Antony Funnell: Science fiction stands on the bridge between fantasy and reality.

Hello, Antony Funnell here, and welcome to Future Tense.

Unlike pure fantasy, science fiction explores what might be possible. And, that's what makes it so intriguing.

On today's show, producer Wendy Zukerman explores the many ways in which the science fiction can help us understand our environment, and possibly create a better one for ourselves.

Wendy Zukerman: Science fiction is as much about the present as it is about the future. It showcases our greatest fears and hopes for society. That's because when you're about to write a book or movie about the so-called future, you have to start by looking at your world; at the priorities of politicians, at the state of technology, and at the mindset of people around you.

On today's show we're talking to three people who have been inspired by the science fiction genre: a journalist who believes sci-fi novels can help us wade through gender politics; a political scientist who pairs science fiction with political theorists like Karl Marx, and even wonders whether Marx would have been a science fiction author had he been writing just a few decades later; and finally, we'll speak to a virtual reality academic who questioned his own work after watching The Matrix.

So stick around. Even if you're not a trekky, even if you've never watched Star Wars. Because as you'll soon find out, science fiction isn't really about aliens, or warp drive or talking robots, it's about us.

First up, I'm speaking with Claire Evans, the futures editor of Vice's technology offshoot Motherboard. She's about to launch a new science fiction magazine with Vice.

Claire recently wrote an article about the power of feminist science fiction. And if you're not familiar with the sub-genre, here's a snippet from Joanna Russ's satirical novel The Female Man. It documents the travels of four women from a world without men.

Reading: If you walk into a gathering of men, professionally or otherwise, you might as well be wearing a sandwich board that says: LOOK! I HAVE TITS! There is this giggling and this chuckling and this reddening and this Uriah Heep, this twisting and writhing and fiddling with ties and fixing of buttons and making of allusions and quoting of courtesies and this self-conscious gallantry, plus a smirky insistence on my physique—all this dreary junk just to please me. If you get good at being One Of The Boys it goes away. Of course there's a certain disembodiment involved, but the sandwich board goes.

Wendy Zukerman: You wrote that few mediums are as effective at articulating the aspirations of feminism as science fiction. To you, what makes sci-fi in particular so powerful?

Claire Evans: I think that science fiction is an extremely powerful tool for predicting…not for predicting the future, because that's impossible of course, but for clarifying our present, for letting us understand the state of being that we are in the present. And what really good science fiction does is it takes the world as we know it and it tweaks some fundamental little constant, so the way that society is ordered or the state of the planet or some condition of technology. And that tweak, that change, isn't meant to be a prediction, it's just a method for discombobulated the reader just enough that it forces you to redefine what's normal, or to at least to come to an awareness of what's normal. And in doing that it allows a state of normal to sort of appear as it is, which is just as arbitrary a construction as any kind of fiction. So feminism…I mean, really any kind of political point of view, critical point of view can be really articulated in a very fun, interesting and engaging manner using that sort of system.

Wendy Zukerman: And to you what does modern-day feminist science fiction tell us about gender relations today? What kind of tweaks are they making to make us question our surroundings?

Claire Evans: Well, I think throughout the history of science fiction and feminism there has been these kind of obvious tweaks, like, okay, let's imagine a world without men, or let's imagine a world in which the gender bias is different or we are in a state of greater equality. But I think that for better or for worse I'm not entirely sure that literature is where those conversations are happening today. I think in the high period of feminist science fiction, which was the mid-1970s, it was also the high period of third wave feminism, and the discourse was happening very heavily in fiction.

Now I don't know. I think now the real trenches are maybe online in film and television. I think the internet especially is a very scary place for women who are interested in science and technology, the same kind of women who would have been writing science fiction 30 years ago, a lot of prominent female critics and writers are constantly being lambasted or shamed or harassed to the point of physical engagement for speaking out about these kinds of things. And I think those women are the Joanna Russes or the Ursula Le Guins of today because they are speaking the same kind of truth to power. And the thousands and thousands of men who believe that videogames or tech or science are their exclusive playground, it's very similar to the kinds of men that were reacting strongly against feminist science fiction writers in the '70s because science fiction was also historically a bit of a male playground.

