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Big Companies and the Military Are Paying Novelists to Write Sci-Fi for Them
- exhilaration 9y agoHey, the article mentions HN-favorite Ken Liu, author of the Three-Body Problem.
- pinewurst 9y agoKen is the translator (but a writer of other things), Liu Cixin is the author.
- exhilaration 9y agoYou're right, thanks!
- markatto 9y agoKen is a great writer in his own right though; The Paper Menagerie might be my favorite book.
- Gotperl 9y agoThis is part of the plot by Armada by Ernest Client (which was also heavily influenced by Ender's Game)
- rglovejoy 9y agoAlso Footfall by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle. It even has a Robert Heinlein cameo.
- marktangotango 9y agoThat's such a great book, seems like also influenced the movie Independence Day, I don't have a source for that though.
- bbctol 9y agoReminds of this story from a while ago: the head writer for Call of Duty switched to working at a think tank, given his experience imagining the future of warfare. http://foreignpolicy.com/2014/09/22/call-of-duty-star-video-game-director-takes-unusual-think-tank-job/ http://foreignpolicy.com/2014/09/22/call-of-duty-star-video-...
- hammock 9y agoIt's the opposite of when Valve hired a Chief Economist in 2012[1]. We've come full circle. [1]http://www.slate.com/blogs/moneybox/2012/06/18/yanis_varoufakis_becomes_chief_economist_for_valve_software.html http://www.slate.com/blogs/moneybox/2012/06/18/yanis_varoufa...
- Bartweiss 9y agoCCP (the EVE Online people) have a whole team of economists also. My favorite story, though, is still epidemiologists studying the Corrupted Blood plague in WoW for real world lessons on bioterrorism.
- alasdair_ 9y agoHopefully they don't come to the conclusion that "rebooting" is the best way to solve the problem.
- thevardanian 9y agoIt's ok just because C-173 got Cronenberged there are still plenty of dimensions left. Sometimes rebooting is the only option.
- logfromblammo 9y agoLook, Rick, you can't just eliminate options just because they seem like too much work for you, specifically. What you meant to say is that sometimes rebooting is the easiest and least boring option.
- zitterbewegung 9y agoReminds me of a quote from Alan Kay: "A change in perspective is worth 80 IQ points."
- dogruck 9y agoI wonder what the annual revenues are. I'm skeptical.
- rurban 9y ago"Sweet Tooth" Ian McEwan: CIA, MI5 and MI6 are sponsoring many writers, such as some companies sponsor open source devs
- travmatt 9y agothe intelligence community has had a very long history of writing fiction novels as ways to communicate some of their realities. see john le carre
- cpete 9y agoI posted something similar on HN nearly a year ago: https://www.fastcompany.com/3063187/scifutures-probes-your-companys-dystopian-nightmares-and-dreams-up-solutions https://www.fastcompany.com/3063187/scifutures-probes-your-c... It's a nice complement to this New Yorker article :-)
- DocSavage 9y agoIt's a more detailed article. I've only done a couple of stories for SciFutures. The topics are interesting. Unfortunately we usually don't get to see what other writers wrote.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- fencepost 9y agoVisualizing and communicating how things will be used is very powerful and important. My memory may be faulty, but I think it's Alan Cooper's "About Face" that basically advised not just describing the interface and how it'll be used, but how Bob the 73 year old luddite who hates all computers is going to interact with it (context in flight movie systems). Creating characters and having them interact with technology that doesn't exist yet is what SF writers DO.
- EliRivers 9y agoI have a copy of About Face on my desk that I keep meaning to read, but I have read Alan Cooper's "The Inmates Are Running The Asylum" which definitely discusses an in-flight entertainment system to be used by, amongst others, an elderly gentleman who really has got better things to do than burrow through menus and directories to find a movie to watch. Could you be thinking of that? Maybe they both used that example (although I think for Cooper, it was personal history rather than example).
- Animats 9y agoI had an online discussion with him about that inflight entertainment system. I suggested just putting a channel selector knob on the thing. Flip through the movie posters, and if you stay on-channel for a few seconds, the movie starts. Then it turns out it has pay-per-view channels and has to have a whole payment interface, something he doesn't mention in the book.
