Isaac Asimov had a term for this. “In the movies and television, science fiction deals primarily with images, so we might call it image-science-fiction,” he wrote in 1979. “Since the show-business people and journalists who talk about image-science-fiction refer to it, abominably, as sci-fi, suppose we call image-science-fiction i-sci-fi or, better yet, eye-sci-fi.”
The late grand master, who reserved the more dignified abbreviation “s.f.” for literary science fiction, held out hope that one day, “visual science fiction may graduate from sci-fi to s.f.” Whether the epic spectacular described above will qualify as eye-sci-fi or s.f. would be a matter of particular interest to Asimov: it’s Foundation, the forthcoming Apple TV+ series based on what the trailer describes as Asimov’s own “groundbreaking novels.”
Virginia Woolf once mused, “I believe that all novels begin with an old lady in the corner opposite,” and it makes me think about the old black woman who sat in the virtual corner of my family. I suspect there is a novel to be written about her, and about my family, and about the secrets we kept. It would be a much safer thing to do that—to write a novel with its guise of fiction—rather than this. I think about the old black woman, the way she sat there wrapped in a blanket of silence and secrecy. I did not think about her much as a child, but I think about her now.
With painting or prose, it has been said that a work is completed, in some metaphorical sense, by its encounter with an audience. With code, this circuit is literal. Programs and platforms are put on display, then tweaked because of error reports and user data; in multiplayer games, the activity of other players animates the experience. It is easy to say that this diminishes the artist-developer. But what the history of video games reveals is the story of all art. Our accounts often thrive on the vision of singular minds, even though every great work relies on the sweat, luck, and talent of many people, each inflecting one another in a continuous loop. When Sid Meier began tinkering with a new game, thirty years ago, his hope was that players would see themselves in his version of our planet. It was when the audience could watch one another tinker, too, that the planet became a world.
Exploring strange new worlds. Understanding the origins of the universe. Searching for life in the galaxy. These are not the plot of a new science fiction movie, but the mission objectives of the James Webb Space Telescope, the long-awaited successor to the Hubble Space Telescope. NASA is building and launching the Webb in partnership with the European Space Agency and Canada.
Calvin Kasulke’s new book, “Several People Are Typing,” is the tale of a guy whose psyche gets trapped in Slack, the workplace-messaging app. Slack lends the story its setting, dictates its form (a series of conversations among co-workers), and defines the book’s voice (characters communicate in a recognizable Slack-speak). Kasulke’s proposition, which taps into the subsuming nature of Work Today, seems to be: What if Slack ate a novel? A reader’s reply might be: Why would I read that novel? And yet “Several People Are Typing” is fun, funny, addictive, and surreal. It doesn’t feel much like literature, but it does feel like any number of Slack-adjacent activities: procrastinating, eavesdropping, solving a puzzle. I blazed through it in an hour, came up for air, and then immediately blazed through it again—behavior that mystified me until I remembered how I am on Slack.
The point is the journey, to savor walking down the mean streets of 1970s Glasgow once again with the stoic Laidlaw. For that pleasure, we have Ian Rankin to thank and, one final time, the man himself, William McIlvanney.