China Miéville says science fiction is not the road map that Elon Musk and others in Silicon Valley have been taking it for.
“So it’s no secret, and it’s not new, that Silicon Valley has long been interested in science fiction,” Miéville said in an interview with TechCrunch. “And to some extent, this is sociological. There’s a crossover of the literary nerd world and the computer world and so on.”
Miéville is known for his particular brand of “new weird” fiction, for which he’s won a litany of prizes, including the Hugo Award. Works of sci-fi can play so well among those in tech, he said, in part due to the strange, unique philosophy that permeates Silicon Valley.
“The Silicon Valley ideology has always been a weird, queasy mix of libertarianism, hippieness, granola crunch tech utopianism — hashtag #NotAllSiliconValley, but really, actually, quite a f—ing lot of Silicon Valley,” Miéville told the tech publication.
When asked about big players in the tech industry, like Elon Musk, treating the works of authors like Kim Stanley Robinson — who’s best known for his Mars trilogy, chronicling the settling and terraforming of the planet — as “sort of a blueprint for the future,” Miéville said one could only “feel deep sorrow for” Robinson.
Musk has previously expressed interest in Isaac Asimov’s “Foundation” trilogy, along with Douglas Adams’ “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy” — even modeling his startup’s AI model, Grok, after the supercomputer in the book that produces the answer to “life, the universe, and everything” (which turns out to be “42”).
Other tech leaders have shown interest in the genre as well — Bill Gates has a roundup of his favorite Sci-fi reads on his blog, with Robinson’s “The Ministry of the Future” making the list. Jeff Bezos, for his part, even managed to get a cameo in “Star Trek Beyond.”
Science fiction has, in some cases, acted as the precursor to science fact — the communicators in the original “Star Trek,” for instance, were incarnated into real-world flip phones in the later 1990s. But Miéville believes that those in Silicon Valley have an incentive to cherry-pick where they draw their inspiration from.
“What elements of science fiction are these people going to be interested in?” Miéville told TechCrunch. “They’re not going to be ‘inspired by,’ for their products, the kind of visions of someone like Ursula Le Guin in ‘Always Coming Home,’ which is precisely about moving out of the dead hand of the commodity. That’s of no use to them.”
For lofty dreams like settling Mars to make more sense than addressing the problems at home on Earth, Miéville believes a degree of “societal and personal derangement” has to have taken place.
“But the idea that you would, rather than say, ‘This is a really interesting novel, this provides the following thoughts, maybe this inspires me to do certain kinds of work,’ but that you would say, ‘Yes, that’s what we should do,’ while around you, the world is spiraling into s—t? It would be terrifying if it wasn’t so risible,” Miéville said.
Miéville, Musk, and Robinson did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Business Insider prior to publication.
Science fiction, much like horror, is a genre that reflects the particular zeitgeist — and fears — of a given time. It’s not a window into what’s to come, Miéville said, but a way of discussing the world “now.”
“It’s always a reflection,” he added. “It’s a kind of fever dream, and it’s always about its own sociological context. It’s always an expression of the anxieties of the now. So there’s a category error in treating it as if it is ‘about the future.'”
Science fiction isn’t meant to act as prophecy, Miéville said — and it’s certainly not responsible for how people today act.
“Let’s not blame science fiction for this,” he told TechCrunch. “It’s not science fiction that’s causing this kind of sociopathy. Sorry to be hack, but it’s capitalism.”
