By John Blyler

Albert Einstein once said that imagination is more important than knowledge. So where do you go to find great imagination?

I caught up with Lou Anders, the editorial director of Prometheus Books’ science fiction and fantasy imprint Pyr, at the recent OryCon convention in Portland, Ore. Here's what he had to say.

SLD: What effect does science fiction have on technology?

Anders: There is a wonderful website called “Technovelgy.com” – where science meets fiction – on which they list every sci-fi idea that has become reality. The last time I went to the site, they had something like 1,400 entries listing both the device and the expression of the device. A great many of the devices are there because someone read about them in a sci-fi story.

SLD: How about that other way around, i.e., what effect does technology have on Sci-Fi?

Anders: William Bison and Bruce Sterling created the cyberpunk movement in science fiction. Gibson first wrote about cyberspace on a manual typewriter. Later, he talked about getting his first computer, sent to him by a company that wanted his endorsement. He took apart to the computer and was absolutely depressed to find a disk inside. He said, “Well, this is just a record player.” He had expected to see some kind of crystalline thing with red lasers shooting out it. Instead, he found a record player. He said he never would have written cyberspace in “Neuromancer” if he had known that it was implemented on little more than a record player.

SLD: Record player? You mean the computer's hard drive or perhaps an early floppy disk. Both systems do look like record players. But that brings up an important difference between science fiction and technology innovation. Most technology improvement, as brought forth by engineers, is accomplished by incremental changes. That's because most designs are constrained by cost and time-to-market pressures to use existing technology.

Anders: Have you seen Microsoft's Project Natal demonstrations? It's the Nintendo Wii minus any kind of physical controller. A camera sits on top of the Xbox monitor and just tracks what you're doing. I saw the demo that they showed their game developer partners event. Microsoft was showing their partners what was coming so the partners could start thinking about what games to put on it. Here's one example: A kid walks into the living room. On the screen is a monk who sees him walk in. The monk spontaneously says, “ I see you have returned for another lesson.” Then the kids and the monk battle each other. The kid has no hardware on him at all, not controller or anything. But his image suddenly appears on the screen and his motioned are copied real-time into the game. It blew my mind.

SLD: I knew that Intel and others have been developing commercial grade facial recognition systems, but this application is amazing. It is far more interesting than the digital signature application that I've written about. Variations on that theme include headbands that respond to thoughts in the brain, as well as recent developments in chips implants.

Anders: I wouldn't mind wearing a chip, as soon as I was sure they couldn't spam it. Nothing frustrates me more than having my computer's browser stop working when you can't make a connection. I'd hate to not be able to access my own brain.

We have an author named David Louis Edelman who wrote a trilogy called ‘The Jump 225 Trilogy.' The third and final book in the series comes out in February. It's a world where, at some point, there was a robot revolution that caused a backlash against technology. Now the society is rebuilding. The way that the people deal with their fears of external technology is to restrict all tech to internal systems. Everybody has nanite threads throughout their bodies and software companies compete for the rights to build the software that runs on it. In this society, you have small four- or five-person companies who compete to write this software. One program is called Poker Face 3.5, which you run during a business meeting so you don't give anything away during negotiations. All of these software programs are loaded into your body. Whenever a new program comes out, it's ranked based upon popularity and performance.

But remember; this author wrote this book in 2000. Again, the model is not huge corporations, but smaller five-person teams writing quick software that is dumped into a data sea and then ranted instantly. It mirrors what have become the applications on an iPhone. The crux of the story, though, is the creation of a program called “multi-real,” which allows instantaneous parallel processing of anything you might want to do. So the nanites in a person's body that run multi-real can do anything. It's a real game changer for that society.

SLD: Even in this example, science fiction touches upon reality. Embedded multicore systems are everyone, although not yet in our bodies. But few of these multicore devices are true parallel processors. Max Domeika, a multicore software expert at Intel, said the software challenges in true multicore processing are significant. Here, too, we find that technology moves by increments. Although multicore processors are now readily, software technology is lagging. Most programs are still using non-parallel languages on multicore like C/C++. We must use legacy system for economic and other reasons. That is the inertia. There are “game changing” technologies, like superconductors, nanotech, and other. But they take a while to be realized. Still, the direction we select may be greatly influenced by our imagination – not the engineers, but the writers of Sci-Fi.

Anders: Maybe, but maybe not. Remember the quote by John Schaar: ‘The future is not a result of choices among alternative paths offered by the present, but a place that is created—created first in the mind and will, created next in activity. The future is not some place we are going to, but one we are creating. The paths are not to be found, but made, and the activity of making them, changes both the maker and the destination.”