Wendy Zukerman: Do you think because science fiction is such a nonthreatening way to question your surroundings…instead of saying, 'Men, you've got into better than we do,' instead you put it in this magical land in the future or in the past, and you are not really directly complaining or explaining, you are just exploring. Do you think we'd be better off encouraging women or even men to be writing feminist science fiction to open up this discussion?

Claire Evans: Fiction is definitely…I think you are very much right, it's a safer space for having these kinds of conversations; it's lot more difficult for people to be angry at you when you are really just exploring something in fiction. But you can say a great deal with fiction, often more so than you can in just a standard face-to-face argument or online argument. Perhaps that would be a much more creative and nurturing space for those kinds of conversations. And I don't think that it means that we all have to be writing feminist science fiction but it would help us if we all read it a bit more and tried to get people using fiction as a lens for talking about the world and as sort of an experimental lens for talking about the world.

Wendy Zukerman: There's almost a strange earnestness that you see online. Do you think that people have lost that ability to make metaphors and to see science fiction as this wonderful lens to question the world? Or would they just take it too literally?

Claire Evans: That is such a great question. Yes, I think that you are right, I think that there is a lack of that kind of critical approach to fiction. I think we treat fiction, especially science fiction now that it has become such a big thing, as an escapist genre rather than something that we can use to sublimate our fears and anxieties and questions about the future, and it is really mostly just running away from it.

Wendy Zukerman: There is a tradition, and you mentioned it a little bit, of feminist science fiction creating either female-only places or places where females are the domineering feature. There is some feminist science fiction where there is perfect equality, but less so. Why do you think we see these narratives? Why aren't we all dreaming of perfect equality?

Claire Evans: As you say, there are definitely a lot of books that address total equality in interesting ways, but there is something really powerful about female-only spaces in fiction. I think personally it's because it makes you realise how few female-only spaces there are in the real world, and I'm not talking about matrilineal societies or tribes of Amazon warrior women, I'm just talking about…I cannot necessarily think of the last time that I was in a public space that had no men or in a social setting that had no men or in a workplace that had no men. It's almost a science fictional thing in daily life.

And the times that I have been in those kinds of spaces, either by intent or circumstance, I found that the tone, the dynamic, the conversations, the structure of the group, all these things change significantly because women behave differently when they are around one other than when they are around men. I think that's really interesting, and something that we don't always have access to, that we don't always have a chance to explore. So in that sense the female-only worlds that you see in science fiction are on one level just journeys into those dynamics and sort of exploring what those dynamics look like.

For a lot of the science fiction and utopian writers from the history of feminism, the investigation of why society is structured largely as a patriarchy is the question. So I think female-only worlds are a helpful way of getting around that question, of kind of kicking the tyres of that question, of saying, you know, well, maybe a patriarchy isn't the natural order, the default way of being, that there's all these other ways that society might work, and it could work very well, it could work perhaps even better than the way we have it structured today, so why not explore those ideas at least.

Wendy Zukerman: In many ways that is similar to a critic and author Marleen S Barr, and she likened feminist science fiction to a microscope in relation to patriarchal myths and said it was a repair manual that can be used by women who wants to fix patriarchy. Do you agree with that analogy?

Claire Evans: I think the term 'repair manual' is useful but I think it's important to make the distinction between a repair manual that exists already, which implies that a certain one or other canonical feminist science fiction book might be a model, a dogmatic model which we could follow to build a new world, which is a dangerous way of thinking.

I think science fiction texts and feminist science fiction texts in particular, they are examples of potential futures. When you sit down to write or read or consider a potential future, it awakens you to possibilities and approaches. And those possibilities and approaches may just live in the realm of fiction or perhaps they inspire us and we try to enact them in our personal lives, in our social spheres, and those changes and possibilities can ebb outwards in larger and larger concentric circles and one day they change the world. But that doesn't necessarily mean that there is one way to go about that.