- samstave 9y agoWasn't there something about Clancy being working with the CIA to massage their image? Military and intelligence and politics have always manipulated media... Also, recall "Americans army" was being ostensibly used as a recruiting/psyche-molding tool... --- Finally: look at cyberpunk, and the top five writers in that category, as well as anime (ghost in the shell, etc) which have in-formed modern reality with all the millions of tech-workers from around the globe have worked since their childhoods to create aspects of those worlds into current reality... Is the totalitarian police-surveillance state an emergent feature of such a reality? All crazy military capability comes from able-minded imaginations saying "wouldn't it be cool if..." without the discernment of the far-reaching implications...
- djrogers 9y agoThere’s a big difference between paying for speculative fiction about your own industry as a form of long-term brainstorming (what the article is about) and paying authors to publicly produce works that further your political agendas. As I understand it, the works discussed in the article aren’t published in the traditional manner, and are for the use of those who commissioned them.
- samstave 9y agoThere may be a difference - but they are in the same mental theatre, regardless... plus don't you think they'd be at least a bit specific about the direction they are interested in the speculation heading???
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- ufmace 9y ago> Also, recall "Americans army" was being ostensibly used as a recruiting/psyche-molding tool... IIRC, "America's Army" was initially created as an internal training tool for the Army. Then the Army decided to have the creator adjust it a bit and publish it as a video game, sort of as a recruiting tool. As far as adjustments, apparently the video game audience doesn't really like waiting 2 minutes for a smoke grenade to actually produce a huge cloud of smoke.
- wodenokoto 9y agoKinda funny to think that maybe, just maybe, the social network was sponsored by Google or Twitter as an attempt to make the competing platform less desirable.
- vonnik 9y agoThe US Army Lab has solicited sci-fi stories and awarded grants to build the tech they describe.
- LanceH 9y agoThe Marines have hired historians to write manuals on how their great works.
- fundabulousrIII 9y agoCongrats. The .mil & .biz folks have been acknowledged in what has been implicit in every advancement I've seen in the last 40 years. sci-fi pop fiction postulation and conjecture based on the science community brain trust. Most of these guys were consultants or engineers anyway and empowered to write. There are iconoclasts like Ellison and the visionaries but the hard science guys always get paid for their visions.
- Retric 9y agoIMO, Science fiction is less about new ideas as it is spreading those ideas to a wider audience. The average NASA scientist may come up with an interesting idea, but unless it's directly relevant within a decade few people are going to hear about it.
- fundabulousrIII 9y agoEdited original to provide idea ancestry.
- rahulpandita 9y agoWe proposed something similar for the field of software engineering research. http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2983986 http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2983986 Pasting abstract here "Software engineering researchers have a tendency to be optimistic about the future. Though useful, optimism bias bolsters unrealistic expectations towards desirable outcomes. We argue that explicitly framing software engineering research through pessimistic futures, or dystopias, will mitigate optimism bias and engender more diverse and thought-provoking research directions. We demonstrate through three pop culture dystopias, Battlestar Galactica, Fallout 3, and Children of Men, how reflecting on dystopian scenarios provides research opportunities as well as implications, such as making research accessible to non-experts, that are relevant to our present."
- TeMPOraL 9y agoInteresting. I didn't realize this could be a paper material. Also, whatever includes BSG in it, I'm an instant fan :). Thanks for mentioning it; it was a good read. In your paper, you cite an interesting piece about the optimism bias of people[0]. Skimming through it, it seems to somewhat support my current belief that we need more, not less utopias and optimistic visions. To quote from the ending of the text: "Overly pessimistic predictions may be demoralizing if these predictions are believed and, if these predictions are fulfilled, the outcomes that are obtained may not be very satisfying. Overly optimistic predictions, however, may confer benefits simply by symbolizing a desired image of success, or more concretely by aiding people’s progress to higher achievements. Given that predictions are often inaccurate at least to some degree, it is possible that people may derive benefits from shifting the range of their predictions to the positive, even if this means introducing an overall higher rate of error into the prediction process. Countering optimistic biases in the name of accuracy may undermine performance without achieving the accuracy that was intended, whereas the maintenance of optimistic predictions may serve to align us, both in thought and in action, more closely with our goals." Evaluating dystopias can be useful to avoid disastrous failure modes, but I feel we shouldn't dwell too much on them, and instead focus on trying to achieve the optimistic goals the best we can. -- [0] - https://sci-hub.cc/10.1017/CBO9780511808098.021 https://sci-hub.cc/10.1017/CBO9780511808098.021
- ironic_ali 9y ago
- runevault 9y agoBased on the article about Neil Stephenson that was posted here not long ago I'd been thinking along these lines, didn't realize someone already made a business out of it. Interesting.
