Available in | English |
---|---|
Owner | Arizona State University |
Created by | Neal Stephenson (founder) Ed Finn (editor) Kathryn Cramer (editor) |
URL | hieroglyph.asu.edu |
Commercial | No |
Launched | 2012 |
Project Hieroglyph is an initiative to create science fiction in order to spur innovation in science and technology founded by Neal Stephenson in 2011. [1]
Stephenson framed the ideas behind Hieroglyph in a World Policy Institute article entitled "Innovation Starvation" [2] where he attempts to rally writers to infuse science fiction with optimism that could inspire a new generation to, as he puts it, “get big stuff done.”
Stephenson says that "a good SF universe has a coherence and internal logic that makes sense to scientists and engineers. Examples include Isaac Asimov's robots, Robert Heinlein's rocket ships, and William Gibson's cyberspace. Such icons serve as hieroglyphs—simple, recognizable symbols on whose significance everyone agrees." [3]
Stephenson partnered with Arizona State University's Center for Science and the Imagination [4] which now administers the project.
In September 2014, the project's first book, Hieroglyph: Stories and Visions for a Better Future, edited by Ed Finn and Kathryn Cramer was published by William Morrow. [5] Contributors to the book include Neal Stephenson, Bruce Sterling, Madeline Ashby, Gregory Benford, Rudy Rucker, Vandana Singh, Cory Doctorow, Elizabeth Bear, Karl Schroeder, James Cambias, Brenda Cooper, Charlie Jane Anders, Kathleen Ann Goonan, Lee Konstantinou, Annalee Newitz, Geoffrey Landis, David Brin, Lawrence Krauss, and Paul Davies.
Kenneth Macrae MacLeod is a Scottish science fiction writer. His novels The Sky Road and The Night Sessions won the BSFA Award. MacLeod's novels have been nominated for the Arthur C. Clarke, Hugo, Nebula, Locus, and Campbell Memorial awards for best novel on multiple occasions. In 2024 Ken MacLeod was one of the Guests of Honour at Glasgow: A Worldcon For Our Futures.
Neal Town Stephenson is an American writer known for his works of speculative fiction. His novels have been categorized as science fiction, historical fiction, cyberpunk and baroque.
Gregory Benford is an American science fiction author and astrophysicist who is professor emeritus at the department of physics and astronomy at the University of California, Irvine. He is a contributing editor of Reason magazine.
Cory Efram Doctorow is a Canadian-British blogger, journalist, and science fiction author who served as co-editor of the blog Boing Boing. He is an activist in favour of liberalising copyright laws and a proponent of the Creative Commons organization, using some of its licences for his books. Some common themes of his work include digital rights management, file sharing, and post-scarcity economics.
Rudolf von Bitter Rucker is an American mathematician, computer scientist, science fiction author, and one of the founders of the cyberpunk literary movement. The author of both fiction and non-fiction, he is best known for the novels in the Ware Tetralogy, the first two of which both won Philip K. Dick Awards. He edited the science fiction webzine Flurb until its closure in 2014.
Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom is a 2003 science fiction book, the first novel by Canadian author and digital-rights activist Cory Doctorow. It depicts people competing over how new technology is being used at Walt Disney World, in a post-scarcity world with an economy based on reputation. Concurrent with its publication by Tor Books, Doctorow released the entire text of the novel under a Creative Commons noncommercial license on his website, allowing the whole text of the book to be freely read and distributed without needing any further permission from him or his publisher.
Karl Schroeder is a Canadian science fiction author and a professional futurist. His novels present far-future speculations on topics such as nanotechnology, terraforming, augmented reality, and interstellar travel, and are deeply philosophical. More recently he also focuses on near-future topics. Several of his short stories feature the character Gennady Malianov.
Annalee Newitz is an American journalist, editor, and author of both fiction and nonfiction. From 1999 to 2008, Newitz wrote a syndicated weekly column called Techsploitation, and from 2000 to 2004 was the culture editor of the San Francisco Bay Guardian. In 2004, Newitz became a policy analyst at the Electronic Frontier Foundation. With Charlie Jane Anders, they also co-founded Other magazine, a periodical that ran from 2002 to 2007. From 2008 to 2015, Newitz was editor-in-chief of Gawker-owned media venture io9, and subsequently its direct descendant Gizmodo, Gawker's design and technology blog. They have written for the periodicals Popular Science, Film Quarterly and Wired. As of 2019, Newitz is a contributing opinion writer at The New York Times.
Many of the tropes of science fiction can be viewed as similar to the goals of transhumanism. Science fiction literature contains many positive depictions of technologically enhanced human life, occasionally set in utopian societies. However, science fiction's depictions of technologically enhanced humans or other posthuman beings frequently come with a cautionary twist. The more pessimistic scenarios include many dystopian tales of human bioengineering gone wrong.
Kathryn Elizabeth Cramer is an American science fiction writer, editor, and literary critic.
Year's Best SF 12 is a science fiction anthology edited by David G. Hartwell and Kathryn Cramer that was published in 2007. It is the twelfth in the Year's Best SF series.
Year's Best SF 11 is a science fiction anthology edited by David G. Hartwell and Kathryn Cramer that was published in 2006. It is the eleventh in the Year's Best SF series.
Flurb was an American science fiction webzine, edited by author Rudy Rucker and launched in August 2006. In addition to short stories, Flurb featured paintings and photography by Rucker. It was released biannually. The author of an accepted story retained full copyright, including the right to have the story published elsewhere, and to request that it be taken down at any time.
Nanopunk refers to an emerging subgenre of science fiction that is still very much in its infancy in comparison to its ancestor-genre, cyberpunk, and some of its other derivatives.
Year's Best SF 14 is a science fiction anthology edited by David G. Hartwell and Kathryn Cramer that was published in 2009. It is the fourteenth in the Year's Best SF series.
The Mongoliad is a collaborative work of transmedia historical adventure fiction by a group known as the Subutai Corporation which was founded by Neal Stephenson and others. Set in the Foreworld Saga, the story was originally released in a serialized format online, and via a series of iOS and Android apps from 2010 until 2012. It was restructured and re-edited for a definitive edition published by 47North in multiple volumes in 2012 as The Mongoliad. Fan-submitted Foreworld stories were published via Amazon's Kindle Worlds imprint starting in 2013.
Arse Elektronika is an annual conference organized by the Austrian arts and philosophy collective monochrom, focused on sex and technology. The festival presents talks, workshops, machines, presentations and films. The festival's curator is Johannes Grenzfurthner. Between 2007 and 2015, the event was held in San Francisco, but is now a traveling event in different countries.
The Robert A. Heinlein Award was established by the Heinlein Society in 2003 "for outstanding published works in science fiction and technical writings to inspire the human exploration of space". It is named for renowned science fiction author Robert A. Heinlein and is administered by the Baltimore Science Fiction Society. It is generally given annually to one or more recipients.
The Year's Best Science Fiction: Thirty-Second Annual Collection is a science fiction anthology edited by Gardner Dozois that was published on July 7, 2015. It is the 32nd in The Year's Best Science Fiction series.