100 years of science fiction themes. OR. A time-lapse web of human dreams.
We built a concept corpus and recommendation network for science fiction.
I see science fiction as the ultimate literary genre for understanding the wildest hopes and deepest fears of society. It explores new social ideas and the possible impact of emerging technology, and is a vehicle for asking philosophical questions about personhood and consciousness.
When people ask me for sci-fi recommendations, we always end up discussing the concepts they are passionate about: quantum physics, space warfare, artificial intelligence, the singularity, enlightenment, superhumans, political control, gender issues, distributed cognition, et cetera.
But when you search for books on Amazon, GoodReads, or Google, they don’t give you these underlying themes. Instead they give you genres like Steampunk, Young Adult, Space Opera.
Big search engines give you descriptions of the shell, not the heart of the content.
We built a library of science fiction ideas from over 4,000 sci-fi books and millions of their reviews. The library is now open to the world. I hope it is used as a map for exploration.
You can explore the sci-fi network and analysis on http://app.openmappr.org/play/100YrsOfSciFi. The network is built on openmappr.org. The library and the scripts for generating and visualizing the network have been open sourced. The root GitHub openmappr repository can be found here.
How to use it
- Find Books to Read.
While Amazon will suggest books of a similar genre — e.g., cyberpunk or space opera — our network visualization connects books if they share similar expert-curated concepts. This is not so much about recommendation as about intelligent browsing, which is kind of a lost art in the world of ‘search’.
For example, if you’re obsessed with quantum physics, you should read Dark Matter, or the Three Body Problem. Distributed Cognition? Try Solaris, or A Fire Upon the Deep. Future of feminism? Dune, or Dawn deal with the extremes and subtleties of sex and gender in future worlds.
2. Explore Concepts.
Browse, don’t search. Explore books not just by traditional genres, but by high level concepts — and see how the publishing trends in those concepts have varied over time. What might be next for human consciousness development? Have you read the Years of Rice and Salt? — What about Childhood’s End?
Curious about how cryptocurrencies might affect gaming, ransomware, and terrorism? — Reamde. How might A.I. feel about humans? — Saturn’s Children or Aurora. The implication of brain-computer interface open source technologies? — read the Nexus books by Ramez Naam. Genetic tampering? — Dune or of course Brave New World. Beautiful alien forms for your next movie or halloween costume? — A Long Ride to a Hot Angry Planet. The future of education? — The Diamond Age, or Pandora’s Star.
3. Explore Future Realities.
Do you have a dark view on AI? Not sure how we could cohabitate? — Read Ancillary Justice. Curious about possible interstellar colonization scenarios? -Try a Mote in God’s Eye, or Revelation Space, or Rendezvous with Rama. Philip K Dick writing on cognition is so topical right now. With all this current hype about ‘are we already in a simulation’ and ‘full brain transcription’, you might want to go back to the master and read about the possibilities he imagined in Ubik.
4. Explore the relationship between Sci-Fi and Cultural/Paradigm Shifts:
Powerful books can fuel our imagination or instill fear in us collectively — phenomena that lead to investment, research, jobs, and laws. Especially because there is such a close relationship between technologists and science fiction, you can draw a slender golden thread between many of these books, technology trends and social movements.We looked at a lot of ideas. Here are just a couple fun ones:
We looked at lag times and changing expressions of the theme of immortality. A few beautiful correlations were exposed. While we’ve been obsessed with immortality as a species, we’ve actually been talking about it less over the last 50 years. Instead, words like superhuman, and genetic enhancement, and brain uploading are taking its place — more practical terms on how we achieve immortality, vs. the iconic concept.
We also explored how writing on AI corresponded to ‘AI Winters’. Major popular works in science fiction have been authored during the tail end of AI winters. What can we then draw from current trends on themes around genetic enhancement, robot social adoption, or AI friends (to name just a few ideas)? The Three Body Problem coming out of China can be seen as a massive anti-authoritarian shift, heralding a generational interest in space exploration many might not have anticipated.
