![]() ![]() Maybe it's time for the rediscovery of Cordwainer Smith. The New England Science Fiction Association collected and republished his stories several years ago as The Rediscovery of Man. ![]() Even hardcore science fiction fans may know him only for his first published story, "Scanners Live in Vane," which is included in the Science Fiction Hall of Fame anthology which is often deployed in science fiction classes. Smith wrote short stories rather than novels, scattered them across a range of publications, and published many of them after his death. If you just mumbled, "Cordwainer who?," you are not alone. I have been pondering this relationship between science fiction and reality a lot this week having recent taught some short stories by Cordwainer Smith in my transmedia entertainment and storytelling class at USC. How many contemporary technological developments emerged from designers whose imagination was incited by some science fiction novel or television series? Without Star Trek, would we have flip phones? Without Snow Crash would we have had Second Life? ![]() I mean inform here in two ways - first, they give us the information we need to process issues in the present moment and to therefore anticipate some likely consequences of the choices we face as a society and second, having given a vivid picture of a possible future, they inspire scientists, policy makers, and others to reshape reality to conform to their depiction. Science fiction writers do not so much invent the future as they inform it. ![]()
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