And there is some history of people taking science fiction too literally in that way. You know, there's a handful of utopian books, like this book called Walden Two from the mid-'50s, a lot of people tried to build communes based on the precepts in those books. Robert Heinlein, a science fiction writer from the '50s and '60s, a lot of people read his books as dogma. It's certainly interesting to try to live a science fictional life, but ultimately we have to be in the real world, and we have to take the predictions and speculations of fiction with a grain of salt and see where we can incorporate them into our lives, but while being aware and conscious of the fact that the world is far more complicated than a novel or film.

Wendy Zukerman: A message for Tom Cruise, no doubt.

Claire Evans: Yes, absolutely!

Wendy Zukerman: That was Claire Evans, science fiction apologist and future editor of Motherboard.

Reading: I turned into a man. I had been a man before, but only briefly and in a crowd. You would not have noticed anything, had you been there.

Manhood, children, is not reached by courage or short hair or insensibility or by being (as I was) in Chicago's only skyscraper hotel while the snow rages outside. I sat in a Los Angeles cocktail party with the bad baroque furniture all around, having turned into a man. I saw myself between the dirty-white scrolls of the mirror and the results were indubitable: I was a man. But what then is manhood? Manhood, children…is Manhood.

Wendy Zukerman: Now for a different take on the power of science fiction.

Jake Bowers is a political scientist at the University of Illinois where he teaches a course which compares science fiction with classical political texts, like that of Karl Marx. Bowers believes that science fiction can help us think critically about our political and economic models.

Jake Bowers: I think science fiction almost always incorporates criticism of today. If, when you write about tomorrow, if your tomorrow seems a lot like today but a lot darker, it is in essence a criticism of today, like Blade Runner, inequality run rampant or something. Or if tomorrow is a happier place and it doesn't look like today, like Callenbach's Ecotopia, again it's an implicit or an explicit social criticism. So, you know, why are people happy if they only make one kind of towel in Ecotpia, for example. What does that tell us about material goods and the good life?

Wendy Zukerman: Do you think that political theorists like Marx or Lenin in some way play the role of the science fiction author in that they create these new visions of the future almost based on their criticisms of the current state of play?

Jake Bowers: Yes, exactly. What did Marx want to have happen? Marx really wanted to have this world in which there is basically no politics, that was the end goal. It wasn't about income redistribution, that was just along the way.

Wendy Zukerman: What do you think is the difference between political theorists and science fiction authors?

Jake Bowers: Marx is different and Marcuse is definitely different in that they based their ideas of the future on what they saw as existing social scientific data. So Marcuse reads a lot of Freud and talks about what we know about humans and their sexuality and the ego and the id, and Marx talks a tonne about how is it that you can go from being rural peasants to being exploited labour in factories. And so they do this thing…it's a bit more like futurism, you really build this edifice such that the next step, the step into the future is a very logical step.

Wendy Zukerman: But for all that theorising and evidence building and edifice creating, what ultimately Marx has developed is quite an unrealistic science fiction vision.

Jake Bowers: Yes, right, exactly. Marx's future vision, yes, it's not realistic. You kind of wonder, if we had this genre, if they would have articulated their visions in these kinds of fictional ways.

Wendy Zukerman: Do you think that science fiction can help us prepare for the political and social ramifications of technology?

Jake Bowers: I think it's not super clear if it's going to help in common law legal systems where we make the law by reacting to things. Civil code systems like France where the law is written down and you don't make new law with every new person-by-person, case-by-case. Maybe they have more of a chance to try to predict what kind of problems they are going to face, and sit down and say, okay, here's a systematic way of thinking through. But I definitely think that it should help our minds so that when something does happen we get bitcoins or something like this or we get Facebook or whatever, then you hope that the lawyers…my prediction is that the lawyers who have read a lot of science fiction react faster and more creatively.

Politics is about ideas, and we are sort of just a limited by our ideas. The more people who are spending their time thinking about these problems, even if the way the first truly sentient robot is not a human shaped robot that walks around but is an amazing vacuum cleaner, we'll be better prepared for that if we think about science fiction.

