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Science Fiction for Prototyping: Designing the Future with Science Fiction by Brian David Johnson
mburnamfink's review
2.0
I wanted to like this book, I really did, but despite his qualifications, Brian Johnson didn't do the legwork necessary to achieve his goals. Brian Johnson is a futurist at Intel, who develops various scenarios to guide the company's development over the next 10 to 20 years (approximately forever in IT time). The back of the book claims that "Science Fiction Prototyping is a practical guide to using fiction as a way to imagine our future in a whole new way."
Instead, what I got was five bullet points on how to do what Johnson gets paid to do, totaling about a page, surrounded by interviews with various media figures about the difference between writing, film, and comics books, and some of Johnson's short fiction. What I wanted (and what I think it's fair to expect) is a detailed guide to gathering views of emerging technologies, sitting down with a group (classroom, corporate, academic, whatever), and somehow using sci-fi to work out the extrapolations. There's nothing like that; not a list of places of Johnson goes to gather his data (you try reading scientific journal abstracts as a layperson), no list of sci-fi works that are particularly good examples of prototyping, and nothing that tells you how to write a story, or what makes it a prototype rather than just an amusement.
I that science-fiction can play a useful role in helping people engage with the future. Almost nobody reads government, military, and corporate predictions: sci-fi is technology assessment for the rest of us. Moreover, I believe that the narrative elements of a story can provide deeper, fuller, and richer visions than sterile graphs and analyses. Not that sci-fi predicts the future, but it can act as design fiction, guiding inventors and scientists towards new discoveries, and an object that create Prevail-style flexibility towards unknowable contingencies. I guess I'll have to make my own plan for how to do that.
Instead, what I got was five bullet points on how to do what Johnson gets paid to do, totaling about a page, surrounded by interviews with various media figures about the difference between writing, film, and comics books, and some of Johnson's short fiction. What I wanted (and what I think it's fair to expect) is a detailed guide to gathering views of emerging technologies, sitting down with a group (classroom, corporate, academic, whatever), and somehow using sci-fi to work out the extrapolations. There's nothing like that; not a list of places of Johnson goes to gather his data (you try reading scientific journal abstracts as a layperson), no list of sci-fi works that are particularly good examples of prototyping, and nothing that tells you how to write a story, or what makes it a prototype rather than just an amusement.
I that science-fiction can play a useful role in helping people engage with the future. Almost nobody reads government, military, and corporate predictions: sci-fi is technology assessment for the rest of us. Moreover, I believe that the narrative elements of a story can provide deeper, fuller, and richer visions than sterile graphs and analyses. Not that sci-fi predicts the future, but it can act as design fiction, guiding inventors and scientists towards new discoveries, and an object that create Prevail-style flexibility towards unknowable contingencies. I guess I'll have to make my own plan for how to do that.
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