Furstenfeldbruck When you think about the future, what images come to mind? Flying cars? Astronauts slumbering in cryochambers on their way to Mars? Killer robots who want to destroy humanity? Or post-apocalyptic wasteland, where the last survivors fight for the few resources?
Even if your vision of the future looks different from what is listed in the first paragraph, some of the scenes described may sound familiar to you. They are images from science fiction stories that have almost become iconographic and that described the future – i.e. our current present – decades ago. So far, none of these visions of the future have materialized. Luckily – one might say in view of the already overflowing traffic, the current CO2 balance of space flights and the general desire to survive.
On the other hand, there are quite a lot of ideas from science fiction stories that we take for granted today: In his 1984 novel Neuromancer, William Gibson paints a vision of what the Internet is today. The tricorder that Captain Kirk uses in Star Trek, with its three functions of scanning, recording and processing, is a forerunner of our smartphone, which should therefore actually be called a multicorder.
In the patent dispute between Samsung and Apple, which has been fought out in court for years, as to who really invented the tablet, Samsung’s lawyers argued that in reality it was not Steve Jobs but Stanley Kubrick who presented the first tablet in his classic film “2001: A Space Odyssey”. . And if you were a bit disappointed that there was still no “real” hoverboard available in 2015, like Marty McFly used in “Back to the Future”, you could at least take solace with an earthbound electric hoverboard on two wheels.
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The claim that science fiction authors are the actual originators of this or that technical innovation is, of course, unfounded. Imagining an interstellar spaceship and actually making it happen are two completely different things. Still, one might never come into existence without the other.
Do they predict the future? no!
When Jules Verne described the adventures on the Nautilus in “20,000 Leagues Under the Sea” in 1870, dozens of inventors had already been struggling to come up with the idea since the British mathematician William Bourne first conceived of a submarine in 1578.
But it was still Verne who made a luxuriously equipped submarine and the underwater adventures that can be experienced with it appear so attractive that people, companies and even the US military acknowledged it by name: John P. Holland, who launched the first in built a commissioned submarine for the US Navy, one of its first companies called the Nautilus Submarine Boat Company. The US Navy named no fewer than six of its ships the Nautilus, including the world’s first nuclear-powered submarine in 1954.
So if science fiction writers today, like then, don’t make direct inventions, are they looking to the future? Do they even predict them? no!
Science fiction writers have eyes and ears for the zeitgeist. It is her profession, her art, to extrapolate the current into the future and to create a multitude of possible futures from it. Which readers are then inspired by which vision of the future is actually decisive for the development of mankind. So this is how SF writers might be making self-fulfilling prophecies.
Because the stories that people consume – be it in the form of literature, film or computer games – shape their imagination, the spectrum of what can be thought. And the broader the reception of the stories, the easier it is to exchange ideas with other people. Science fiction stories can be the initial spark of your own idea, which matures into a new invention over time.
So if the SF of the past has influenced our present, it is safe to assume that the SF of the present is not without implications for the future in that it suggests ideas and possibilities, points out dangers, raises hopes and all that fills the people’s thought sheet with new trump cards.
Anyone who deals with current SF definitely has an advantage: they are not easily surprised by the future!
After the companies, politicians are now slowly beginning to use this advantage for themselves. Companies have SF authors write about future customers and their wishes so that they can better prepare themselves. Governments hire futurologists for foresight and technology assessment. And in the recent past, SF authors have been hired directly to design or formulate certain scenarios.
From 2019 to 2021, the Wetzlar Fantastic Library developed the ERDF-funded project “Future Life”, which excerpts, systematizes and evaluates the ideas that exist in science fiction literature. The Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) carried out the “Future Work” project in 2021, in which, among other things, SF authors wrote stories about the future of work for scenarios previously defined by the researchers. The BMBF is also dealing with the future in its foresight process.
The power of science fiction
In addition to scientifically working futurologists, more than a dozen SF authors and illustrators were also consulted here in 2021/22 to develop scenarios and the associated stories. The special thing about it is the interplay between scientific and artistic work. Because the more scientific the study of the future, the narrower the perspective.
Theresa Hannig: Pantopia.
fisherman gate
Frankfurt 2022
464 pages
16.99 euros
There is very little that can be said with absolute certainty about tomorrow, and the further one looks into the future, the greater the spectrum of possibilities. The strength of SF is now to pick out a few from the multitude of futures defined by science as possible and to fill them with ideas, people, their conflicts and needs and to knit stories out of them.
In this way, the readers – be they politicians, entrepreneurs or any other audience – get a much more direct, emotional access to the problems and possibilities of the future and can identify with them more than if they were just reading a fact-based, scientific report.
So it’s worth listening to the SF authors! Their stories are worth reading, seeing and experiencing. Sometimes as a warning voice that shows us the vulnerability of our current security and freedom, sometimes as a source of ideas for our own innovations.
But now especially as a voice of hope. Because they still exist, the utopias. The stories that show how everything could turn out well. These stories are worth reading. Because in the current situation, in which the climate crisis and corona pandemic themselves feel like a dystopia that has been going on for years, they give hope. hope for life after the disaster. And where there is hope, there is also future.
More: These ten trends will change our lives in the next decade.