The Applied Sci-Fi Project, Center for Science and the Imagination, Arizona State University, Tempe, Arizona, United States (online event), May 2022–June 2023

The Applied Sci-Fi Project at the Center for Science and the Imagination (CSI) is a one-time project funded by a grant from the Sloan Foundation. CSI’s mission has been to envision more hopeful futures using science fiction (SF) stories and strategies through workshops and anthologies on topics ranging from space futures (with NASA), climate change and solar futures, to the future of music technology and the Metaverse. To that end, CSI held four events, with the goal of laying out “best practices” for envisioning more hopeful and just futures using the imaginative and narrative strategies of science fiction. Held throughout 2022 and 2023, the events outlined the history and explanations of how science fiction is used by government, corporate, academic, and nonprofit organizations to conduct futures and foresight work. Each Applied Sci-Fi event assembled a variety of experts—researchers, consultants, designers, and SF writers—representing many subfields of futures work, such as: strategic foresight; scenario planning; design fiction; experiential futures; speculative futures; critical futures; and speculative journalism. Each event consisted of (1) a public panel of up to five speakers, streamed live, followed by (2) a private invitation-only workshop of up to twenty “experts” and “practitioners.”While scholars recognize the mutual influence between SF narratives and technoscientific developments, the exact nature of that influence has remained murky.1 Science fiction has inspired a number of well-known technologies;2 for example, the creators of the mobile phone (at Motorola) and QuickTime (at Apple) were inspired by episodes of Star Trek (1966–69) and Star Trek: The Next Generation (1987–94).3 Conversely, many SF works show the influence of real world technoscience: two well-known examples include the films Interstellar (2014) and 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), both of which employed scientific consultants to ensure accuracy.4This bidirectional influence is informally referred to as the “Sci-Fi Feedback Loop,” a term that posits not only that science fiction influences technoscientific innovators, but that real-world innovations become inputs into the next wave of SF narratives.5 This was the starting point for the first of the four Applied Sci-Fi events. We can see this loop at work over many decades in both science fiction depictions of and the technical developments leading to space flight, rocketry, and the moon landings. Such travels were anticipated by Jules Verne and H. G. Wells, whose fiction inspired rocketry pioneers Robert Goddard, Hermann Oberth, and Werner von Braun. These innovators in turn inspired more realistic (and futuristic) SF representations of space travel, including the film Destination Moon (1950), with a rocket looking suspiciously like the V-2,6 and on to more futuristic spaceships in the film 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968).The relationship between utopian and SF narratives was seen as integral to the SF stories and techniques discussed, moving beyond whether or not science fiction is, as Glen Negly and J. Max Patrick suggested, “a bastard literary device” that arose from utopian stories;7 or whether one agrees with Darko Suvin’s statement that utopias are basically a “sociopolitical subgenre of science fiction.”8 Assumptions about techno-utopian or techno-dystopian futures are often built into specific SF genres and stories. In fact, the purpose of futures work covered in this project is often to help create more just, hopeful, and diverse stories through science fiction, in contrast with the often dystopic worlds depicted in successful commercial science fiction.The public panel of the first event in May 2022, “The Sci-Fi Feedback Loop: Mapping Fiction’s Influence on Real-World Tech,” included SF writers Cory Doctorow (Little Brother [2008]; Walkaway [2017]) and Malka Older (Null States [2017]; . . . and Other Disasters [2022]); venture capitalist Tim Chang; media studies professor Sherryl Vint (University of California, Riverside); and policy and legal scholar Michael Bennett (University of Illinois). The event focused on the historical influence of science friction on technoscientific innovation via examples in subgenres including space fiction (Star Trek franchise [1966-present], and 2001: A Space Odyssey [1969]), military fiction (Robert A. Heinlein’s Starship Troopers [1959]), and cyberpunk (Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash [1992], and The Diamond Age [1995]).The role of utopian and dystopian narrative arcs was traced through specific SF subgenres, illustrating how space-age fiction often depicts a techno-utopian future that was inspired by the technological determinism of the 1950s–1960s. In subsequent decades many young people were inspired to go into STEM fields, or to work for organizations like NASA.9 This trend continued into the 1990s with the X-Files-inspired “Scully Effect,” which attracted many young women into the sciences.10 Although cyberpunk stories from the 1980s onward largely depicted dystopias, such stories are still inspiring today’s tech titans to attempt to imitate the technologies showcased therein: for example, Mark Zuckerberg’s attempt to build the Metaverse is not unlike the virtual reality worlds previously imagined in novels such as Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash (1992) or Ernest Cline’s Ready Player One (2011), yet disregards the grim futures depicted in these novels. More recently, genres such as climate fiction, Afrofuturism, and non-Western-centric, postcolonial science fiction, have tried to