Science-fiction authors, scientists and professors gathered at Crescent Ballroom on Wednesday night to celebrate the launch of “Hieroglyph: Stories & Visions for a Better Future,” an anthology of optimistic science-fiction stories that resulted from dialogues between ASU’s Center for Science and the Imagination and various authors.
The series of conversations and monologues on topics ranging from time travel to cognitive biases and literacy to border issues featured authors Kim Stanley Robinson, Brenda Cooper, Karl Schroeder, James L. Cambias, Kathleen Ann Goonan and Madeline Ashby; “Hieroglyph” editors Ed Finn and Kathryn Cramer; and cosmologist, astrobiologist and ASU professor Paul Davies.
In 2011, ASU President Michael Crow was at an event with science-fiction author Neal Stephenson, who discussed what he saw as a loss of ambition to accomplish big things among scientists and science-fiction authors. Stephenson had grown up around the Apollo space program and the development of national infrastructure in the form of highways and dams and felt that the United States and the scientific community as a whole had lost some of their motivation to attempt projects like these in modern times.
Additionally, Stephenson said the overwhelming majority of science-fiction stories being told were negative dystopian tales about the future of our world, which typically came to a horrific end of some sort. He wondered what a reimagination of science fiction might look like if humanity survived and stories featured technologies and concepts that already existed, not magical devices that might exist in the distant future.
This was the foundation of Project Hieroglyph, said Finn, the book’s co-editor and director of the ASU Center for Science and the Imagination.
“Hieroglyph is a very conscious effort to change that relationship, that conversation about the future,” Finn said. “What would happen if we actually tried to write technically grounded optimistic stories about worlds we want to live in, dreams we want to believe in, rather than just the nightmares and the horror stories?”
Three years after that conversation between Stephenson and Crow, the book was published, featuring a total of 17 stories as well as other discussions and essays.
“It’s about this idea … that if we engage our powers of reason, optimism, hope and creativity, we can actually make the world better,” Finn said. “Not because the world is destined to be better or destined to be worse, but because by thinking about it and by talking about it, we can actually change the future.”
Robinson, one of the authors, spoke with Davies, the scientist, about time travel during a dialogue at Wednesday’s event.
Robinson said science fiction is good at emulating real life in ways that are easier to understand and discuss.
“For fiction, I think of time travel as a big metaphor for how things feel for us often. It’s actually very hard to keep your mind in the present — it’s a difficult Zen practice — because our minds spend an awful lot of time in the past or in the future, either remembering or anticipating,” Robinson said. “Time travel is really good for expressing these strange dislocations in our lives.”
Davies added that reading science fiction as he was growing up inspired him to go into a scientific field and ask questions about the world around him.
“A lot of people go into science because as youngsters, they read science fiction,” Davies said. “Because science fiction is about possible worlds, it’s about imaginary worlds, and theoretical physics is about imaginary worlds — we’re constructing a description of reality.”
Project Hieroglyph may have manifested itself in the publication of the short-story anthology, but Finn hopes the conversations that went into developing it continue on through both its contributors and its readers.
“The book is not a dead tree commemorating a conversation that’s over,” Finn said. “The book is an invitation to all of you to come and join the conversation that is still happening now.”
Contact the reporter at kimberly.koerth@asu.edu
