While the 'golden age' of science fiction, the 1930s to '50s, was fixated on space travel and colonizing other planets, its successor - dubbed the 'new wave' - was more concerned with ecological and societal threats, particularly with the emergence of writers like Samuel Delaney and Octavia E. Over its more than 150-year history, the genre has in some ways paralleled the general cultural perception of technological innovations and what they can do for us or to us, says Gerry Canavan, an associate professor and the chair of the English department at Marquette University in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. While the book is over 200 years old, it encapsulates the ethical and moral questions we still grapple with today in the face of technological innovation, says Finn, who co-edited an annotated version of the book in 2017. Mary Shelley's Frankenstein used the term 'scientist' 20 years before there was the word to describe someone in that profession. Gerry Canavan is co-editor of Uneven Futures: Strategies for Community Survival from Speculative Fiction. ![]() He also co-leads the Applied Sci-Fi Project at CSI, which invites science fiction writers, futurists and technologists to investigate how science fiction stories can shape the development of real-world technologies - what he calls the "science fiction feedback loop." "Science fiction prototyping, and design fiction and speculative design, all of these are different approaches to a very similar idea, which is, can we use the power of storytelling about the future as a toolkit to create experiences of the future?" said Ed Finn, founding director of the Center for Science and the Imagination (CSI) at Arizona State University. The moon landing was also famously depicted in Jules Verne's 1865 novel and made possible by a 1929 film called Woman in the Moon. There are many examples of sci-fi stories in literature and film that got the future right, including the communicator from Star Trek, which served as inspiration for Motorola's flip phone. But the power of the genre doesn't necessarily lie in being literally prescient, say researchers. ![]() Spark 53:59 How science fiction helps us harness the power of imaginationįrom 2001: A Space Odyssey to Black Mirror, science fiction has long predicted technological innovations.
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