Get Different: K.L. Tremaine Interviewed

Katie Tremaine is a friend of mine, but she also takes a very different view as a writer, feminist, and transgendered person.  That’s the kind of different view of things, and I’m glad to say she got interviewed at Two Geeks Talking.  Give it a listen as she mixes her unique perspective and classic space opera.

– Steven Savage

Steven Savage is a Geek 2.0 writer, speaker, blogger, and job coach.  He blogs on careers at http://www.musehack.com/, publishes books on career and culture at http://www.informotron.com/, and does a site of creative tools at http://www.seventhsanctum.com/. He can be reached at https://www.stevensavage.com/.

SF, Vision, And Beyond

Space Station

Some time ago I mentioned the role of SF in having a vision, how our culture’s attitude made “visionary” SF harder, and the virtue of incrementalization. Serdar further examined how we might examine progress inappropriate.

But something kept kicking around in my head. There is some good SF out there, challenging SF, outrageous SF out there.  But I didn’t see anything that was really inspiring to me, that felt like it’d build the future.  Certainly little of it inspires me (especially as you’ve heard talking to me about my editing experience).

Then I realized that if we’re looking to SF to provide visions and growth and direction, to inspire us to more, it doesn’t matter if the SF is good (in some ways), challenging, or outrageous.

The thing is we need SF that really inspires us to do more. That means it has to have two traits.

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Science Fiction As Vision

Astronaut

Over at the Atlantic (and later in Mashable), Robinson Meyer made the interesting – indeed challenging statement – that the idea of making things in Science Fiction a reality was limiting. He was specifically discussing the Google X lab, which was profiled by John Gertner of Fast Company – and there they want every project to have a a component that resembled Science Fiction.

Which frankly, sounds pretty cool, but Robinson had issues with this idea:

  • SF means we tend think in whole, complete systems as opposed to the assembled work of many actors and influences.
  • We miss that some change – such as social – is incremental, and SF’s inheritance includes some limited and reactionary elements.
  • There is virtue in incrementalization.

So this got me thinking about the role of SF in envisioning and building the future. I think he has a point in that thinking about things “Science Fictionally” can be limiting. But I don’t think the problem is Science Fictional thinking per se – it’s the state of SF today and in our culture.

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