SLD: The theme of our conversation seems to be one of man's merging with his creations, resulting in the connectivity of everyone at some bizarre level – hardware being the commodity, software being the dynamic variable. How about other areas of technology, like biomedical?

Anders: We have only scraped the surface of genetic engineering. I remember reading somewhere that there is a 60-year cycle from the invention of the technology and the revolutionizing of the world by that technology. We build the first computers and they are giant things that take up whole suites of business building. Now, 60 years later, they have become miniaturized and everyone has one on their watch. Genetic engineering is not yet 50 years old. At some point in the near future we'll have a genetic revolution that will be equivalent to the computer revolution. Right now we're at the stage where transistors are so cheap that you can buy a birthday card that players music and then throw it away! That will happen with genetic engineering.

SLD: Freeman Dyson delivered a lecture on this very topic. “Freeman Dyson Talks About Biotech vs. Nanotech.”

Anders: Some say this genetic revolution is still 50 to 60 years away. But that is still the 21st century. For the last 40,000 years we have just used plows to till the earth and hit each other with sticks. Then suddenly, in the last couple of hundred years, we are ramping up asymmetrically. So if I don't see a genetic revolution in my lifetime my children and grandchildren will. That's still an astronomical leap. I firmly believe that we will not end this century as one human race. We've already cracked the genome. Within the next 50 years we will be able to tinker with our own genomes to the point where people will start splicing themselves into whatever they want to be. We will be a multiplicity.

Michio Kaku, famous physicist and technology evangelist, recently said that 90% of what you see on Star Trek will be real by the end of this century.

SLD: Which 90%?

Anders: It's interesting what he puts downs as possible and not possible. He's one of those who thinks that artificial intelligence – a form of genetic engineering – is a lot further out in time. He thinks that thought processes in the brain at an order of magnitude deeper than people think they are. On the other hand, he thinks the teleporter technology and faster than light travel is right around the corner.

SLD: Right around the corner – direct conversion of mass to energy and vice versa? That doesn't seem possible. It may be scientifically possible, but to bring it to reality is a daunting task for the engineer. As an engineer, you must move forward cautiously.

Anders: Science fiction, like science, has to be extremely conservative. Sci-Fi is the art of taking the improbable (not the impossible) and making it seem convincing. Fantasy is taking the impossible and making it seem credible. One of my favorite quotes of all came from Paramount Studios. DC Comics wanted to create a Star Trek-Superman crossover. They asked Paramount if Superman can go to the Enterprise? The people at Paramount said “no,” since Superman isn't real, which meant by extension that Star Trek was real because it uses technology.

SLD: Science fiction seems to help shape the future of our technology. What does the future hold for sci-Fi?

Anders: It's an odd time for Sci-Fi. It's being outsold by fantasy and fantasy is being outsold by urban fantasy. That's any book you see with a girl's back with a tattoo on either her shoulder or right above her buttock. It actually represents a confluence of the sci-fi genre with romance readers.

I think the sci-fi category is migrating out of adult and back into Young Readers (YR). Perhaps this is where is should have been, since the golden age of science fiction is 12. At the same time, Sci-Fi is migrating to the mainstream literature, with writers like Cormac McCarthy, Michael Chibon, and everyone else.

I met someone recently who told me they are a huge fan of sci-fi . They went on to describe the physics of faster-than-light travel and warfare in space. His descriptions sounded a lot like the mass effect games from Bioware. Turns out I was right and he had never read any science fiction. All of his admiration and knowledge came from playing games. This is a little bit of what sci-fi is up against. Its audience is teenage boys who are getting their sci-fi fix from the video games or TV.

SLD: Seems like a bit of an incomplete fix.

Anders: I'm surprised at the sophistication of some of those games. What seems to be happening is that people are getting tired of just blowing the same stuff over and over again in these games. They are looking for more sophisticated narratives. I think long term we will see video games looking to actual writers to bring in the complexity.

It's the same thing that is happening in Hollywood. The Matrix films – are they progressively better films or worse? Setting aside the narrative, you can see that the technology in the films is improving by leaps and bounds. But what happens when you can do anything with special effect, when they are ubiquitous? Then narrative becomes important again. You need special effects married to a good story. I think that is starting to happen in gaming. Just look at Walter John Williams who wrote the dialog for Spore. I think we will see more parallels between video games and science fiction.

Tags: Biotech, David Edelman, Dyson, Intel, Lou Anders, Microsoft, Nanotech, Orycon, Project Natal, sci-fi, technology

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