depict and inspire more hopeful and just futures, in the hope that, through the SF feedback loop, such futures are more likely to be achieved.Participants also discussed specific proposed theories of influence between SF narrative and technoscientific innovation. One such theory is Stephenson’s hieroglyph model, wherein a work of science fiction is used as a vision (or shorthand symbol or hieroglyph of the goal), bringing together and implicitly guiding a large group of individuals to work on an ambitious project, like the Apollo space missions.11 The adjacent possible model, a term from biology, advanced by Doctorow, describes how innovation depends on predecessor technologies12; for example, a knowledge of metallurgy was needed before the helicopter, envisioned by Leonardo da Vinci hundreds of years earlier, could be built.13The second and third Applied Sci-Fi events attempted to define a tax-onomy of specific terminology and techniques for utilizing SF narratives, scenarios, and fictional artifacts (or diegetic prototypes) to prepare for uncertain futures: worldbuilding, threat-casting, forecasting, back-casting, scenario planning, experiential and speculative futures, critical futures, and SF prototyping.14 Futurist Julian Bleecker observed that if we think of a continuum with “art” (creative endeavors like writing fiction and illustrating fictional products) on one side, and strategy (logical approaches such as forecasts using surveys and spreadsheets) on the other, we could then contextualize and categorize these methods into some kind of taxonomy, based on how much creativity is involved.The second event, “Designing the Future with Applied Sci-Fi,” held in September 2022, explored the artistic side of this continuum. The speakers explored the practices of design fiction, a term coined by SF writer Bruce Sterling (Schismatrix [1985], Islands in the Net [1988]) and futures consultant Julian Bleecker, two participants in the event.15 During the public panel, moderator Brian David Johnson (Sci-Fi Prototyping [2011]), former futurist at Intel, suggested that the purpose of writing science fiction is to sell books, while the main purpose of both design fiction and foresight is to help an organization plan for the future by exploring fictional products and scenarios. This planning could be via stories, but could also include experiential futures, like an apartment from a climate-affected future as designed by futures consultant Anab Jain, another participant in the event.16 Worldbuilding spans across science fiction and applied science fiction and is a necessary part of any SF project, whether a Hollywood film or a corporate futures workshop. For example, Minority Report (2002) included production design and real-life human-computer research done by the MIT Media Lab.The third event, “Science Fictional Scenarios and Strategic Foresight,” held in December 2022, focused on the other end of this continuum: strategy. The purpose of strategic foresight is to imagine possible or plausible future scenarios and narratives in a more structured way. Dating back to the 1950s, foresight has been a key part of what has been called alternatively futurology, futures studies, or futures work. It was pioneered by the RAND Corporation to help the US government prepare for continued technological and sociopolitical change.17 In the 1970s the Shell Corporation adopted story writing and narrative techniques to plan beyond a few years into the future.18 Alumni from Shell, such as Peter Schwartz (who participated in this third Applied Sci-Fi event) and various Silicon Valley luminaries, co-founded the Global Business Network (GBN) in the 1980s and 1990s, a think-tank consultancy that brought futures work to organizations during the dot com era.19 The methods focused on best-case and worst-case scenarios, which might be considered mini-utopias or dystopias for a particular industry or client.The fourth and final event, “Reimagining the Future of X,” was held in June 2023. Guests discussed best practices for the application of science fiction through the publication of anthologies, the hosting of workshops, and writing contests focused on a specific topic. CSI’s own anthologies, Cities of Light: A Collection of Solar Futures (2021), and A Year Without Winter (2019) are relevant for utopian studies scholars, in that their explicit goal is to anticipate “better futures,” or at least to prevent worse ones. A public panel was moderated by Joey Eschrich (Arizona State University), with panelists including: SF writer and io9 founder Annalee Newitz (The Terraformers [2023]); SF writer Tobias Buckell (Reclaim, Restore, Return: Futurist Tales from the Caribbean [2022]); security expert and military SF author August Cole (Ghost Fleet [2015]); and Tory Stephens, creative manager of climate fiction at Grist Magazine. Many of these SF anthologies were created for specific clients—companies such as Microsoft, or nonprofits such as the National Democratic Institute (NDI)—to envision various types of futures. These and other participants discussed both the promise and pitfalls of putting together such anthologies as corporate planning documents, thus rarely released to the public, in contrast with more public contests. Concerns ranged from the types of prompts that might be used, the criteria for inclusion in the anthology, and the rights of the authors to the stories (vs. the rights of the client).The Applied Sci-Fi series brought together many experts and pioneers in various subfields of futures work. The forthcoming papers (to be included in an open-access book) may not be the project’s final act; CSI hopes for more events, taking advantage of the community of practitioners, academics, writers, futurists, and other experts created over the two-year project.