Neal Stephenson On Fiction, Games, and Saving the World

An anonymous reader points out an interview with Neal Stephenson at The Verge in which he talks a bit about his upcoming "research-heavy" novel, his Mongoliad project to reinvent the fiction novel as an app, what he thinks about saving the world with sci-fi. He says, "It would be saying a lot to say that SF can save the world, but I do think that we've fallen into a habitual state of being depressed and pessimistic about the future. We are extremely conservative and fearful about how we deploy our resources. It contrasts pretty vividly with the way we worked in the first half of the 20th century. We are looking at a lot of challenges now that I do not think can be solved as long as we stay in that mindset. This is more of an 'if you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail' kind of thing. My hammer is that I can write science fiction, so that's the thing I'm going to try to do. If I had billions of dollars sitting around, I could try to put my money where my mouth is and invest it. If I did something else for a living, I would be using my skills – whatever they were – to solve this problem, but since I'm a science fiction writer, I'm going to try to address it through the medium of science fiction."

Comments

Re:Messiah Complex

[meerling]

Science Fiction has changed the world. Many people, scientists, philosophers, statesmen, engineers, and inventors have been inspired by sci-fi. Many things we have now were first the fanciful writings of authors, until somebody (usually a lot of somebodies) decided to make it real.

Does all sci-fi inspire these advancements? No, but more than enough do, it has a definite effect on our world.
Do the warnings that exist in some sci-fi work? Sometimes, but it's a lot harder to identify when something was changed because of the literature someone read, rather than inventions which are concrete and tangible. Although I'm sure you can recall at least a few cases where some form of governmental snooping was fought with the rallying cries of Big Brother and 1984.

So yes, sci-fi can transform the world, but like everything else, it's a slow process and often invisible. Not to mention, like so many other things that might alter the human society, fraught with more misses than successes. Of course, just because sci-fi has the possibility to sway mankind, or a portion of it, most of it was written for entertainment, not political ambitions. It's not "burdened with unnecessary baggage", rather it is recognized for the influence it occasionally has.

Re:Messiah Complex

[somersault]

Has the world changed because of _any_ novel?

Has the world changed because of any works of fiction? Let's think.. the Bible, the Quran, Xenu's Big Book Of Fun (or whatever Scientologists' scriptures are called), etc..