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by AlwaysRock 1611 days ago
Did anyone else read this article and still not really get the point the author is trying to make? Sounds like someone woke up on the wrong side of the bed or finished a sci fi novel last night that ended with a little too much like Bruce Willis Saves The Day.

Stephenson, who he calls out, actually worked at Blue Origin in the early days trying to come up with and design alternative fuel/rocket ideas. Did they work? No. But he's utterly practical with his idea of what Sci Fi ideas actually get manifested into our world. It's the ones that will make someone enough money for it to be worth it.
2 comments
SideburnsOfDoom 1611 days ago
What many people here are sadly not getting is that this article is a critique, but not primarily of Sci-Fi in general, but of "Project Hieroglyph" (1) A specific attempt to make Sci-Fi more usefully optimistic, and the flaws in it. Project Hieroglyph launched in 2011 (2) and is now dead or dormant.

Sci-fi has of course always veered wildly between impossible wide-eyed utopian space technomancy (e.g. Star Trek) and grimdark dystopia (e.g. I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream). Project Hieroglyph was a optimistic rejection of both of those.

The article concludes "the subsequent years have shown, optimism has very real limits", because unfortunately, as you probably already know, people.

If commenters here are not familiar with Project Hieroglyph and just want to ramble about sci-fi in general, go ahead but don't mistake that for a relevant criticism of the original article.

1) https://hieroglyph.asu.edu/

2) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Hieroglyph

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hideo 1611 days ago
Yeah I re-read it 3-something times and I have no idea what's going on here. Here's what I took away

- Most Sci Fi is too dystopian

- Project Heiroglyph forced authors to be techno optimist and it didn't go anywhere

- Authors must deal with human malfeasance (isn't that just the dystopian fiction that he is against)

- ???

- Profit?

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toolcombinator 1611 days ago
Don’t forget: “Entrepreneurs are evil!”

Because you know, entrepreneurs aren’t an integral part of who helps shape the future. They’re evil capitalists. And in the future they’ll be evil space capitalists.

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