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Exit the zombies, enter the engineers

Nov 18th 2013 |  |

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Dystopian literature will lose out to more optimistic fare in 2014. In part this shift is attributable to readers’ fatigue with mutant, vampire and (particularly) zombie stories. Mostly, though, it reflects a move in the popular consciousness from civilisational angst to the question of preserving biodiversity.

Accelerating technological advances will rekindle hope that man can manipulate the atmosphere and genes to help lifeforms flourish. Stories will move away from howling and towards the possible. The new optimism will be most clearly seen in science fiction. The biggest successes in the genre in 2014 will be cheering tales set in the near future. That will mean more of Africa, more of equitable politics and, crucially, more of engineering solutions.

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Emblematic of this in the coming year will be an anthology of sci-fi work, published by the Hieroglyph project at Arizona State University, concerned with the coming age of networked matter. Hieroglyph arose out of a challenge made to a bestselling American sci-fi writer, Neal Stephenson, that he and others should try writing stories that did not always end in collapse, despotism or machine supremacy.

Mr Stephenson reckons that many technologists in real life are inspired by science fiction. Why not set them new challenges? Together with an engineering professor, Keith Hjelmstad, Mr Stephenson has kicked off the can-do spirit by imagining a 20km-high tower, a true Babel, which would service spacecraft and, one supposes, a city state in low orbit that could in turn enable the colonisation of Mars. Mr Stephenson believes that just imagining an achievement into existence gives large organisations a common vision to work towards.

This will also weaken the reputation of curmudgeonly literary fiction. In his 2010 novel, “Solar”, Ian McEwan has his scientist protagonist declare a distrust of “anyone who routinely referred to ‘the planet’ as proof of thinking big”. But 2014 will mark the rise of planetary writing: high literature which will seek a truer perspective of man’s place in time and space.

director, future Africa, École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne

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