by Ed Finn
Believing we have all the technology we’ll ever need, we seek to draw attention to its destructive side effects. This seems foolish now that we find ourselves saddled with technologies like Japan’s ramshackle 1960s-vintage reactors at Fukushima when we have the possibility of clean nuclear fusion on the horizon. The imperative to develop new technologies and implement them on a heroic scale no longer seems like the childish preoccupation of a few nerds with slide rules. It’s the only way for the human race to escape from its current predicaments. Too bad we’ve forgotten how to do it.
“You’re the ones who’ve been slacking off!” proclaims Michael Crow, president of Arizona State University (and one of the other speakers at Future Tense). He refers, of course, to SF writers. The scientists and engineers, he seems to be saying, are ready and looking for things to do. Time for the SF writers to start pulling their weight and supplying big visions that make sense. Hence the Hieroglyph project, an effort to produce an anthology of new SF that will be in some ways a conscious throwback to the practical techno-optimism of the Golden Age.
SPACEBORNE CIVILIZATIONS
China is frequently cited as a country now executing the big stuff, and there’s no doubt they are constructing dams, high-speed rail systems, and rockets at an extraordinary clip. But those are not fundamentally innovative. Their space program, like all other countries’ (including our own), is just parroting work that was done fifty years ago by the Soviets and the Americans. A truly innovative program would involve taking risks (and accepting failures) to pioneer some of the alternative space launch technologies that have been advanced by researchers all over the world during the decades dominated by rockets.
Imagine a factory mass-producing small vehicles, about as big and complicated as refrigerators, which roll off the end of an assembly line, are loaded with space-bound cargo and topped off with nonpolluting liquid hydrogen fuel, then are exposed to intense concentrated heat from an array of ground-based lasers or microwave antennas. Heated to temperatures beyond what can be achieved through a chemical reaction, the hydrogen erupts from a nozzle on the base of the device and sends it rocketing into the air. Tracked through its flight by the lasers or microwaves, the vehicle soars into orbit, carrying a larger payload for its size than a chemical rocket could ever manage, but the complexity, expense, and jobs remain grounded. For decades, this has been the vision of such researchers as physicists Jordin Kare and Kevin Parkin. A similar idea, using a pulsed ground-based laser to blast propellant from the backside of a space vehicle, was being talked about by Arthur Kantrowitz, Freeman Dyson, and other eminent physicists in the early 1960s.
If that sounds too complicated, then consider the 2003 proposal of Geoff Landis and Vincent Denis to construct a twenty-kilometer-high tower using simple steel trusses. Conventional rockets launched from its top would be able to carry twice as much payload as comparable ones launched from ground level. There is even abundant research, dating all the way back to Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, the father of astronautics beginning in the late nineteenth century, to show that a simple tether—a long rope, tumbling end over end while orbiting Earth—could be used to scoop payloads out of the upper atmosphere and haul them up into orbit without the need for engines of any kind. Energy would be pumped into the system using an electrodynamic process with no moving parts.
All are promising ideas—just the sort that used to get an earlier generation of scientists and engineers fired up about actually building something.
But to grasp just how far our current mind-set is from being able to attempt innovation on such a scale, consider the fate of the space shuttle’s external tanks (ETs). Dwarfing the vehicle itself, the ET was the largest and most prominent feature of the space shuttle as it stood on the pad. It remained attached to the shuttle—or perhaps it makes as much sense to say that the shuttle remained attached to it—long after the two strap-on boosters had fallen away. The ET and the shuttle remained connected all the way out of the atmosphere and into space. Only after the system had attained orbital velocity was the tank jettisoned and allowed to fall into the atmosphere, where it was destroyed on reentry.
