[extropy-chat] Peter Watts: views on writing science fiction and the future

Amara Graps amara at amara.com
Sun Jul 24 11:46:20 UTC 2005


Boing Boing pointed me to this science-fiction writer with books
available under the Creative Commons License. I had not heard of
this writer, mostly because I haven't been reading science fiction
for a long time.

http://rifters.com/real/shorts.htm

The site contains this author description (hilarious)

----
''He has spent much of his adult life trying to decide whether to be a
writer or a scientist, ending up as a marginal hybrid of both. He's
won a handful of awards in fields as diverse as marine mammal science,
video documentary, and science fiction. These accolades have not gone
to his head since they never involved a lot of cash.

He spent ten years getting a bunch of degrees in the ecophysiology of
marine mammals (how's that for unbridled optimism), and another ten
trying make a living on those qualifications without becoming a whore
for special-interest groups. This proved somewhat tougher that it
looked; throughout the nineties he was paid by the animal welfare
movement to defend marine mammals; by the US fishing industry to sell
them out; and by the Canadian government to ignore them. He eventually
decided that since he was fictionalising science anyway, he might as
well add some characters and plot and try selling to a wider market
than the Journal of Theoretical Biology.''
----

And if you go here, you will find his opinion on Tipler's _Physics
of Immortality_ (also hilarious) among other ponderings of the
future and why he says it sucks to be a science fiction author.

Peter Watts lecture June 16, 2001
http://voyageur.idic.ca/Wattslec01.htm

An excerpt:

----
''So the bottom line is, if you want to know what your future looks
like, don't waste your time on Analog; read Time magazine. We are
already saturated in the future. You don't need me or any other SF
writer to tell you what the future looks like. And if we do tell you
what the future looks like, we will not only be wrong-which we pretty
much always were anyway-but we will be immediately and spectacularly
wrong in record time, because the corollary to this whole exponential
increase in knowledge is that although the population at large is
getting dumber and dumber with each passing day, the target audience
for science fiction by definition has an interest in science. They're
scientifically more savvy, so their rate of intolerance for bad
science basically follows the same curve. So in one sense, not only
has the future caught up and surpassed us, but you guys have as well.''
----

-- 

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Amara Graps, PhD          email: amara at amara.com
Computational Physics     vita:  ftp://ftp.amara.com/pub/resume.txt
Multiplex Answers         URL:   http://www.amara.com/
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"I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of library."
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