- lukateake 9y agoA quick HN search (via Google) didn't turn up the article for me; please link. Thanks in advance!
- runevault 9y agohttps://www.vanityfair.com/news/2017/06/neal-stephenson-metaverse-snow-crash-silicon-valley-virtual-reality https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2017/06/neal-stephenson-meta... Basically it talking about how much his book has shaped what companies even today are chasing got me thinking about the idea of how culture shapes tech shapes culture. I should have considered it sooner since this dates back so much farther.
- arnioxux 9y agoNeal Stephenson is working at Magic Leap (an augmented reality company) now. I think it actually makes a lot of sense. If a product manager's main job is to define product vision, this guy has a 25 year head start thinking about it!
- runevault 9y agoYup, mentioned in the article I referenced and linked below. Sounds like he got a lot of offers but ML finally made him one that made sense.
- dctoedt 9y agoMy wife watches police "procedural" stories (Law & Order, CSI, NCIS, etc.). I've long thought that some of their plot lines would make for interesting "what if" training cases for real cops.
- thefalcon 9y agoAren't something approaching 100% of those stories pulled from the headlines? (Not disagreeing with you that they would also make good training cases.)
- CodeAndCuffs 9y agoI don't know about 100%, but it is quite a common thing. That said, even if you make a crime/situation/scenario up entirely, there is a good chance it has happened somewhere. Case studies of actual investigations - what worked, what didn't, what the big break was, etc - are not uncommon in law enforcement academies and training. When you watch stuff like CSI and Law & Order, their criminal investigation stuff is often about as accurate as their high tech and computer science stuff.
- Wohlf 9y agoLaw and Order certainly pulls a lot from real cases, but it's not that high of a percentage. I'm sure many are inspired by multiple cases mixed together but most murders are pretty boring by fiction standards.
- mmaluff 9y agoThis is the worst story I've read all week. Capitalism is destroying our culture.
- icebraining 9y agoThis is nothing new, and certainly not restricted to capitalism. Most of the great works throughout history (sculptures, paintings, compositions, etc) were commissioned, often with a specific purpose and conditions.
- mac01021 9y agoWhat's bad about this?
- nitrogen 9y agoIt's a submarine promo for the company mentioned. Seems pretty appropriate though for a company paid to create stories to use stories for its own promotion.
- ZenoArrow 9y agoYou can use sci-fi novels as a way to normalise actions. Take drone warfare for example. If we actually thought about what that meant, it's pretty terrifying, but we've been conditioned by our media to find it fairly ordinary.
- aeorgnoieang 9y agoTerrifying is ordinary tho; just look at every other living creature ever.
- thinkfurther 9y agoTerrifying is you seeing your mother being bombed to shreds, not you handwaving it away with some generalized blah. Terrifying is actually you being in a concentration camp, not others being in a concentration camp while you say "oh well, just like anything else". For a story about sci-fi, there's a lot of professed lovers of it who would make someone like Isaac Asimov or Frank Herbert outright puke. You have no imagination, you have no guts, you have no sense of your own responsibility. You're someone great people write about, not for. Take it personal, but divide it up by dozens of people in this thread, all of whom warrant no more words than these.
- AdmiralAsshat 9y agoNot terribly surprising. People forget that Neuromancer was a commission.
- Bartweiss 9y agoEh? I thought it was commissioned by a book publisher, which is pretty different - they're buying it as a product, but these companies seem to be hiring authors as consultants. Or am I missing some interesting history on Neuromancer?