At a modest marginal cost, the ETs could have been kept in orbit indefinitely. The mass of the ET at separation, including residual propellants, was about twice that of the largest possible shuttle payload. Not destroying them would have roughly tripled the total mass launched into orbit by the shuttle. ETs could have been connected to build units that would have humbled today’s International Space Station. The residual oxygen and hydrogen sloshing around in them could have been combined to generate electricity and produce tons of water, a commodity that is vastly expensive and desirable in space. But in spite of hard work and passionate advocacy by space experts who wished to see the tanks put to use, NASA—for reasons both technical and political—sent each of them to fiery destruction in the atmosphere. Viewed as a parable, it has much to tell us about the difficulties of innovating in other spheres.
EXECUTING THE BIG STUFF
Innovation can’t happen without accepting the risk that it might fail. The vast and radical innovations of the mid-twentieth century took place in a world that, in retrospect, looks insanely dangerous and unstable. Possible outcomes that the modern mind identifies as serious risks might not have been taken seriously—supposing they were noticed at all—by people habituated to the Depression, the World Wars, and the Cold War, in times when seat belts, antibiotics, and many vaccines did not exist. Competition between the Western democracies and the communist powers obliged the former to push their scientists and engineers to the limits of what they could imagine and supplied a sort of safety net in the event that their initial efforts did not pay off. A grizzled NASA veteran once told me that the Apollo moon landings were communism’s greatest achievement.
In his book Adapt: Why Success Always Starts with Failure, Tim Harford outlines Charles Darwin’s discovery of a vast array of distinct species in the Galapagos Islands—a state of affairs that contrasts with the picture seen on large continents, where evolutionary experiments tend to get pulled back toward a sort of ecological consensus by interbreeding. “Galapagan isolation” versus the “nervous corporate hierarchy” is the contrast staked out by Harford in assessing the ability of an organization to innovate.
Most people who work in corporations or academia have witnessed something like the following: A number of engineers are sitting together in a room, bouncing ideas off one another. Out of the discussion emerges a new concept that seems promising. Then some laptop-wielding person in the corner, having performed a quick Google search, announces that this “new” idea is, in fact, an old one—or at least vaguely similar—and has already been tried. Either it failed, or it succeeded. If it failed, then no manager who wants to keep his or her job will approve spending money trying to revive it. If it succeeded, then it’s patented and entry to the market is presumed to be unattainable, since the first people who thought of it will have “first-mover advantage” and will have created “barriers to entry.” The number of seemingly promising ideas that have been crushed in this way must be in the millions.
What if that person in the corner hadn’t been able to do a Google search? It might have required weeks of library research to uncover evidence that the idea wasn’t entirely new—and after a long and toilsome slog through many books, tracking down many references, some relevant, some not. When the precedent was finally unearthed, it might not have seemed like such a direct precedent after all. There might be reasons why it would be worth taking a second crack at the idea, perhaps hybridizing it with innovations from other fields. Hence the virtues of Galapagan isolation.
The counterpart to Galapagan isolation is the struggle for survival on a large continent, where firmly established ecosystems tend to blur and swamp new adaptations. Jaron Lanier, a computer scientist, composer, visual artist, and author of the book You Are Not a Gadget: A Manifesto, has some insights about the unintended consequences of the Internet—the informational
equivalent of a large continent—on our ability to take risks. In the pre-Net era, managers were forced to make decisions based on what they knew to be limited information. Today, by contrast, data flows to managers in real time from countless sources that could not even be imagined a couple of generations ago, and powerful computers process, organize, and display the data in ways that are as far beyond the hand-drawn graph-paper plots of my youth as modern video games are to tic-tac-toe. In a world where decision makers are so close to being omniscient, it’s easy to see risk as a quaint artifact of a primitive and dangerous past.
The illusion of eliminating uncertainty from corporate decision making is not merely a question of management style or personal preference. In the legal environment that has developed around publicly traded corporations, managers are strongly discouraged from shouldering any risks that they know about—or, in the opinion of some future jury, should have known about—even if they have a hunch that the gamble might pay off in the long run. There is no such thing as “long run” in industries driven by the next quarterly report. The possibility of some innovation making money is just that—a mere possibility that will not have time to materialize before the subpoenas from minority shareholder lawsuits begin to roll in.
