Using Sci-Fi to Understand the World

No, not because it’s scary accurate, because half the people building the future have read the same books

REAL TALK NOTE: It seems extremely likely that SNAP benefits are going to be cut off soon. This is incredibly, incredibly bad for the 42 million people who rely on it. Because of the sheer scale of the SNAP program, programs like food banks are unlikely to be able to fill the gap, and are going to strain their budgets trying to do so. While I firmly believe the only solution is government action, in the meantime, I’m trying to fundraise for both local food banks and for Share our Strength, who works both on direct grants to organizations that provide food, and political action.

TLDR: Send me a receipt for a $50 donation to your local food bank or to Share our Strength, and I’ll send you a book recommendation. You can add a note about what genre or type of thing you’re interested in, if you care to, or take the random option. Book quality not guaranteed, book lack-of-trashiness not guaranteed, read at your own risk, etc, etc. Replying to the newsletter email works, DMs work. Okay, now for the post.

From this blog’s occasional dips into book reviews when I don’t have a better idea, you can probably work out that I’m a pretty constant reader of fiction. Often not very *good* fiction, more of a broad meandering swath of whatever I can get at the library. What may or may not be obvious is that I’m extremely, extremely committed to sci-fi as a genre. I really like it, I grew up on it, I enjoy knowing things about the genre and discussing various forms of it. (at one point, my fun ice breaker presentation for a work thing was “Male Sci-Fi Authors and Where They Should Have Stopped” which I stand by entirely, looking directly at you Larry Niven)

Sometimes people who are incredibly into sci-fi and also into tech can talk a big game about how “science fiction predicts the future”. This is mostly garbage- for every oddly dead-on book there’s a pile of wildly off takes that we’ve simply forgotten¹. It’s more likely to tell you about the present anxieties of whoever wrote it than anything else.

One thing that older sci-fi CAN do is let you pinpoint exactly what book someone has pulled their clever new idea or vision of the world from. Nerds of a certain age are extremely likely to have read many of the same books, usually as teenagers (the golden age of sci-fi is about 13, as the joke goes). Some of those nerds are going to try and build the torment nexus. These books vary on if they portray their torment nexus as bad or not. Even with books that are HEAVILY criticizing something, there’s a tendency to half remember it years later and go “yeah well, what if we did that but good?”.

Personally, I think understanding these references is useful as a psychological insight. My area of interest is written sci-fi, but I’m sure there’s a lot of “one episode of Battlestar Galactica” or whatever getting referenced that I’m missing.

Assume these are not recommendations unless specifically listed. Many of these books aren’t good. Without further ado, here are some topics you may wish to understand the references for, and the books I think inform them.

Libertarians and Mars Colonization Weirdos

The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress, by Robert Heinlein². I am not recommending you read this, it’s not very good, it’s uncomfortably racist, weird about women, and also at one point fully stops the plot to talk about the optimal size of terrorist cells. However, it’s a super important reference across a variety of ideologies.

People often describe Elon Musk’s mars colonization stuff as coming from Asimov’s Foundation (he himself has said this), but I think this is a much more likely source. The entire point of the book is a small collection of people on the Moon entirely outclassing Earth by being smarter, tougher, harder working, and above all that boring earth shit like “social safety nets” and “non-mob-based justice”³. It’s also one of the foundational texts of libertarianism, and spends a great deal of time on it⁴.

I’m biased because I really do not like Foundation (despite loving other Asimov works), but I think it appeals to a certain type of guy who thinks he’s smarter than everyone and 10 steps ahead. It doesn’t really provide models for actually doing anything other than 1. Go to space 2. Be really smart 3. Create a nuclear-reactor cargo cult religion. It’s a model if your goal is for everyone to venerate you specifically after your death. Moon spends a lot more time extolling the virtues of the specific governing and lifestyle decisions that made people “fit” to colonize the moon. Ick, but useful to understand.

Reproductive tech and screening ventures

Ethan of Athos, by Louis McMaster Bujold. Bujold is clearly really interested in future possibilities for reproductive tech, specifically artificial wombs and how they’d impact childrearing. The Vorkosigan saga spins what is very clearly Star Trek Federation x Klingons fanfic⁵ into a very fun combination of palace intrigue plot and mercenary company nonsense. Ethan of Athos comes out of left field with an oddly touching story of a planet that literally bans women (religious reasons, because they’re corrupting and demonic, which #goals) and relies on artificial womb tech for its population. I know this sounds bad, it’s actually kind of sweet. For the full picture, you’d have to pull from the other books which touch on the possibilities for things like embryo selection and genetic tweaking, but the use of “uterine replicators” is a constant in the books.

