“We don’t give them a manual, we don’t send them home for three weeks to study,” says James Blake, head of the U.S. Army Program Executive Office for Simulation, Training and Instrumentation. “We just put them in the environment, put the device on them, and exercise.”
“We get kids who come in with unrealistic views of the Army because of Call of Duty,” Hill says, referring to Activision Blizzard’s popular video game franchise. “You’re not going to come in here and run around like you’re in a one-man war.”
On the occasion of the 30th anniversary of his landmark novel "Neuromancer," CHF favorite William Gibson returns to the Festival. This autumn he’ll celebrate the publication of his latest work, "The Peripheral," a high-tech thriller set partly in a decadent postapocalyptic future. Gibson is joined in conversation by author Carol Anshaw.
Microsoft, Google, Apple and other firms have sponsored lecture series in which science fiction writers give talks to employees and then meet privately with developers and research departments. Perhaps nothing better demonstrates the close tie between science fiction and technology today than what is called “design fiction”—imaginative works commissioned by tech companies to model new ideas. Some corporations hire authors to create what-if stories about potentially marketable products.
“I really like design fiction or prototyping fiction,” says novelist Cory Doctorow, whose clients have included Disney and Tesco. “There is nothing weird about a company doing this—commissioning a story about people using a technology to decide if the technology is worth following through on. It’s like an architect creating a virtual fly-through of a building.” Doctorow, who worked in the software industry, has seen both sides of the development process. “I’ve been in engineering discussions in which the argument turned on what it would be like to use the product, and fiction can be a way of getting at that experience.”