Today’s belief in ineluctable certainty is the true innovation killer of our age. In this environment, the best an audacious manager can do is to develop small improvements to existing systems—climbing the hill, as it were, toward a local maximum, trimming fat, eking out the occasional tiny innovation—like city planners painting bicycle lanes on the streets as a gesture toward solving our energy problems. Any strategy that involves crossing a valley—accepting short-term losses to reach a higher hill in the distance—will soon be brought to a halt by the demands of a system that celebrates short-term gains and tolerates stagnation, but condemns anything else as failure. In short, a world where big stuff can never get done.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
THE EDITORS WISH TO thank the many people who made this book and Project Hieroglyph possible. Many of the people we name here will be named again several times below because of the many roles they served in building and supporting this big idea. First, we’d like to acknowledge Neal Stephenson for founding Project Hieroglyph and President Michael Crow for bringing the Center for Science and the Imagination to life at Arizona State University (ASU).
On behalf of the Center for Science and the Imagination, we thank Kimberly de los Santos for shepherding the idea in its nascent early stages; Safwat Saleem and Joshua Gallagher for establishing Project Hieroglyph’s early style; Art Lee, Jim O’Brien, and Karen Liepmann for sage counsel; and Lauren Pedersen, Elizabeth Vegh, and Wesley de la Rosa for their good humor, can-do attitudes, and the many hours they have contributed to making Project Hieroglyph and the center as creative and vibrant as they are today. We wish to specially acknowledge Jennifer Apple, volunteer editor extraordinaire; Chelsea Courtney, business operations specialist and operational wizard; Nina Miller, the tremendously creative designer and architect of the current Project Hieroglyph platform; and Joey Eschrich, a tireless and talented editor, promoter, enthusiast, manager, field marshal, ghostbuster, and majority whip for Project Hieroglyph and the center. For the launch of Project Hieroglyph we thank Jeremy Bornstein, Gary McCoy, Karen Laur, Zoe Glynn, and all those at Subutai Corporation and Brainstem Media for their hard work on the first iterations of the Hieroglyph platform, as well as Jim Karkanias, Stewart Brand, Esther Dyson, and the many others who provided key pieces of advice and support during Project Hieroglyph’s early days.
As editors we also wish to acknowledge the wit, warmth, and unflagging support of Jennifer Brehl and the entire team at HarperCollins, as well as Michele Mortimer and the charming Liz Darhansoff, of Darhansoff and Verril Literary Agents, who acted as agent for the project, negotiating the complex contract on behalf of ASU.
Ed Finn would like to thank all those at ASU who have made the center’s existence not merely possible but a thrilling adventure for their support, their good advice, and their intellectual generosity, especially those who might grant him tenure one day. He’d especially like to thank Michael Crow for letting him just make stuff up and then try it as a job description and Kimberly de los Santos for hiring someone who is, by many objective measures, pretty weird. He is eternally grateful to Anna and Nora for giving him new reasons for optimism every single day.
Kathryn Cramer thanks Neal Stephenson and Ed Finn for the opportunity to work on Hieroglyph, Edward Cornell for his support and encouragement, Gregory Benford for conversation and advice, and David Hartwell for suggesting to Neal Stephenson that she might be right for this project.
INTRODUCTION:
A BLUEPRINT FOR BETTER DREAMS
Ed Finn and Kathryn Cramer
WELCOME TO PROJECT HIEROGLYPH, founded by Neal Stephenson and produced by Arizona State University’s Center for Science and the Imagination. Our purpose here is to rekindle grand technological ambitions through the power of storytelling. Audacious projects like the Great Pyramids, the Hoover Dam, or a moon landing didn’t just happen by accident. Someone had to imagine them and create a narrative that brought that vision to life for others. They are dreams that became real not because they were easy, but because they were hard. The editors firmly believe that if we want to create a better future, we need to start with better dreams. Big dreams—infectious, inclusive, optimistic dreams—are the vital first step to catalyzing real change in the world. As it turns out, sometimes that dreamer is a writer of fiction, often science fiction.
