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Whatsapp The eternal optimist and a model for intergalactic collaboration, Star Trek's Mr Spock.

Project Hieroglyph is an initiative that aims to break science fiction writers’ addiction to the negative. Ed Finn, Director of the Center for Science and Imagination at Arizona State University, explains why positive science fiction stories are important for our future.

The idea for Project Hieroglyph came out of one conversation that the president of our university had with the science-fiction writer Neal Stephenson.

Stephenson was at an event in Washington DC where he was talking about how dystopian all of our visions for the future seem to have become.

Every new book and movie is about the world ending catastrophically or, even worse, not ending and staggering on into some horrific post-apocalyptic hell-scape. And at the same time, while that is very depressing, we seem to have also lost our ambition to do big new stuff.

We went from the Apollo missions to paying other countries to fly our astronauts into space.

It's much less risky to tell a dystopian tale, especially when you think of the Hollywood context, than it is to try and come up with a more nuanced or more positivistic vision of the future.

We went from the grand infrastructure projects of the '50s and '60s and designing intercontinental commercial transit aeroplanes, to using almost the same machines to get around that we did then, and using the very same infrastructure that is now decaying and falling apart that we built 50 years ago.

So Stephenson was saying: why aren't we thinking big anymore, why aren't we doing ambitious new stuff? And the president of Arizona State University's response to that was, well, maybe this is all your fault. Maybe it's the science-fiction writers who are letting us down who need to be coming up with more creative and ambitious dreams for the future.

That was the spark that launched both Project Hieroglyph and the Center for Science and the Imagination.

The mission of our centre is very simply to get people thinking more creatively and ambitiously about the future, and I'd say that's at the core of Project Hieroglyph as well.

I like to think of Project Hieroglyph as science-fiction about the present; stuff that we could do now if we simply set our minds to it.

The guidelines we have for our writers are to engage directly with scientists and engineers to explore the full possibility space of the world that we live in now, to think about ideas that are eminently doable but just lack a certain kind of will or lack a really good story.

That's where the term 'hieroglyph' comes from, this idea that there are these emblems that we've inherited from great science-fiction, the idea of the robot, the rocketship. A really good story can shape generations of thinking about those ideas. For instance, we can't think of robots now without thinking about Asimov's three laws.

The core of the project is thinking about how we can create new hieroglyphs, new stories that will become so embedded, so exciting that we can't help but integrate them into our cultural consciousness and the way that we think about the future and everyday life.

There is a line that Neal Stephenson likes to use which is that a good science fiction story can save you hundreds of hours of PowerPoint sessions and meetings because it plants that seed, that germ of an idea in everybody's head, and so while all of the details might not be fleshed out, everybody is in unison on what the larger goal is.

I think at this point it's much easier to be a critic than it is to advance a positivistic notion of the future, and it's easy to be an incisive, witty, funny critic.

I think that critical fiction has a very important place. I wouldn't trade any book for Brave New World or 1984. I think they remain incredibly valuable pieces of dystopian fiction and warnings about how things could go wrong.

But I think that the pessimistic trend is related to a lot of different factors, and some of them are simply market factors.

It's much less risky to tell a dystopian tale—especially when you think of the Hollywood context—than it is to try and come up with a more nuanced or more positivistic vision of the future.

We advocate what we call ‘thoughtful optimism’, the notion not that we have to only think of happy and possible futures, the best possible world, but that we should be thinking through all of the possibilities and exploring the ways in which we could conceivably improve our lot. 'No pessimism' is one of the guidelines.

The second guideline is 'no magic', and this one I think is equally important—to come up with science-fiction that is truly grounded in what we know now, in contemporary research, things that might become feasible within the next few years.

The central guideline there is to write science-fiction stories that could inspire a young scientist or engineer to achieve that goal within his or her professional lifetime.

Hieroglyph does have multiple goals. The first one is to pull together an anthology of these stories, and we are actually working on that right now.

But I'd say that the process by which we are bringing these different people together, from very different backgrounds, is just as important as the collection that comes out at the end of it.

I'm very excited to see how writers, scientists, engineers, students, designers, and all sorts of people, city planners, people who we never contacted directly but just found the site on their own have rolled up their sleeves and gotten involved in all sorts of fascinating conversations.

We are seeing tangible results, first of all in terms of building a community, and we invested a lot of thought and effort into how we could create Hieroglyph as a virtual community.

Anybody can go on the site and comment and engage with people like Neal Stephenson, Bruce Sterling, Cory Doctorow, and that has been very exciting.

Project Hieroglyph Find out more about Ed Finn's work and the Project Hieroglyph initiative.

One of the core ideas that we are trying to transmit here is that science itself can be a creative space and a fun space. There's this unfortunate term 'hard science-fiction' to convey the subgenre of writing that deals seriously with scientific issues.

But there's hard science-fiction that is quite beautiful and poetic and creative and funny, and I think that is important to remember.

The reason that the word 'imagination' is in the title of the centre that I founded is that I really think that is a core space.

I think of it as a third access that allows us to escape from the disciplinary turf wars that characterise a lot of university politics but also characterises the relationship between science-fiction and other genres.

‘The imagination’ is a space that we are all invited to, it's not a space that any one discipline or group of people possesses, and it allows us to speak on equal terms, to be creative and playful.

I think opening up that space of the imagination is at the core of Project Hieroglyph and the Center's work.

Ed Finn is the Director of the Center for Science and the Imagination and Co-Editor of Project Hieroglyph. Find out more at Future Tense.

