Futures Imperfect

Paul Graham Raven

Column/Vector “Community” Special Issue 300

The longer I’ve sat with the assignment to write a column themed on community, the more daunting it has come to seem. This is, ironically, a personal problem: put very simply—and thus avoiding autobiographical sidequests—community is not something with which I am very well acquainted, and what acquaintance I have with it is tainted with distrust. Community has always shown itself to me as being concerned with who’s out as much as who’s in, if not perhaps more so; I thus tend to position community, from which one may be expelled, in contrast to the admittedly more abstract notion of society, of which one is a member by default (though one may of course be an unwilling and/or disenfranchised member of society).

Those who work with language face a perpetual dilemma in what we sometimes still call the ‘information age ’: on the one hand, words have meanings; on the other hand, meanings change with usage, and this process of semantic alteration (or evacuation) seems only to accelerate. In this particular case, I am rather stuck with “community,” but I can surface my discontent by suggesting a fresh distinction between community considered as a noun—a thing which one has or does not have—and community as a verb—a thing which one does, or in which one partakes.

(Readers who detect a Heraclitean distinction between being and becoming, respectively, are not imagining things; those whose philosophy tends more to the vernacular may prefer to think in terms of product and process.)

To be clear, I’m not out to position one or the other of these terms as being “the bad community;” indeed, that’s exactly the sort of monochromatic thinking that I’m trying to get away from in this piece. But I do want to highlight the way in which community-as-noun tends ineluctibly toward in-group-out-group dynamics, while community-as-verb puts the focus instead upon choices and compromises made in the face of constraints whose very commonality might conjure up the spectre of society which Margaret Thatcher once so successfully banished. More plainly, it seems to me that by paying more attention to what we are obliged to do, in the process of making, unmaking and remaking community through our actions, we might better recognise the greater societal ideal that community reproduces at a smaller and more limited scale.

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Applied Science Fiction

Definition: Applied science fiction is “science fiction that is trying to do something, to not only glimpse but also shape the future.” Jo Lindsay Walton

Vector 297 Futures is now available to download.

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The ‘Futures’ issue of Vector is a collaboration between the British Science Fiction Association and the Institute for Development Studies, guest-edited by Stephen Oram. Our biggest issue to date, it explores how the opportunities, risks and limitations of harnessing science fiction all depend on who is applying it and how. Vector: Futures is a treasure trove of projects that aim to use science fiction to change the real world, showcasing interventions from fields as diverse as statistics, military intelligence, social activism, climate policy, decision science, technology and art.

Several pieces consider milestones for artificial intelligence and creativity, including SF writer Fiona Moore interviewing AI scientist Hod Lipson, and AI scientist Mackenzie Jorgensen interviewing SF writer Eli Lee, while Paul March-Russell and Dilman Dila both reflect on positive examples of AI/artist collaborations. Other interviewees include Andrew Merrie and Pat Keys, two of the leaders of the Radical Ocean Futures project, and Shanice Da Costa, art director for UNHCR’s Innovation Service’s Project Unsung. Interventions by SF writers in environment, science and policy domains are the subject of several articles, including those by Allen Stroud, Emma Johanna Puranen, Benjamin Greenaway, Dillon & Craig, Finch & Mahon, Fredström et al. and Pereira et al. Sara Stoudt reflects on statistics as a kind of science fictional thinking. Articles by Seeger and Davison-Vecchione and by Will Slocombe gives the issue’s theme a further twist, exploring science fictional representations of forecasting and prediction, and how science fiction itself might shape our applied science fiction imaginaries. Vector: Futures also features regular BSFA favourites, including Kincaid in Short, and Vector Recommends (selections from The BSFA Review).

The editorial, ‘Torque Control: Apply Science Fiction Here’ scopes the ground for this issue, and for applied science fiction as a whole. Whether you’re a longtime science fiction fan or writer, or a policymaker, practitioner, researcher or organiser interested in the power of arts and culture, there should be something in this issue for you.

‘The Utmost Sail’ by Karel Janovický: A Neglected Czech SF Opera

By Cyril Simsa

My late father, the Czech composer and broadcaster, Karel Janovický – born Bohuš František Šimsa in Pilsen in 1930, but better known under the pseudonym he adopted in the 1950s to protect his parents, whom he had left behind in Communist Czechoslovakia, when he skipped the border during the Cold War – died in January 2024. He left behind a four-storey Victorian terrace in North London, crammed with music, books, and papers, including 250 or so classical compositions and a not inconsiderable personal archive.

It was in his papers that I found a booklet with the libretto of his one-act opera, The Utmost Sail, which he wrote in 1958 to an English-language text by another Czech émigré, Karel Brušák (1913-2004). The booklet is mimeographed, fanzine-style, so it is not a professional publication; but to anyone familiar with the history of fanzines or sf fandom, the format will be immediately recognisable, and I assume this is something that he or Brušák must have had printed for the benefit of future producers and performers at around the same time they were finishing the work itself.

Karel Janovický, Ludwigsburg refugee camp, Germany, ca. 1950

I had been long aware that my father had written an opera, and back in my teenage years, when I was at the height of my initial involvement with science fiction, he had even told me it was set on a spaceship. However, in the way children have of ignoring their parents, I had never actually seen a copy or read the text. And while I have still not seen a performance, the libretto can stand on its own as an interesting example of mid-20th Century European sf theatre.

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