Yesterday evening I was a guest panelist at an event in the Bristol Technology Festival. It was called Invented Futures, and it was all about how we use technology to, you guessed it, invent the future. Obviously I was there a the science fiction expert, but the rest of the crew covered a wide range of technological innovation.
Julia Scott-Stevenson from UWE is an expert in Virtual Reality. She’s involed in the i_Docs project (immersive documentaries), and she has also written a manifesto on how immersive experiences can be used for good.
Coral Manton from Bath Spa University works with computer games (and therefore has one of the best jobs in the world). She is also one of the people behind a fascinating project called Women Reclaiming AI, which seeks to create a digital assistant made by women (as opposed to an artificial woman made by men).
Pete Bennett from the University of Bristol has a variety of creative projects including Digitally Enhanced Lego, and making games for the gorillas at Bristol Zoo.
Also I shouldn’t forget our moderator, Maria Leonard, who is the brains behind Death.io, which helps people manage their departure in the digital world. (Did you know that you can leave your Farcebook account to a friend to manage after you die? I didn’t.)
I saw my job as talking about as many great books as possible, and it was slightly disturbing to realise that many of the people in the room only consumed science fiction through TV and movies. Consequently they were completely unaware of the changes that have happened in the field over the past decade. I asked the audience to guess how many of the fiction writing awards it this year’s Hugos had gone to women. It took quite a while for someone to twig that the correct answer was, “all of them”, and this despite the fact that the audience was majority female.
I mentioned as many books as I could. Even so, I couldn’t get in every one I wanted. So here is a reading list.
Books by Bristol writers that address issues with the current digital world:
- Everything About You by Heather Child
- After Atlas by Emma Newman
- Infinite Detail by Tim Maughan
Books about AIs and artificial beings:
- Autonomous by Analee Newitz
- The Murderbot Diaries by Martha Wells
- Ancillary Justice by Ann Leckie
- vN and iD by Madeline Ashby
- Silently and Very Fast by Catherynne M Valente
- The Stone Canal by Ken MacLeod
- Saturn’s Children by Charles Stross
Other books about digital worlds:
- Singularity Sky by Charles Stross
- Little Brother by Cory Doctorow
- Lady of Mazes by Karl Schroeder
- Queen City Jazz by Kathleen Ann Goonan
Julia recommended the anthology, Women Invent the Future.
If anyone has any additional suggestions please add them in comments. But let’s it keep it to fairly recent books, OK? There’s no need to suggest Asimov’s robot novels, or Do Androids Dream Electric Sheep.