It all started in 2011. Neal Stephenson was on a panel called Future Tense with ASU’s president, Michael Crow. Stephenson had recently published “Innovation Starvation,” his preface to this volume, and onstage he was talking about how dystopian our visions of the future are, and how we seem to have lost sight of our ability to think and do “big stuff”: the Apollo program, national infrastructure projects, and the microchip, for example. Crow responded that maybe it’s the science fiction writers who are letting us down by failing to conjure up grand, ambitious futures that will inspire us to get out there and make them real. The two began to discuss how we might get science fiction writers actively involved in shaping the future in a persistent, organized way.
That conversation launched both the Center for Science and the Imagination and Project Hieroglyph, two initiatives with a shared goal: get people thinking creatively and ambitiously about the future. We see this mission as having two interlocking halves. First, we need to share a broader sense of agency about the future. It’s not something people in white coats are cooking up in a lab somewhere. Whether we consciously accept it or not, we are all making choices that shape the future we are creating together. Second, we need to become more comfortable with the tools we have for envisioning that future. The university is a particularly good place to see that imagination is the key to moving forward in every discipline, even though the language of professionalism in many of them forbids or discourages unorthodox thinking. So it is our hope that the center, founded and directed by Ed Finn, becomes a vehicle for radical thought experiments, odd conversations, and mind-blowing prototypes and, most important, a venue in which anyone can take intellectual risks.
If the center is the mission control system, Project Hieroglyph is the spacecraft: our first effort to explore the ragged edge of human knowledge and potential. Stephenson assembled a small group of fellow writers interested in taking on the challenge. He also recruited Kathryn Cramer, who has edited Year’s Best Science Fiction annuals for a decade and who has expertise in hard science fiction. She joined Finn as coeditor and together, we broadened the group to the mix of writers in the current volume. We sought a diverse group with a mix of stylistic, political, and technological viewpoints, including several celebrated science fiction authors who have been writing this kind of technically grounded, optimistic, near-future fiction for years. Project Hieroglyph also leverages an incredible network of people ranging from und
ergraduates to leading technologists, scientists, and visionaries who are ready to think seriously, and boldly, about the futures we want to realize.
While this network includes scientists and engineers working on very real stuff, our brand of imagination does not reject or edge away from its origins in science fiction. Rather we embrace the power of what science and technology writer Clive Thompson calls the “last great literature of ideas” to open new doors, to ask difficult questions, and to inspire. A good science fiction story can share an iconic vision with millions of people. Isaac Asimov’s robots, Robert Heinlein’s rocket ships, and William Gibson’s cyberspace shaped not just real technologies but the whole cultural frame around them. Such science fiction stories created a kind of indelible symbol, a hieroglyphic imprint that has endured in popular imagination. This variety and range of approaches is crucial to breaking the mold of the status quo future and exploring the full spectrum of possibility for our species in the next few generations.
To explore those possibilities, Project Hieroglyph connects writers with scientists and engineers so they can identify compelling new “moonshot ideas.” A moonshot idea is the intersection of a huge problem, a radical solution, and a breakthrough discovery that makes the solution possible now or in the near future. Our challenge to the Hieroglyph community is to develop ideas that could be realized within one professional lifetime and implement technologies that exist today or will exist in the near future. No magic wands, hyperspace drives, or galaxies far, far away—just big ideas about how the world could be very different with a few small adjustments.
The project’s home at the center puts the resources of a world-class, ambitiously experimental research university behind our work. While it is not new for science fiction writers to consult scientists—and a number of science fiction writers are themselves scientists—this is the first time that we know of that a university has aggressively recruited its faculty members to further the project of visionary science fiction.