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Ask Slashdot: What Essays and Short Stories Should Be In a Course On Futurism?
Ellen Spertus writes "I'll be teaching an interdisciplinary college course on how technology is changing the world and how students can influence that change. In addition to teaching the students how to create apps, I'd like for us to read and discuss short stories and essays about how the future (next 40 years) might play out. For example, we'll read excerpts from David Brin's Transparent Society and Ray Kurzweil's The Singularity is Near. I'm also considering excerpts of Cory Doctorow's Homeland and Neal Stephenson's Diamond Age. What other suggestions do Slashdotters have?"
Make Room! Make Room! Harry Harrison. A dystopian near-future where overpopulation leads to a struggle for resources. Overcrowding, energy blackouts, food riots and soylent green. Especially look for any passages where the old man, in the main protagonists shared flat, talks about how the world used to be.
Read biographies of people who actually changed the world, and discuss how they did it.
Stop confusing science fiction or science fiction-styled essays with futurism.
Slashdot: providing anti-social weirdos a soapbox, since 1997.
Stanislaw Lem's The Futurological Congress
yor students shud wrte thR essay bout d evoluation of language, UzN a modern txtN lngwij, lol!
Oh, U ask bout reading, not writiN. ZOMG!
Bladerunner - Philip K Dick
The Foundation series is a great set of material where he deals with the difference between an individual's actions swaying the course of history, and the behaviours and trends of large groups over time (psychohistory).
It links in neatly with the 3 laws, and if it's far too long then try some of his short stories.
"Superiority" by Arthur C. Clarke
"The Power of Progression" by Isaac Asimov
"Time For The Stars" by Robert A. Heinlein, with particular attention to the "Long Range Foundation"
I commented about that anonymousely a minute ago and I think Shalsdot ate my comment, so I'll go ahead and repeat myself:
The thing you are describing isn't Futurism. Futurims isn't about "how technology is changing the world" and specifically not about " how [it] might play out". It's about the glorification of early 20th century technology and the way it affected the people at that time.
What you are talking about is Futurology, NOT Futursim. Try not to confuse these, especially if you are teaching people who already know about that stuff. Trying to make the disambiguation early on can be intresting too, since most people tend to abusively use the word Futrism.
Here, take this : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Futurism
and this : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Futurology
Well if you're going to teach about Futurism you should definitely include some critical consideration of the effect of industrialisation on European and North American countries, consider how art was affected by the experiences of artists in the First World War, and how it influenced the later art movements such as Art Deco, Surrealism, and Dada.
That's good reading for everyone, but for a more recent look ahead on how technology changes the world, I would recommend "The Circle" by Dave Eggers. Instead of a tyrannical government, the book predicts a runaway Google-like company. It's the kind of "tyranny of the public" we can expect if we continue to cheerfully sign away our privacy and the privacy of others to otherwise well-meaning companies.
If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...
It's actually a lot closer to Aldous Huxley's Brave New World.
Sky subscribers are morons. They pay to be advertised at !
Another suggestion: read "Manna" by Marshall Brain, a (free) short story that brings up Marx' old question about the ownership of the means to production, in a society that is pretty much completely robotized. Even if you disagree with his view on how such a future will play out, it'll make for some interesting discussion.
If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...
1984, Brave New World and Little Brother could be too close to comfort for the authorities, probably Foundation too. And I'd say that a lot of Philip K. Dick tales where the official vision of reality is put in doubt won't make it neither.
Asimov's The Feeling of Power, Charles Stross Accelerando, Vernon Vinge's Rainbow's End and parts of Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars trilogy could give different hints on how the future could develop without too much controversy.
Can't recommend Stephenson's Diamond Age because for me is somewhat the past. It was written before wikipedia and internet, before than even poor children in 3rd world countries had an access to all of it. And those children prefer to access youtube videos and play candy crush over accessing wikipedia.
Another great dystopian future novel, with some science fiction.
Shouldn't you also be looking at much earlier authors and comparing what they wrote to the state of events 50 odd years later? Would think there is a vast selection from 'golden age' sci-fi including Asimov,Heinlein, Pohl, etc. You can also find many old PopMechanics and similar magazines from the 40s, 50s, 60s with 'future' editions. How does what they wrote compare to what is being predicted by writers today?
First, thank you, everyone, for the feedback. There are some wonderful stories that I recognize and others that I look forward to reading.
Second, because the solicited essays and fiction will only be a small part of the course, I will have to rely on short stories (including novellas) instead of entire novels. That is part of what makes it hard to research. It's much easier to find out about novels, which have more readers and are better publicized than short stories, especially recent ones that have not yet been widely reprinted.
Third, to those of you who think I am being too lazy to do my research myself, gathering information is part of the research process, and I'd be remiss in not making use of the hive mind if it has useful information that I might not. I would much rather be called a negligent teacher than to be one. Academics study one another's reading lists and syllabi all the time. Believe me, plenty of work remains in deciding what material to include, how present it, etc.
Fourth, thank you for letting me know the history of the word "futurism". The sense I used it ("concern with events and trends of the future or which anticipate the future") is the first one in some dictionaries and is widely used at kurzweilai.net, The Foresight Institute, and other sites I have used, but I will certainly let my students know that some people prefer the word "futurology". For those who are interested, here's a Google n-gram view of "futurism", "futurist", and "futurology".
Fifth, some commenters suggested using primary sources and biography. Agreed. I was already planning to include Turing's Computing Machinery and Intelligence, Vannevar Bush's As We May Think, and the stories of Khan Academy, Iqbal Quadir, Sugata Mitra, and others.
Sixth, it was also suggested that I look at past predictions of the future. Also agreed. I assembled such a reading list for a previous course. It hadn't occurred to me to include in my question what I didn't need, because I'd already assembled it, but I see now that it would be helpful.
Thank you again for the suggestions and even for the criticisms. Soliciting opinions from Slashdot is always a story in itself.