Interop Sci-Fi
Inside the Clock Tower, my interoperability sf for Consumer Reports.
The most anti-science-fiction political leader of all time was Margaret Thatcher. Her motto — “There is no alternative” — was a demand masquerading as an observation, and what she really meant was “Stop trying to imagine an alternative.”
This idea — that our world is inevitable, not the result of human choices, and it cannot be altered through human action — is well-put in the quote attributed to Frederic Jameson “it is easier to imagine the end of the world than to imagine the end of capitalism.”
In that light, science fiction can be a radical literature indeed. Depicting a future where our bedrock assumptions of our interpersonal, political and commercial relations are different implicitly denies that our present is inevitable or immutable.
(By the same token, sf can be a ghastly and reactionary literature: the mere act of asserting that the future will be just like today, save for some cosmetic technological “innovations,” implicitly says that we have arrived at the end of history itself)
This week in Consumer Reports Digital Labs, I’ve published “Inside the Clock Tower: An Interoperability Story,” a science fiction story about women comics creators who use interop to create their own anti-harassment…