- KineticLensman 9y agoIf you want to read a concrete example rather than the generic relevant novels mentioned in the article the Directorate of Land Strategic Concepts, National Defence Canada, commissioned Karl Schroeder [1] in 2005 to write an SF novel to help explore them future doctrine and concepts. PDF is available at [2]. He wrote a second (post 2010) but I don't have the reference now (a 'friend' never returned it). I recall that it involved a CAF unit operating in a trans-national mega city (somewhere in Asia) having to subvert the all pervasive city AR so that they could complete their mission. I was impressed! [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karl_Schroeder https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karl_Schroeder [2] http://www.kschroeder.com/foresight-consulting/crisis-in-zefra/Crisis-in-Zefra-e.pdf http://www.kschroeder.com/foresight-consulting/crisis-in-zef...
- tabtab 9y ago"How I used Microsoft Cloud 365 to escape Darth Vader and blow up the Death Star! Uplinking R2D2 was totally seamless."
- smilbandit 9y agorebels use Teams
- divbit 9y agoI honestly don't care if there is a "sinister" purpose behind the good scifi I've read. Fund the next Iain banks please. In fact - throw me $50k to live for a year and you've got yourself a book - or I can at least guarantee some words on pages mentioning spaceships / robots, etc.
- detritus 9y agoSpeaking of whom - a friend and I were the other day wondering Just Why On Earth none of his SciFi appears to have been optioned for conversion to other media. I can imagine scope, complexity and presumably huge budget leaving prospective optioners with slightly soiled breeks, but all the same — not even a hope of one of the tales in The State of the Art?
- devrandomguy 9y agoPerhaps our civilization is not yet ready for direct contact with the Culture. Hopefully, someone and her drone are working on the problem.
- ufmace 9y agoI don't remember all of the stories in State of the Art, but I'm finding it hard to see the ones I do working as a movie for people not already immersed in the Culture universe. I could see Consider Phlebas or Player of Games as a miniseries though.
- detritus 9y agoIt's a long (long) time since I read state of the art, but I think you could mangle the tale of the benevolent super culture visiting Earth and eating meat made from the DNA of world leaders :) I think SotA was the third Banks book I read, after The Crow Road and The Wasp Factory, and I don't recall there being any gulf of appreciation from not having being previously immersed in The Culture.
- wj 9y agoProbably lacking the ratio of explosions to character development that modern scifi movies and tv audiences demand.
- jermaustin1 9y agoI do something similar. I pay writers to write me sci-fi and fantasy stories based on my prompts! It allows me to read what I want to read!
- brandonmenc 9y agoInteresting. Could you provide more details? Things like cost, etc
- DKnoll 9y agoThat's interesting. Can you give us some examples of plotlines and/or features you've requested, what you pay and the length of the end result?
- YCode 9y agoWhat's that sort of service cost? What's the length of the stories?
- jermaustin1 9y agoSo I like to use a couple of ghost writers I have found on various freelancing sites (Upwork, elance, etc). Don't let their rates scare you away. Almost all of them work for fixed prices. I let them chose the price, then I add a bonus on top of that. A story can cost anywhere from $50 for a 20 page novelette to $2500 for a full novel. As a terrible writer, some times I provide my own short story, then work with a professional to plan out something bigger. I'm currently working on a 200-250 pager with a guy I found on upwork. This will cost me about $500 for the writing, $500 in bonus, $500 for proofing and editing, then I have a novel with full ownership - he will be on the byline if I ever decide to publish it.
- CodeCube 9y agoI don't have much more to offer over the other comments, other than to bolster the requests for more information. Would love to hear about what venue/service you're using for this, and if you're willing to share, how much money you're funneling into this kind of patronage. I'm very supportive of the idea of communities coming together to produce art in this way :)
- elorant 9y agoAnd destroyed the Greek economy. Which speaks volumes about his competence as an economist.
- r00fus 9y agoThat's a bit rich. He advocated retreating from the Euro when Greece essentially had obligations that it could never repay (obligations created by a corrupt previous government that arguably were unconscionable).
