Winter 2024
Ian Campbell
I have just been informed that the American right wing has declared “holy war” on Taylor Swift. There’s a part of me that enjoys our cyberpunk-lite unevenly-distributed future; I can’t imagine it will go well for the American right wing; the only thing missing is that Taylor Swift is an actual breathing human being and not a hologram personality analogue driven by AI. That’s set for Winter 2025, I don’t doubt. The sudden and soon to be still more sudden advent of AI appears already to be “disruptive”, which as any cyberpunk fan will know, means that it will funnel still more money and power to the top and leave a great number of knowledge workers with a clear understanding of how they could have fought this when robots came for factory workers.
This issue of the SFRA Review contains a long and marvellous essay by Jo Walton, “Machine Learning in Contemporary Science Fiction.” It is worth reading in its entirety, so I will not spoil it for you save to note that very little in SF that concerns AI has much to do with the hyperreality whose advent has only just begun. It’s the way in which Walton makes this point that’s worth savoring.
Our symposium on socialist SF will appear in the May issue; in this one, we chose to center Walton’s thoughts on AI. We welcome your thoughts on AI and will be pleased to publish well-formed responses to Walton or readings of other works of SF through his framework. The same goes for nearly any other aspect of SF, or reviews of same. Write me at icampbell@gsu.edu.
SFRA Review 