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Monday, July 26, 2010

Fiction Not Science

Precisely true to the futurological genre to which they are contributing, the bloggers of Discover Magazine's Science Not Fiction (including stealth Robot Cultist Kyle Munkittrick about whom I've written before here) are busily offering up bad fictions they hope you will mistake for sciency insights.

The chirpy self-description of the blog captures its tone perfectly:
Sometime in the future, a group of renegade scientists and technologists will take a time machine to now. They're spilling the secrets of tomorrow here at Discover's Science Not Fiction blog.

It goes without saying that not all of the contributors actually are scientists, especially the ones who seem to provide the lion's share of the blog's actual content, and that those who are scientists scarcely seem to be "renegades" particularly. Whether they are fairly described as "technologists" is anybody's guess, since that doesn't actually mean anything.

All this is just to say, all this slick self-description is fiction (to be generous) and like the content of the blog more generally has little that is more than superficially scientific about it. Fiction Not Science, for Science Not Fiction, to be plain. But also do please note that even as a science fictional premise their intro-seductory snippet is so hackneyed that only self-appointed futurists would still be trying to get mileage out of it.

Time machines and sooper-geniuses aside, no actually respectable science fiction writer would churn out the sort of loose scenarios and whiskered conceits that so-called professional futurists peddle to keep their bread buttered. That they go on so often to add insult to injury, pretending that their stale speculations constitute some kind of serious ethical discourse or policy analysis is really just too much.

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