- elorant 9y agoWell actually he never did, and that's the problem. If he had, we'd at least know his plan. But all he did was taking a gamble that went on and on for months dragging the economy to the bottom in the meantime. There was no planning for exiting the Euro, nothing at all. Just random thoughts here and there and a lot of bs talk. For example, the committee that was exploring the consequences of leaving the Euro and how the state would react to that was less than five guys that he brought. There was a lot of amateurism going on and eventually we paid the price for all that. And by the way, those obligations you speak about were not created by corrupted governments. They were created for sustaining an unviable model that gives pensions to people at their mid fifties and maintains a soviet-era type of economy where the state controls pretty much everything.
- true_religion 9y agoHow much power do you guys all think a minister of finance has? In almost every government, its an executive/cabinet level position which means all his power derives from the President or Prime Minister. He doesn't take independent action, as he has no independent power.
- elorant 9y agoI can't give you an educated answer to that, but the general feeling here was that he was calling the shots in the whole negotiations thing considering that Tsipras is an imbecile, and his English were tragic. Varoufakis was chosen because a lot of guys in the government bought the idea that extorting Germany would work out and they would back off.
- legohead 9y agoInteresting they mention and get quotes from the author of the Three Body Problem series. I just finished reading that series, and the whole time I had the feeling that it was written more to convince people of something than to actually entertain the reader. The ideas in the books were pretty amazing, unique, and imaginative; but the story and writing itself was quite sub-par. edit: I listened (audio books) to the English versions. I thought the translation was excellent. I don't want to spoil anything, but the author has a very dark vision of mankind and kept having his characters ostracized to the extreme which got old pretty quick. I didn't feel like the books were missing anything descriptive from lack of translation.
- skrebbel 9y agoNotpick: It's not the author, but the English translator.
- jacobolus 9y agoDid you read it in Chinese? Maybe something got lost in translation...?
- Jemaclus 9y agoI also really enjoyed the books, but definitely more from a "these are cool ideas" perspective than from great narrative storytelling. Something was probably lost in translation, but the ideas were really great. I especially like (and hate) the concept of the Dark Forest.
- QuercusMax 9y agoDid you read it in the original Chinese, or the English translation? I haven't read either, but it's possible that the English version misses a lot of nuance from the original version. (It's also quite possible the original is crap, and the translation is doing a very adequate job.)
- monochromatic 9y agoI actually thought the translator did a pretty good job (not to say that I can read Chinese or do a direct comparison). My only complaint was that I wish they'd westernized the names--they all sound too similar to my American ears.
- podiki 9y agoDid no one else immediately think about the plot to Watchmen (the graphic novel, not movie)?
- vinayak 9y agoMicrosoft had released Future Visions Sci-fi series after inviting several sci-fi authors to their research labs - New Link - https://news.microsoft.com/features/future-visions-anthology-brings-together-science-fiction-and-science-fact/ https://news.microsoft.com/features/future-visions-anthology... The book itself can be downloaded at https://news.microsoft.com/futurevisions/ https://news.microsoft.com/futurevisions/
- whyzoidberg 9y agoFinally some good work for writers! But seriously artists have been kept alive by the state for millennia, no shock here
- viach 9y agoInteresting read, somewhat related: A 19th-Century Vision of the Year 2000 https://publicdomainreview.org/collections/france-in-the-year-2000-1899-1910/ https://publicdomainreview.org/collections/france-in-the-yea...
- lowglow 9y agoI wonder if Neal Stephenson gets paid to do this. He's predicted parts of where we're headed with Diamond Age and Snow crash.
- pvaldes 9y agoLast days the defcon issue, and this week for some particular reason we have a few similar articles here and there talking about how fabulous and great would be for a 'good nerd' to work for the military, government, etc... Can we spot a pattern here? PR damage control?
- KGIII 9y agoI used to take some employees to Defcon. Though, technically, I had no good reason to go, personally. I just thought it was neat. Anyhow, two games we used to play: Spot the Fed. Name That Influence. The first was to see who looked like, and acted like, a federal agent. We'd sometimes do some work to confirm it, but we usually discussed it at the bar. The second was trickier, and often just conjecture - again, over drinks. Who paid for the research, what did they say, what did they not say, and what does it imply? We weren't the only ones to play these games. I'm going to guess they're still playing them.
