Zion's Fiction: A Treasury of Israeli Speculative Literature

Afterword ^{Aharon Hauptman}

It was in 1996, during the first annual convention of our newly founded Israeli Society for Science Fiction and Fantasy. I proudly strolled, with Emanuel Lottem and other friends, through the corridors of the Tel Aviv Cinematheque, crowded with enthusiastic young fans. One of them stared at me, and I could hear him whispering in a friend’s ear: “I think this is Aharon Hauptman, he was the editor of Fantasia 2000.” And his astonished friend replied: “What? Is he still alive?!”

Well, here I am, twenty years later, alive and kicking (or at least trying to), and what is more important, the Israeli SF scene is alive, kicking more than ever. Yes, there are no regular printed magazines anymore (the time of printed magazines is over anyway). But the online activity is flourishing: three or four sites, rich in contents. Conventions attract thousands of visitors each year (amazingly, sometimes two parallel events competing with each other), an annual collection of original stories is regularly published, several local publishers specialize in SF, Hebrew SF is being translated, Israeli writers win awards, films are produced, academic theses are being written. Who would have dreamed about this back in 1978, when we conceived the late Fantasia 2000, the first Israeli SF magazine that besides translations encouraged submission of original Hebrew stories? (Funny, once upon a time the year 2000 sounded futuristic).

Well, we dreamt. Science fiction is the stuff of dreams, isn’t it? SF dreams (and nightmares) are products of imagination, but they are inspired by reality, and they shape reality by inspiring and enriching human knowledge and actions. I write these words just after attending an academic meeting about artificial intelligence. The chairman reminded the audience that the origins of AI and robotics are rooted deep in SF. They will soon be an integral part of our lives. The same with space travel, of course, as well as with human-machine interface, cyberspace, cyborgs, nanotechnology, you name it. And, as every SF fan knows (or should know), the point is not the technology (real or fictional), not even speculative science, but their interaction with humans, with us. Good SF can help us to better understand how we are (or will be) shaped by science and technology and how science and technology are (or will be) shaped by us. For me, an SF story at its best is a thought experiment about alternative realities, with plausible technoscience ingredients, in a way that makes you think differently and perhaps better understand our world, other worlds.

If humans fail to understand our potential futures, our alternative realities, it is mostly due to the failure of imagination, something that the SF community is not short of. Arthur C. Clarke wrote (in Profiles of the Future) that although only a very small fraction of SF readers would count as “reliable prophets,” “almost a hundred percent of reliable prophets will be SF readers—or writers.” Today, we should better replace the word “prophets” with “futurists” or “foresight practitioners,” as foresight and futures studies are finally (but yet not sufficiently) taking their place in research and policy making.

What’s more, in these fields (which don’t deal with prophecy but with analyzing alternative futures) there is growing interest in the contribution of SF and SF thinking. We constantly face unforeseen surprises in economy, politics, climate, and technology that challenge conventional thinking and methods. In order to enrich the outcomes of foresight studies and to strengthen their effectiveness, it is important to encourage nonconsensual views about potential wild cards: future events with (currently perceived) low likelihood but high impact. And there is no better source of wild ideas for wild cards (including their possible implications) than science fiction. Yes, you may think about teleportation.

Indeed, in recent research activities, such as some projects in the research program of the European Union (in which yours truly was privileged to participate), imagining wild cards played an important role, and the projects’ work plans explicitly encouraged the researchers to explore the SF literature for inspiration. And that’s what they did. In one of those projects many imaginative wild cards were analyzed in order to point at possible new (currently overlooked) research directions for technology-society interaction. Some of them had distinctive “SF flavor”—for example, the one about a society in which people are becoming addicted to dream manipulation enabled by brain-computer interfaces. Another project dealt with wild-card scenarios about potential abuse of new technologies. One of them described future everyday gadgets (enabled by nanotechnology or 4D printing combined with the Internet of Things) that are capable of (remotely activated) self-healing, upgrade, or recycling, thus being vulnerable to a malicious signal that triggers their self-destruction (and thereby making flea markets the most attractive places to buy reliable products). The project even sketched the outlines of so-called narrative scenarios—we may call them SF stories—with the help of an SF writer (my good friend Karlheinz Steinmüller) who also happens to be, not coincidentally, a professional futurist.

With the accelerating pace of advances in science and technology, and of social changes in general, it is becoming a cliché to say that “we witness SF coming true” or that “we live in the future” (although some current societal phenomena should make one wonder if we are not going backwards to live in the past, which in turn has also to do with SF: the alternative history branch of the so rich SF tree). But as the only constant thing is change, and the future will always surprise us, the role of SF is not over. SF is the future; the future is SF, long live SF!