How Fi is Sci Fi

I hope you are well and have managed by now to decide whether what we live in is real or fiction. I know, it’s that red vs. blue pill dilemma again, right? For sure, it feels like something between dystopian science fiction and a 90’s parody film, a hybrid of Black Mirror and Austin Powers.

There is so much news these days that widen the gap between Sci and Fi. For example, AI-powered biotech able to help deploy a vaccine in record time or a recent cosmic ray detection experiment that has led to a discovery of particles that could be from a parallel universe. In contrast to this, I suggest you watch DEVS, Alex Garland‘s (The Beach, Never Let Me Go, Ex Machina, and unfortunately, Annihilation) original and quite thought-provoking new series. You’ll notice straight away from the first episode (or the trailer) its high aesthetics standards and the atmospheric soundtrack. In the first episode, the mysterious CEO explains to a traitorous employee. “The universe is deterministic,” he states, but we believe we have free will because “the tram-lines are invisible.” I love Garland‘s approach, although the parallel universe theory is much more exciting. Like Apple Glass, the rumoured soon-to-launch new AR device as the latest way to waste $500.

Interestingly enough, later in the DEVS show (no spoilers here), we hear the quote, “nobody has a private life anymore.” Sadly, this not just legit but has also become one of the most important topics of discussion of our era. Especially when after Google and Amazon, we now see news about Apple having conducted a “massive violation of the privacy of millions of citizens.”. I try and avoid the comparison with all the madness coming from people believing that 5G towers generate coronavirus or that the latter is a grand secret plan to make us accept being vaccinated with something that includes a microchip that will track everyone. These theories are now part of our lives (like the flat Earth one). In a limited scale, they’re similar to the concerns I have on whether I would trust Apple and Google collaboration for a contact tracing app more than the NHS version, backed by a Government that uses a quite specific and convenient approach to data interpretation.

You see, the contemporary problems we have to solve are far from those the 50’s science fiction writers have imagined but, maybe, it’s precisely that early science fiction that can help today’s science.