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How science fiction feeds the fuel solutions of the future

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C C Offline
https://aeon.co/essays/how-science-ficti...the-future

EXCERPT: . . . Working out just how the future will work still depends on this interplay between fact and fiction. Not just because, today, clear lines of connection link contemporary debates with their Victorian and Edwardian antecedents – though these are often forgotten in contemporary discussions of figuring out the future. But it turns out that fictionalising the future can be an effective way of realising it and making it familiar. When commentators and entrepreneurs debate future worlds in which power is generated by solar panels, fuel cells, wind farms or fusion, their imagined futures make sense to us largely because they seem familiar. And they seem familiar because we already know about other fictional futures that work like that – and, though this might seem less clear to us, because ours is a culture with a history of thinking like that about the future.

Put another way, our fictions offer a means of fixing the future’s energy technologies in the form of cultural expectations. Heinlein’s alternative futures effectively run scenarios of how different energy technologies might be played out, giving energy futurologists a playing field where they can work out what the social worlds of different future fuels might be.

[...] the fantasy of a future powered by cheap and inexhaustible electrical energy was common throughout the Victorian period. In his utopian/dystopian account of a subterranean civilisation in The Coming Race (1871), Edward Bulwer Lytton was clear that the Vril-ya’s technologies were powered by electricity. The Vril-ya lived in a world in which electricity (or vril, as they called it) powered everything. Electricity ran their machinery, controlled the weather, and helped to grow crops. It was the source of their telepathic power, too. Such speculations worked for Bulwer Lytton’s readers precisely because they mirrored the futuristic speculations made in the real Victorian world. The prediction that electricity would soon supersede steam as the universal source of economic power was ubiquitous. Grove shared that optimism, even as he poured economic cold water over its imminent prospect. When the British Association for the Advancement of Science met in Grove’s home town of Swansea in 1848, the visitors were taken to his friend John Dillwyn Llewelyn’s palatial estate in Penllergaer to see a boat powered by a bank of Grove’s nitric acid batteries puttering about on the lake.

While our concerns about future energy are now primarily dictated by encroaching climate change, Victorians worried more about the need to ensure that future energy would belong to Empire: future energy in the wrong hands and its consequences was a favourite topic of fin-de-siècle scientific romance. In his novel The Outlaws of the Air (1895), George Griffith imagined rival anarchist groups (utopian and nihilist respectively) slugging it out upon the sea and in the air with electrical gunboats and airships wielding electrical weapons. In The Angel of the Revolution (1893), Griffith pictured revolutionary anarchists with access to a new source of energy in control of the air and terrorising the great European states into submission. In both stories, the social organisation of the future was going to depend on who owned the right kind of power. The realisation that controlling future energy was essential to maintaining (or subverting) the social order was what made stories about that energy falling under alien control simultaneously so terrifying and so alluring.

These fictional speculations were mirrored by inventors and entrepreneurs. Indeed, projection was part of the process of invention....

MORE: https://aeon.co/essays/how-science-ficti...the-future
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