What I’m Reading: ‘Hieroglyph’

Tom Jorgensen, U. of Iowa

Science fiction lately has been dominated by postapocalyptic, dystopian futures: environmental desolation, runaway nanotechnology, AI overlords, genetic discrimination, and the death of privacy. When did our utopian dreams stagger into an alleyway, drunk on hubris, only to be mugged by our diminished expectations?

It’s enough to make one pull up the blankets and dream of a better world, one where precision medicine is ubiquitous and inexpensive, and where personal, autonomous vehicles have eliminated traffic accidents and reduced urban congestion.

Fear not, there is hope. Hieroglyph: Stories and Visions for a Better Future is a collection of science-fiction short stories filled with positive visions of the future and anchored in foreseeable science and technology. The collection is an outgrowth of Arizona State University’s Center for Science and the Imagination, a partnership among science-fiction writers, scientists, and technologists that is predicated on the premise that “if we want to create a better future, we need to start with better dreams.”

Hieroglyph is a wonderful juxtaposition of call and response: speculative, hopeful fiction, followed by dispassionate, technical assessment. It is also a call to arms for those of us in higher education, encouraging us not only to dream of the future, but also to marshal our broad intellectual assets and build the better world we all yearn to see.