There once was a man of erudition /
who took to writing science fiction. /
His thoughts were transcendent, /
his paragraphs perfectly indented, /
but still something got lost in transmission.
Tag Archives: s.f.
An Interview With Margaret Atwood
The acclaimed author on hope, science, and writing about the future.
By Ed Finn
Margaret Atwood
Atwood’s intensely literary, human focus on environmental issues and the future of the planet is shaping a more optimistic vision of cli fi, one that sidesteps the blame games and the “will-they, won’t-they” battles over carbon emissions. Her response is clear and compelling: The planet is changing. We need creativity, ambition, and some powerful new stories to understand how we can change with it.
My colleagues and I invited Atwood to Arizona State University in November to help launch a new project about these challenges, the Imagination and Climate Futures Initiative. (Disclosure: ASU is a partner with Slate and New America in Future Tense.) Our conversation was inspired by the idea that an effective response to what Atwood calls the “everything change” will take more than better batteries and lightbulbs (though we’ll need them too). To answer the challenge, we need to think much bigger about what it means to be human in the era when we dominate every corner of this world.
Last fall, you became the first author to submit work to the Future Library project—and no one will be able to read that story until 2114.
The Future Library project is something thought up by a conceptual artist called Katie Paterson. She was approached by the Oslo Library in Norway, which is building a new facility, and it wanted a special thing. What she came up with was Future Library. A forest has been planted in Norway that will grow for 100 years. Each one of those 100 years, one author will be invited to contribute something to the future library in a sealed box. It can be one word. It can be a poem. It can be a story. It can be a novel. It can be nonfiction. There are two stipulations: No. 1, no images. No. 2, you cannot tell anybody what is inside the box.
These boxes will accumulate in a special room—the Future Library room—and people will be able to go into that room and see the titles and the authors and imagine what’s in the boxes. Meanwhile the forest is growing, and at the 100-year moment, the boxes will all be opened and enough trees will be cut from this forest to make the paper to print the Future Library books. The first person to put a box in there—their book will be a hundred years old. The last person to put it in—it will be 1 year old. You will get a continuum through 100 years of what writers have seen fit to communicate to the future.
The selecting committee will renew itself as it will have to do, and the people who will be on that final committee have not been born yet nor have their parents been born. The final authors have not been born yet nor have their parents been born, so it’s completely an unknown. It’s the kind of project you are going to either say yes to immediately because it grabs your imagination, or you’re going to say no to it immediately because you’ll not be able to see the point of writing something that will not be published in your lifetime.
Rest of the interview: http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/future_tense/2015/02/margaret_atwood_interview_the_author_speaks_on_hope_science_and_the_future.single.html
Filed under 2015, author interview
Looking out as a way of looking in
Creation writing: is sci-fi a 21st-century religion?
Space shuttle during the early years.
Source: http://www.theguardian.com/books/booksblog/2015/jan/16/sci-fi-21st-century-religion-universe-hubble
Ever since mankind began to count, the uncountable stars have been filling us with awe. But the splendour revealed by a cloudless night reveals only a fraction of the universe’s truly awe-inspiring scale. The Hubble space telescope reveals a tiny smudge in the sky such as Andromeda to be a galaxy vaster than our own, teeming with a trillion stars, one of a hundred million other galaxies spread across the heavens.
Science today shows us a very different universe than the clockwork model imagined by Isaac Newton in his description of gravity. Jules Verne could imagine shooting a rocket from the Earth to the moon in 1865, but could not have imagined the vastness even of our solar system’s Kuiper belt. It was only when Edwin Hubble identified the first star beyond the Milky Way, and only when the telescope that bore his name photographed 3,000 galaxies in a single patch of “empty” space, that the human eye could glimpse the near infinite depths of space.
The work of the most ambitious SF authors like Iain M Banks, Vernor Vinge and David Brin manages to capture the true scale of the universe in fiction. And even then SF can detail only the tiniest portion of a cosmos some 93bn light years wide (and expanding ever more quickly), shaped by the unifying force of gravity, where the elements of life are created in supernova explosions and destroyed in black holes. The scientific model of the universe begins to look eerily like that expressed by Hindu astronomers over 3,000 years ago, in which the cycles of the universe are measured in aeons 1.28tn years long, reality is maintained by the force of Vishnu, and all things are created by Brahma and destroyed by Shiva.
Perhaps it’s these mythic resonances that have seen science fiction trend more and more towards religious zeal in recent years. The Singularity, a point in the near future when technology evolves so fast that it allows life to transcend all physical boundaries, is now a common idea in SF, explored by writers from Damien Broderick to Charlie Stross. Its believers style themselves as singulatarians and transhumanists, but their rhetoric of life after death in silicon virtual realities so deeply echoes fundamentalist Christianity that no one is joking when they call it the Rapture of the Nerds.
More at: http://www.theguardian.com/books/booksblog/2015/jan/16/sci-fi-21st-century-religion-universe-hubble
Filed under science fiction
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