Crypto-inspired science fiction is taking off

Los Angeles Review of Books is running a review, titled “Speculating on the Blockchain Beyond Cryptocurrencies,” of blockchain technologies and cryptocurrencies in science fiction.

Science fiction “is percolating behind the scenes of blockchain development,” says author Andrew Hageman. In fact, it seems safe to bet that many crypto enthusiasts are avid science fiction fans, whose day-to-day work is influenced by the wild imagination of science fiction writers. But Hageman also notes that:

“[Science] fiction, a genre that typically delights in extrapolating the possibilities of new technologies, has been surprisingly sluggish in exploring the possibilities this new techno-scientific development could generate.”

Having said that, Hageman lists many examples of recent science fiction where cryptocurrencies appear, or even take center stage. This is the case of (ID)entity, the second novel in P. J. Manney’s “Phoenix Horizon” series.

I interviewed Manney when Identity came out. Manney, a frequent flyer in futurist circles and an enthusiast of highly imaginative speculations on transhumanist technologies like mind uploading, doesn’t describe herself as a techno-optimist or techno-pessimist but as a techno-realist. She considers Identity as “ a call to make cryptos and the blockchain safer and more independent from outside manipulation.”

Nothing online is safe, Manney said. “China could, at any minute, decide to launch a 51 percent attack.”

“I assume that blockchains will best be maintained outside of nation-states and proliferate into many aspects of life. And given that proliferation, ways will be found to corrupt them… As much as their creators believe in their world-changing positive properties, they also turn blind eyes to their corruption.”

Kim Stanley Robinson’s Red Moon depicts a future Earth (and Moon) where the two superpowers (the US and China of course) are in a kind of Cold War, and cryptocurrencies are weaponized. A stablecoin called “US Dollar” threatens to disrupt the US economy, and citizens all over the world(s) take refuge in another cryptocurrency called “carboncoin”:

“That person I was talking to on that quantum phone has just given every person in the world a million carboncoins and invited them to join a global householders’ union, and something like four billion people have already joined!”

Speaking of China, Chinese science fiction is booming and seems poised to offer an alternative to Western science fiction, which has arguably lost its visionary spark. Liu Cixin, the best known Chinese science fiction writer and the author of The Three Body Problem (winner of the 2015 Hugo award for best science fiction novel) and its two sequels, “has weighed in on the blockchain at major conferences like the 2018 World Blockchain Conference in Wuzhen,” notes Hageman.

Liu Xixin is a saint to me, so I went looking for what he actually said in Wuzhen, and found a summary.

Hageman says:

“The future promises to include blockchain science fiction from China as sophisticated as it is divergent from its American and European counterparts.”

The first and last novels in Liu Cixin’s trilogy were translated by Ken Liu, who is a science fiction writers himself. Hageman credits him for writing a short story that stands out “for combining the most in-depth technical grasp of the blockchain with captivating characters and plots. The story is “Byzantine Empathy,” part of the collection Twelve Tomorrows (2018), published by MIT Technology Review.

Another short story recommended by Hageman is Karl Schroeder’s “The Baker of Mars,” included in the 2017 collection Visions, Ventures, Escape Velocities: A Collection of Space Futures from the Center for Science and the Imagination at Arizona State University. Schroeder’s story is focused on blockchain governance of a future multi-planetary society and “proposes a blockchain solution to governing space resources that can scale up to cover a planet and beyond.”

A short story by acclaimed science fiction writer Hannu Rajaniemi, titled “Unchained: A story of love, loss, and blockchain” (2018), is published in MIT Technology Review. Contrary to what Hageman says, the story is paywalled, but an open access copy has been archived.

As a science fiction and crypto technology fan, I look forward to reading more and more crypto-inspired science fiction.

Cover image from Pixabay.