Artificial intelligence has had an effect on nearly every facet of modern life — ranging from diagnosing diseases, to applying for a job, to deciding which movie to watch. Now it’s reaching back into the realm where our notions about AI were born decades ago: science fiction.
“AI is just becoming more and more prominent in science fiction, which I think is a just a reflection of the times we’re in right now,” says Allan Kaster, who has been editing annual collections of sci-fi stories for 15 years. “It’s getting harder and harder to see a story that doesn’t include some sort of AI.”
Kaster, who heads up a sci-fi publishing house called Infinivox, discusses the connections between real-world science and fiction in the latest episode of the Fiction Science podcast.
Intelligent machines have long played a role in science fiction, going back to Fritz Lang’s “Metropolis” (1927), Isaac Asimov’s Three Rules of Robotics (1942) and HAL 9000 in “2001: A Space Odyssey” (1968). But generative AI and other recent innovations are providing writers with new opportunities to play off parallels between fact and fiction.
Infinivox’s latest anthology, “The Year’s Top Hard Science Fiction Stories 8,” brings together Kaster’s selections for 2023’s best short stories and novellas in a genre called hard science fiction.
One of the novellas, written by Fiction Science co-host Dominica Phetteplace, features robots who guide a teenage girl toward an otherworldly encounter at an abandoned Mars base. Another tale traces the development of a machine-learning algorithm who goes out in search of alien life long after its human programmers have gone extinct. Yet another story is told from the perspective of an AI agent who is waiting in the subsurface seas of Enceladus for instructions from Earth that never come.
In all those stories, the bots are more in control of the situation than the humans are. And there’s not a villain in the bunch.
It’s not inconceivable that updated depictions of artificial intelligence could contribute to the feedback loop between science fiction and fact. That loop has been running for decades: Quite a few techies say they were inspired by watching “Star Trek” episodes in the 1960s.
Such cross-fertilization has led to tech innovations on Earth as well as in space. For instance, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos has acknowledged that the Alexa voice assistant was inspired by the conversational computer on “Star Trek.” And Alexa, in turn, was adapted for an in-space demonstration of an experimental AI agent called Callisto during NASA’s Artemis 1 mission in 2022.
Meanwhile, the story about the alien-seeking algorithm — “Ocasta,” by Daniel H. Wilson — has its real-world parallel in the AI-based data analysis tools being developed by the University of Washington’s DiRAC Institute for the Vera C. Rubin Observatory. DiRAC’s researchers aren’t looking specifically for extraterrestrial life. Instead, they’re looking for the signatures of other types of exotic phenomena, such as dark matter, dark energy and active asteroids.
UW astrophysicist Colin Orion Chandler recently said that human observers using standard analysis techniques would require 180 days to comb through a single night’s worth of Rubin Observatory data. “That’s not tenable,” he said. “It just highlights the need for more algorithms and AI for this type of project, because there’s no way we’d be able to look through this data with human eyes.”
Artificial intelligence isn’t the only technological frontier that’s pointing the way to new types of science-fiction tales. One of the novellas in “The Year’s Top Hard Science Fiction Stories” tells the story of a billionaire who buys a trip to the moon with the aim of investigating mysterious lights that flash from the lunar surface.
The flashes — known as transient lunar phenomena, or TLP — are the subject of a real-world debate, and scientists aren’t completely certain what causes them. “Lemuria 7 Is Missing,” by Allen M. Steele, also weaves in references to NASA’s Artemis moon program, the heavy-lift Space Launch System and commercial space stations.
“The science in it is well-done, and it’s relevant to today, because there’s a conspiracy theory going on,” Kaster says. “And aren’t there conspiracy theories all over the place these days?”
What qualifies a story for designation as “hard” science fiction? Sci-fi fans have debated that question for years, and you can get a good sense of the debate by tuning into the podcast. “My definition of a hard science fiction story is, if the science in the story enhances the story, then it’s hard science fiction,” Kaster says.
But in Kaster’s view, the science isn’t what elevates today’s sci-fi above what was written during the “Golden Age” of the mid-20th century. Instead, it’s the uniquely human art of storytelling.
“I think we’re in a ‘Diamond Age,'” he says. “I don’t think we’ve had science fiction as well-written as it is now. … A lot of it is just really wonderful characterizations, and wonderful stories and plots. Because there are so many venues now for writers to publish short fiction, I really believe that we are in a Diamond Age.”
Cosmic Log Used Book Club
The next anthology on Kaster’s list will be “Three Hard Shots at the Moon,” a collection of three sci-fi novellas set on the moon. He estimates that he reads 300 to 400 science-fiction stories per year, and selects about 45 of those stories to appear in the four anthologies that are typically published by Infinivox over the course of a year.
So what does he like to read or watch for personal enjoyment? You guessed it: hard science fiction. He keeps up with the major magazines — including Asimov’s Science Fiction, Analog, Clarkesworld and Uncanny Magazine — plus lots of anthologies.
When it comes to movies, Kaster favors the screen adaptations of “Dune,” from David Lynch’s 1984 movie to the much more recent two-movie series directed by Denis Villeneuve. He also has high praise for “The Expanse,” the Prime Video series based on books by James S.A. Corey.
Daniel Abraham and Ty Franck — the authors behind the James S.A. Corey pen name — were our guests on the Fiction Science podcast last month. That’s one more reason to designate “The Expanse” series as this month’s selection for the Cosmic Log Used Book Club. The CLUB Club traditionally highlights books with cosmic themes that have been around long enough to show up at your local library or secondhand book shop. But we’ve occasionally bent the rules to add on-screen presentations to the CLUB Club list. Why not? After all, we’re the ones making the rules.
Visit the Infinivox website for more information about “The Year’s Top Hard Science Fiction Stories 8” and the company’s other sci-fi anthologies.
Can generative AI create art? In an essay published in The New Yorker, Seattle-area science-fiction author Ted Chiang argues that AI is incapable of outdoing humans in artistic endeavors such as painting or fiction writing.
My co-host for the Fiction Science podcast is Dominica Phetteplace, an award-winning writer who is a graduate of the Clarion West Writers Workshop and lives in San Francisco. To learn more about Phetteplace, visit her website, DominicaPhetteplace.com, and read “The Ghosts of Mars,” which is the first story featured in “The Year’s Top Hard Science Fiction Stories 8.”
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