If science fiction is the use of fiction to explore the impact that technology and scientific progress have on the world and on the lives of the people who inhabit the world, then writing good science fiction requires us to understand the relationships between power, production, knowledge, happiness, freedom, design, and who controls and defines development.
Even though science fiction maps out a future, it ultimately asks us to reflect on our present. That may be because within the same society, the relationships described above do not actually change very much from one century to the next, even as the forms of technology change immensely.
This seems to present a paradox. On its face, most science fiction appears to exist on a spectrum between angst and optimism about the future. What if, at its heart, we encountered the fear that nothing actually ever changes?
A reflection of this fear is that the most exciting science fiction is always about revolution, whether the protagonists are descending into dystopia, preventing such a descent, or more rarely, expanding all our wildest possibilities of freedom.
This craft talk will help aspiring and published Sci-Fi writers, as well as avid readers, explore the relationship between technology and power in society, to better understand what makes science fiction exciting, engaging, troubling, and inspiring.
Instructor: Peter Gelderloos is an American anarchist activist and writer. He is known among anarchists for his 2005 book, How Nonviolence Protects the State.