I find her work interesting particularly because it’s somewhat about the way that the available technology changes the relationships between men and women, and alters the cultural understanding of who gets to be a family. Later books deal with the way replicators are changing the uptight imperial society, and their impacts on the lives of women. IMO, you can see clear pulls from Athos in the way Sam Altman especially talks about reproductive tech.

Election Forecasters and AI

Stay with me here. “Big smart AI that can predict everything” is a common enough theme, with less tech-y roots in Laplace’s Demon (which is also the name of software for running Bayesian analysis as I literally just learned). There’s enough references that it’s hard to pin down. My favorite (and I think a likely enough one) is the Multivac stories from Asimov. These stories are specifically cool because they’re an early enough treatment of AI that they conceive of it as a huge calculator, rather than a being with a personality. Multivac explicitly requires data on all things happening on earth to make its decrees and predictions. Most of them are kind of ~fine, but that era of proto-AI is imo influential in how people think about forecasting and understanding human behavior.

Specifically worth your attention is a single Asimov story called “Franchise”, in which the single most representative voter in the US is called in to do his civic duty of answering baffling questions so a supercomputer can calculate the outcome of the election. No actual election is held, because the computer is so accurate that what would be the point? It’s set in 2008 and the only specific question we are given is about the price of eggs. If you wrote this now, people would be calling it a bit on the nose. It’s dated, obviously, but it hits on the pull to perfectly predict behavior so well that there’s no need for the behavior to like…occur.

I don’t actually have evidence that our election forecasting nerds of the moment have read this, but I am one, and I certainly read this, so I’m counting that. You should go read this one, it’s short and available online.

The Goddamn Phones

The Naked Sun, Asimov, second book in the R. Daneel series. Matt Darling made this point on Twitter in response to some truly awful “AI friend” advertising and I think he’s right and want to add on. The first R. Daneel book, Caves of Steel⁶, is more about super dense future cities and their resultant agoraphobic (or, claustrophilic, a word I just learned you could use) population. I adored this book as a child (I was very fun and normal) for its synthesized yeast-based foods⁷ and cities with tunnels full of moving walkways. Naked Sun takes you off Earth onto a Spacer world where everyone stays in their extremely far apart houses, hangs out via video call, and can’t stomach the thought of being in a room with another person IRL.

Because of when it was written, Naked Sun sees the alternative to human contact as “calling your friends on video calls”, which is far LESS cynical than current possibilities. I think we’d be pretty happy if the Youth were on facetime constantly and not on tiktok. The other part of this vision of the world I think folks are pulling from is the idea that the great robotic replacement of all human labor will free us up to...scroll our phones hologram video screens. I find this hideously depressing, but the vision of work-free personalized entertainment in our own homes seems hugely attractive to people. I’ll keep my knitting, thank you.

My favorite eerily-accurate take on The Phones is “The Machine Stops”, a 1909 short story about a society controlled by The Machine. It perfectly captures what it’s like to be so busy with your phone that you barely have time for people who you actually know.

Niche beef: Dune

One thing that is NOT a useful way to understand the present is Dune’s Butlerian Jihad. I know this is a thing like 5 people care about, but the Butlerian Jihad is a setting shorthand to let Herbert write a futuristic novel in which they have sick knife fights⁸ and aren’t using robot armies. The backstory of it is mostly made up in later novels while fishing for material, and it’s dumb as hell. It is also notably not a reaction against normal-ass computers or robots taking your jobs. I am begging you to stop referencing it.

Fundraising reminder: Send me a receipt for a $50 donation to your local food bank or to Share our Strength⁹, and I’ll send you a book recommendation.

1. Ask me about a book I own a physical copy of because it was extremely difficult to find as an ebook, Facial Justice by L.P. Hartley. It has Things to say about Society and is entirely unrecognizable as a vision of the future.

2. Also the writer of the book that kind of explains current-San-Francisco-Culture, Stranger in a Strange Land, and some other things we aren’t going to discuss in polite company

3. Also, they have giant mass driver/catapult thingies

4. I’m just so happy people aren’t saying “TANSTAAFL” where I have to see it

5. Not an insult, just a real description of Shards of Honor

6. Asimov is always the reference point when people are talking about robots, personal or industrial. I really like the “I, Robot” stories (they are not like the movie at all).

7. I really wanted those synthesized from yeast strawberries

8. “why aren’t they just always using remote controlled lasers to make other people’s shields into bombs” and other questions asked by people missing the point

9. Or, honestly, to whatever org in this space you want, I just wanted to give an option that wasn’t implicitly “tell me where you live” because that would freak me out to do, personally.