Sci-fi storytelling gives us the tools to imagine better futures, says researcher
'We need many more people to feel invited and empowered and inspired to imagine their own futures'
From 2001: A Space Odyssey to Black Mirror, science fiction has long predicted technological innovations. But the power of the genre doesn't necessarily lie in being literally prescient, say researchers.
There are many examples of sci-fi stories in literature and film that got the future right, including the communicator from Star Trek, which served as inspiration for Motorola's flip phone. The moon landing was also famously depicted in Jules Verne's 1865 novel and made possible by a 1929 film called Woman in the Moon.
"Science fiction prototyping, and design fiction and speculative design, all of these are different approaches to a very similar idea, which is, can we use the power of storytelling about the future as a toolkit to create experiences of the future?" said Ed Finn, founding director of the Center for Science and the Imagination (CSI) at Arizona State University.
He also co-leads the Applied Sci-Fi Project at CSI, which invites science fiction writers, futurists and technologists to investigate how science fiction stories can shape the development of real-world technologies — what he calls the "science fiction feedback loop."
Mary Shelley's Frankenstein used the term 'scientist' 20 years before there was the word to describe someone in that profession. While the book is over 200 years old, it encapsulates the ethical and moral questions we still grapple with today in the face of technological innovation, says Finn, who co-edited an annotated version of the book in 2017.
Evolution of science fiction
Over its more than 150-year history, the genre has in some ways paralleled the general cultural perception of technological innovations and what they can do for us or to us, says Gerry Canavan, an associate professor and the chair of the English department at Marquette University in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.
While the 'golden age' of science fiction, the 1930s to '50s, was fixated on space travel and colonizing other planets, its successor — dubbed the 'new wave' — was more concerned with ecological and societal threats, particularly with the emergence of writers like Samuel Delaney and Octavia E. Butler.
"All of these things wind up really being part of science fiction, and maybe the future is a story of how humanity destroyed the planet rather than a story about how we conquered the universe," he said.
The new wave helped structure the modern science fiction we know today, and gave rise to subgenres like 'cli-fi', says Canavan, who co-edited The Cambridge Companion to American Science Fiction and an anthology book called Uneven Futures: Strategies for Community Survival from Speculative Fiction. The latter gathered over 40 writers to reflect on the importance and diversity of sci-fi stories spanning 200 years — from books to TV shows.
"All the great science fiction writers say that they're not trying to predict the future, they're trying to predict the present," he said.
Diverse visions of the world
Postcolonial iterations of science fiction storytelling have also served as a tool for people who've historically been left out of the genre, to tell stories of the future that reflect their own realities.
"Afrofuturism is a way of looking at futures or alternate realities, but through Black cultural lenses around the world," said Ytasha Womack, a Chicago-based filmmaker, futurist and author of Afrofuturism: The World of Black Sci-Fi and Fantasy Culture.
While writer Mike Dery coined the term in 1993, and it's often referenced as an offshoot of science fiction, Womack says the concept and practice behind Afrofuturism predate both the term and sci-fi as a genre.
"The relationship that people of the African diaspora and continent have had to space and time is quite old," she said.
Beyond literature, Afrofuturism is a cultural aesthetic and way of thinking about liberation, history, mysticism and technology that's explored through various art forms.
Womack says the term serves as an umbrella for the many perspectives of Black communities across the globe. In Brazil, there's 'Afrofuturismo' and South Africa has 'ubuntu futurism'. Nigerian-American author Nnedi Okorafor also popularized the term 'Africanfuturism' to categorize science fiction stories that are directly rooted in African culture and history.
"And that's not to say that they aren't using tropes that we're familiar with in sci-fi, maybe there are cyborgs, maybe there [are] aliens, but how they might talk about it, or think about it might differ from some of the things that were in the canon."
Womack is also the author of Black Panther: A Cultural Exploration, coming out in October 2023. It's a deep dive into the development of the celebrated Marvel character and series — a product of the '60s, amid the civil rights movement.
She says the comic is a notable example of how afrofuturist narratives have envisioned our technological future, but notes that the story of a hidden, technologically advanced African society has been around for ages.
Of One Blood: Or, The Hidden Self by Pauline Hopkins, written in the early 20th century, tells the story of an African American man who travels to Ethiopia and finds a hidden, ancient city that's technologically advanced.
She says these stories explore a principle called Sankofa, originating from the Akan tribe in Ghana, about bringing the best of the past into the future.
"This notion of it's always OK to go back or to retrieve, really points to this idea of bridging ancient ideas and future ones in a way that pulls from some African diasporic or continental spaces in thinking about moving forward," said Womack.
She says the principles of Afrofuturist storytelling have inspired a lot of her own writing. She's written a series of science fiction novels called the Rayla Universe, which evolved while she was writing her first book on Afrofuturism.
Her three-part novella A Spaceship in Bronzeville, which takes place in 1950s Chicago, was an opportunity to write about people who had arrived in Chicago through the Great Migration, thinking about futures. "I'm a descendant of that experience. And so to think about how they were thinking about futures and how that relates today, [Afrofuturism] clearly was a platform for a kind of storytelling that I might not have done otherwise, although I might have thought of those ideas," said Womack.
The power of storytelling
While diverse speculative stories exist, popular depictions of AI and related technologies are still often western-centric and dystopian, says Finn.
"I think one of the big mistakes we have been making over and over again … is this assumption that a bunch of white guys in Silicon Valley are going to be accurately and effectively able to create tools or imagine for themselves a broadly representational user base across the world."
In recent years, the Global AI Narratives Project at the University of Cambridge has gathered local stories about the future of AI across different regions outside the West.
"And it turns out, there are big differences in how different cultures imagine AI and how they relate to AI technologies now," said Finn.
He says these stories shape our view and understanding of emerging technologies.
"The science fiction stories we tell become the stories that we think about when something new like Tesla's auto drive or ChatGPT emerges to kind of explain to ourselves what we think about that," said Canavan.
Finn says cautionary tales about possible repercussions of technological innovations are important. "It's good to have a yardstick to measure and say this is a future we don't want, are we inching closer to this bad outcome?" But, he adds, there's also a need for more grounded, hopeful stories about the near future.
"I think if we're going to survive all the challenges of the 21st century, we need many more people to feel invited and empowered and inspired to imagine their own futures," said Finn.