- cryoshon 9y agoi'd kill for opportunities like this. but maybe we have to make our own opportunities, so: how about a startup that provides science fiction writing thought leadership as a service? dibs on founder
- igorgue 9y agoThe author of this novel works at Magic Leap: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snow_Crash https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snow_Crash
- schlipity 9y agoThis is actually part of the plot of the movie (Three Days of the Condor) and book (Six days of the Condor). The protagonist works at a CIA site where they read basically everything released and break down the plots to see if it has any strategic value and/or state secrets. If I had to guess, this still goes on at the state level, but this article is about making this sort of data (minus the state secrets awareness) available to the corporations able to afford it. I'd also say that I think this might be an amusing reversal of the old mantra: Ideas have no intrinsic value. This business is pretty much about the expression of ideas. Maybe they have value because they are writing them down and marketing them.
- tzs 9y agoCompanies commissioning stories has gone on for a long time. For example, the Isaac Asimov story "My Son, The Physicist" was commissioned by an electronics company to run in an ad in "Scientific American". Another Asimov example. "Think", IBM's in-house magazine, commissioned Asimov to write a story based on this quote from J. B. Priestly: > Between midnight and dawn, when sleep will not come and all the old wounds begin to ache, I often have a nightmare vision of a future world in which there are billions of people, all numbered and registered, with not a gleam of genius anywhere, not an original mind, a rich personality, on the whole packed globe Asimov write the story "2430 A.D." about a world where Priestly's nightmare had come true. (The title comes from his estimate of when human population at its current growth rate would reach the point where the Earth had so many people that there were no resources left for non-human animals). The funny thing about this story is that "Think" rejected it, because they wanted a story that refuted the quotation. So Asimov wrote another story, "The Greatest Asset", that refuted Priestly, and sent that to "Think". "Think" then decided they liked the first story better and ran "2430 A.D."! I'm pretty sure that there was at least one other similar case with Asimov.
- godelmachine 9y agoI had "My Son, The Physicist" in my 9th grade. The mom comes and suggests the son about "continuous conversation" with some astronaut's stuck on Jupiter's moon - Ganymede (if I am not wrong and remember correctly)
- JadeNB 9y ago> if I am not wrong and remember correctly You are not and you do: http://readnovelonline.com/ScienceFiction/Asimov41/27366.html http://readnovelonline.com/ScienceFiction/Asimov41/27366.htm... .
- godelmachine 9y agoThanks for the link, buddy. This was the chapter we had. From beginning to end, very much the same. Even the title of the chapter was, "My son, the Physicist" (I remember, in my 9th grade, I was unsure how to pronounce "Physicist", and had asked my friend about it :D )
- leoc 9y agoThere was a rash of initiatives of this kind after 9/11 as well.
- stcredzero 9y agoBack in the late 80's, I ran across a statistic that just the amount amount the military spent supporting its bands was as large as the entire budget for NPR. I think this is also covered in Manufacturing Consent. I remember flipping channels as a grade schooler and running across US military propaganda on the nearest independent TV station. (Which is now Fox, unfortunately. Sad, because this is the station that introduced me to anime.) That stuff gave me nightmares! An 80's era Soviet land assault is basically some nightmare perfection of the Blitzkreig. The whole horizon turns black and rolls at you like a wave, as rank after rank of smoke generating tanks charges you at high speed.
- remarkEon 9y agoAnyone read Ghost Fleet? It wasn't commissioned, as far as I'm aware, but it so spooked the Pentagon they hired the authors as consultants.
- charlieo88 9y agoFrom the article: >> Companies that market directly to >> A.I. software, rather than to humans, >> might gain a competitive advantage." I don't know why, but this is really disturbing. "Hey Siri, find me a widget" "I've found three locations with widget in your area. Would you like me t... WHOA! Check out the bytes on that ad!"
- lolive 9y agoFunny (alternate) facts : - Amiga is behind the novel "Ready Player One" (so they will make a craaaazy comeback) - Trump paid GRRM for ASOF&I (so the people enjoy the mix of politics and mental illness) - Hollywood is highly connected with cigarette manufacturers, liquor manufacturers and (of course) the US army.