Wendy Zukerman: Just to take a side note here, theories about global economics have been pretty stagnant for the past century. Do you think that science fiction can help us conceive of a new and perhaps better economy?

Jake Bowers: Yes, and I think we need to that. Just, for example, one question that my students were thinking about last term was this idea that we are just going to need fewer and fewer human workers. So that if unemployment grows, it's not like there's any point in creating jobs because there is no need for humans to do the work. The robots are better at doing the work, they are doing it more cheaply. And so then the question is, well, what do we do? What do you do if 50% of people don't need to work to earn money? That's an entirely new kind of society and economy. If you try to apply the simple ideas that we have now I think we would fail. If it was the big argument about people who are unemployed don't deserve public support, that falls down when you have 50% of the population unemployed. And the way we've designed social programs, even in the details, aren't going to survive if we have enormous numbers of people who just don't need to work for a wage. That's a huge challenge. We need a lot of people imagining what a new economy would look like if you don't have everybody working to earn money.

Wendy Zukerman: And can you think of any science fiction novels that could help us answer that question?

Jake Bowers: Neal Stephenson has some darker visions but really interesting ones. There's a book called Diamond Age which is his vision of an economy in which we have matter compilers. In that world there is no factory work anymore, you just ask for a spoon to be created in your home and then a spoon is created in your home. This is sort of like 3-D printing taken to the extreme, but written I think in 1996. And he envisions how that might play out. The highest status people are the designers of the stuff rather than the makers of the stuff. Or there's some groups of people in that book that decide they are only going to make things handmade and they've decided that they…they opt out.

Wendy Zukerman: I've got an example of a new economy that was suggested by Star Trek. Here's Jean-Luc Picard's explanation of it:

Jean-Luc Picard: The economics of the future are somewhat different. You see, money doesn't exist in the 24th century.

Lily Sloane: No money? You mean you don't get paid?

Jean-Luc Picard: The acquisition of wealth is no longer the driving force in our lives. We work to better ourselves, and the rest of humanity.

Wendy Zukerman: Do you think this is possible?

Jake Bowers: Well, I think so. We see people doing this. There are people who make choices in their lives. They would do the work they are doing whether or not they were being paid for it, but not broadly speaking. Most people most of the time are probably not all working in jobs that they absolutely love and they would do and they'd work in without being paid.

Wendy Zukerman: Do you think there is a danger of dreaming of a utopia? Can it breed dissatisfaction?

Jake Bowers: I hope it does. I think that creativity can arise from dissatisfaction. If there is a danger, the danger is that people are going to be more critical about the now and think more critically about the future. So I think you're right, there is a danger of dreaming of a utopia but the danger is just to the ordinary way of doing things and our point is to move forward and confront that which is not ordinary.

Excerpt from Star Trek: The Next Generation:

Guinan: Consider that in the history of many worlds there have always been disposable creatures. They do the dirty work. They do the work that no one else wants to do, because it's too difficult or too hazardous. And an army of Datas, all disposable? You don't have to think about their welfare, you don't think about how they feel. Whole generations of disposable people.

Jean-Luc Picard: You're talking about slavery.

Wendy Zukerman: That's a scene from Star Trek's The Next Generation. And I was speaking with Jake Bowers, an associate professor of political science at the University of Illinois.

We've heard how science fiction can shed light on economics and gender politics. Dreaming up new worlds discombobulates us, forcing us to question why things are the way they are. But science also plays a role making things the way they are, and driving scientific developments.

[X Prize advertisement]

Right now the X Prize has a $10 million competition to create a mobile device that diagnoses 16 medical conditions. The competition is named after, and inspired by Star Trek's Tricorder.

This is Dr Peter Diamandis, CEO of the X Prize Foundation. He's selling his sci-fi vision for medical diagnosis.

[X Prize advertisement]

This brings me to our final guest on Future Tense today. Jim Blascovich is a professor of psychology at the University of California in Santa Barbara. He's one of the many scientists who have been influenced by science fiction. Jim researches how people respond to being in virtual reality environments.

He and his colleague Jeremy Bailenson have found that we easily confuse the images projected through virtual reality headsets with real life. After messing around with people's heads, Jim saw the science fiction movie The Matrix, and found it was particularly compelling.

