forbes.com/sites/kevinmurnane/2017/03/08/science...
(Unfortunately, this would probably require public infrastructure, not private, which just seems to create more walled gardens. But... I digress...)
This approach to technology is really a major difference from the expanse and a lot of other sci-fi. FTA:
> The writers and creators of The Expanse take the view that technology develops over time to serve human needs but it doesn’t do away with those needs by either wholly satisfying them or destroying the people who have them. Technology advances but the human problems remain.
In many ways, a lot of sci-fi writes focuses on technology first, people second. And _that_ often resembles "concept products" that never see the light of day.
They ignore:
1) Usability and ergonomics
2) Privacy implications
3) Technical feasibility
4) Operability in adverse conditions
5) Health effects
The entire sci-fi aesthetics throw away what we know about the world, pragmatism and functionalism. Instead, sci-fi aesthetics focus on what looks cool. If future is full of this kind of interfaces, devices and aesthetics; I don't want to be part of it.
I also understand the fiction bit in science fiction. This is a collection of ideas imagined and not supposed to be practical. That's fine and treat it like Harry Potter or any fictional world. But, when you start desiging real things with consequences (such as human-machine interfaces where astronaut's lives depend on), I have a problem with that. Marketing is not the language of nature and decoration is a crime.
And sometimes this means to make something look futuristic just to constantly remind viewers that this is a completely different universe.
Additionally set designers have usually quite little time to think about all the details. They are essentially in the job of cobbling together something that looks ok in as little time as possible for as little money as possible.
When it comes to interfaces in films I kinda like the way Alien (1979) did it: very realistic, kinda gritty, very distinct graphical language
That said, we have Steve Jobs (and his fundamentalism in aesthetics over functionality), Elon Musk and many other successful people in the history who have twisted the equation.
And just judging the sales it kinda works for Apple. Elon Musk is certainly in the trade of selling stories as well, and he is quite good at it which explains his sucess.
As somebody who moves between engineering and design a lot I like to stress this: cosmetics and storytelling by design are not without their function. I also hate it when the cosmetics become everything and the function nothing, but many engineers don't realize that the cosmetics alone can change the perception of things so much, that they impact both function and the real world usage.
A curious example is the Mexican neighbourhood of Las Palmitas¹ – a hillside part of town with drug problems. Instead of investing into drug prevention the government just painted the houses with colors. This apparently changed more in the communities conduct than any invisible but functional thing could have ever done.
The fictional part of design (so once you see a thing, what does it invoke in you), is something that often gets completely ignored by engineers, just like the functional aspect sometimes gets ignored by designers (although I'd call them bad designers then).
--- ¹ https://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/aug/01/mexico-pachuca...
Agree with all your points, and I'll make one more:
The way that they blend the "gesture" interfaces (the "iPhone" device, the map and orbit planner, the wall screens) with tactile interfaces (physical keyboards at critical positions on the spacecraft, like weapons and burn control) signal they put some deep thought into it. Gesture and touch-screen stuff is fine, in very specific instances. You will need a tactile surface to touch in many of the kind of (future) environments that the show depicts.
While terminals were often just a basic touchscreen, many critical elements, like the chairs on the ships, had tactile input (joysticks, buttons, etc) - to deal with input under gravitational shifts.
It really gives everything a greater physicality.
Scifi ideas come from authors, and come primarily from text.
Scifi book covers come from artists, and create a sort of "look and feel" that is at best loosely related to the book, but generally unrelated and may not be chosed by the author.
And then there's Hollywood. By now we're several minds removed from the scifi author and the sausage for public consumption has little resemblance to the original beast. But it definitely has a look and feel.
Think of the early scifi pulp, and although the ideas may be timeless and strong, people picture bug eyed monsters holding damsels wearing brass clothing, and spaceships that stand upright on fins with a ladder leading down the side.
Similarly scifi of the 70's might conjure up images of planetscapes with multiple moons and floating islands in the sky.
I suspect the Tron look is a period theme derived from the state of computer graphics when the movie was authored.
He searched his pockets. No more coins; nothing. “I’ll pay you tomorrow,” he told the door. Again he tried the knob. Again it remained locked tight. “What I pay you,” he informed it, “is in the nature of a gratuity; I don’t have to pay you.”
“I think otherwise,” the door said.
Currently, the market seems more keen on ads.
Personally, I'd be happy to pay for investigative journalism (e.g. https://www.buzzfeednews.com/investigations)... but not the kind of journalism which cites "tweets" as research and doesn't think enough of its journalists to give them a byline.