An Overview of the Network’s Structure - a.k.a. the Shape of Dreams.
Here is a short set of takeaways from the project, including observations on major themes, clusters, and their interactions.
Galactic Empire — the largest cluster is related to military and interstellar warfare. This focus on war is foreseeable as a core structure of society has been empire building. Much of our contemplation of the future involves the conquest of the galaxy.
Interstellar War/Space Warfare — a cluster of books concerns war. Good reading for anyone interested in (not) weaponized AI, and for exploring how emerging technologies alter the nature of conflict. The change can be on the battlefield, or moving battlefields into virtual worlds or even people’s minds.
Human Nature — Wait, but why is human nature and zombies clustered together? Someone riddle me that one. Here we see a cluster of books exploring what it means to be human, and alternative existences. Dune is a great example of the Mappr network working for a specific book. Dune sits between space travel, human nature, and genetic enhancements — an accurate view of the concepts in the book. To compare this against another search engine, I checked and after searching for Dune, Amazon would tell you to buy ‘I am Legend’, a fun read, but it doesn’t really intersect with the issues that Dune explores.
Feminism/Gender Issues — Books on ‘feminism and social issues’ are at the core of the network (see cluster titled as such). One could argue that gender power dynamic is the oldest power imbalance we know of, and thus a key theme and issue in our society in the future.
Artificial Intelligence — And of course, nothing would be complete in 2018 without a mention of artificial intelligence. The AI cluster surfaces some of my favorite books ever — Dune, Neuromancer, Stranger in a Strange Land, and of course, Hyperion (bless you, Dan Simmons). It’s cool is visualize how distributed the concept is across clusters — a fact that points to the idea that intelligence, and AI, is a key theme inside all other themes of our future.
First Contact — I find it rather sad that our narratives around first contact with an alien species clusters so heavily together with narratives on interstellar war. Maybe we’re not ready for first contact. Certainly we fear it will follow tribal first-contact scenarios from human history.
Superhumans & Genetic Enhancement — With companies and technologies like NeuraLink, Crispr, AlterEgo, and Kernel being currently developed, many people are wondering about the possibilities and externalities of neural interfaces, neural prosthetics, and the possibility of mind uploading. These are all major themes in science fiction. If you’re interested in neural interfaces specifically, I suggest looking at the keyword clusters on superhumans, mind uploading, transhumanism, reality simulation, bio-implants, and collective consciousness.
This topic is so broadly distributed across all science fiction, it basically points to us believing that almost all future scenarios will involve enhanced humans. Some of the most popular books here include Dune, Jurassic Park, the Giver, Brave New World. I suggest you read Altered Carbon and the Years of Rice and Salt…
Political control — Tags like ‘authoritarian’ and ‘dictator’ are augmented by more subtle concepts around societal control and structure, soft and hard social structures, and future genetic differences leading to wide gaps in political parties. No one is more adept at exploring these subjects than the late Ursula K Le Guin, while books like Surface Detail and the Hike explore the extremes of virtual reality, living hells, prison sentences, and mind control.
And…combinations of factors you did not expect — one of my favorite clusters is “immortality, hyperspace, culture, genetic enhancement, magical feminism.” Yes people. This is a possible future. It contains books like The Dispossessed, an iconic tome by the late Ursula Le Guin.
Another really fun cluster for the future-forward political analyst is “telepathy, group mind, android, social issues, artificial intelligence’.
Future work: This is a human-curated effort to tag books with conceptual themes. In the future it would be great to do deeper natural language processing to automatically extract semantic concepts from the full text of each book.
Thanks: None of this would have happened without Eric Berlow’s perpetual curiosity and leadership, and Srini Kadamati’s generous intellect. This year of work with you has been super fun and rewarding. And to my friends who helped with tagging, library building, and network analysis: Shivon Zilis, Owen Mahoney, Jeremy Carr, Kevin Mahaffey, Lisa Kavanaugh, Jean Sini, and Ben Mathes.