Excerpt from The Matrix:

Neo: This...this isn't real?

Morpheus: What is 'real'? How do you define 'real'? If you're talking about what you can feel, what you can smell, what you can taste and see, then real is simply electrical signals interpreted by your brain.

Jim Blascovich: The Matrix came out after I got involved in this whole thing, and I can remember sitting in a theatre, the first of many times I've watched that movie, and thought to myself, holy cow, should I really be doing what I'm doing? Am I helping create this technology? Am I going to help the world be taken over by Agent Smiths? You know, it's kind of scary, where a person discovers, well, they are not really where they thought they were, somebody else is controlling everything in their world. And the other side of all of this of course are the very many good things about virtual reality, particularly education, in terms of business, in terms of recreation et cetera.

Wendy Zukerman: What do you think are the future applications for virtual reality? Take us through some of these positive applications?

Jim Blascovich: Certainly education, for example. So in education we have this kind of classroom model. You go to class and you sit in a chair and the teacher generally delivers information, and you as a student might suck it up, so to speak. So you might ask the question, well, why study ancient Greek history in a traditional classroom with a textbook when you can study it from a virtual Parthenon? Why not be at the Council of Trent, why not experience being shoved together in a slave ship?

Wendy Zukerman: And what are some negative effects that you see of virtual reality?

Jim Blascovich: Well, I think there can be addiction, I think there can be lost of physical intimacy, for good or for bad.

Wendy Zukerman: Do you think we are ready to dive into that world?

Jim Blascovich: Whether we are ready or not, we are going to, I'll tell you that. So virtual reality is just part of human nature. We take ourselves psychologically somewhere other than where we are often. It's a way of escaping from what we call grounded reality, and we've developed all these media tools to do so. So it doesn't surprise me that human nature, if we can get addicted to biological substances such as drugs, that we can get addicted to, let's say, psychological kinds of delivery methods of information and of distraction and all those sorts of things.

Wendy Zukerman: Jim Blascovich is a professor at the University of California in Santa Barbara, and co-author of Infinite Reality.

Excerpt from Star Trek: The Next Generation:

Minuet: A dream, is that what this is? Is that what I am?

William Riker: I know you're a computer-generated image, but even the things you say and think seem so real.

Minuet: Thank you.

William Riker: I mean, how real are you?

Minuet: As real as you need me to be.

Wendy Zukerman: Yet another scene from Star Trek: The Next Generation, which highlights the ease of becoming addicted to virtual worlds. Oh, and no prizes for guessing my favourite sci-fi series.

As we enter a rapidly changing world, we need new ways to think about our gender relations, our economy and our environment. Perhaps the utopias of science fiction can inspire us to create this Brave New World.

Antony Funnell: Ending on a decidedly up note, Wendy Zukerman there on the power of science fiction.

Today's guests were: Claire Evans, futures editor for the website Motherboard; Jake Bowers, a political scientist from the University of Illinois; and psychologist Jim Blascovich, co-author of Infinite Reality: Avatars, Eternal Life, New Worlds and the Dawn of the Virtual Revolution.

Thanks to this week's sound engineer Timothy Nicastri.

And you'll find a transcript of this show on our website. You can also podcast from there or stream it directly.

Next week on Future Tense, being prepared for the future. I mean really being prepared.

[Prepper video excerpt]

It's called the 'Prepper' movement, and at the extreme end it's all guns, underground shelters and preparing for the apocalypse, but there is a not-so-extreme side which we'll explore next week on Future Tense.

Until then, I'm Antony Funnell. Take care, cheers!

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Guests

Claire Evans

Claire Evans is a science fiction apologist and the Futures Editor of Motherboard.

Associate professor Jake Bowers

Jake Bowers is an associate professor of political science at the University of Illinois

Professor Jim Blascovich

Jim Blascovich is a professor of psychology at the University of California in Santa Barbara and co-author of Infinite Reality: Avatars, Eternal Life, New Worlds and the Dawn of the Virtual Revolution.