(2023-04-26) Scalzi The Big Idea Cory Doctorow

John Scalzi: The Big Idea: Cory Doctorow. For years, Cory Doctorow has carved one of the most idiosyncratic paths in the genre of science fiction and fantasy

So it’s no surprise that his new novel Red Team Blues combines elements of both for something new and exciting in his canon

Marty Hench isn’t a typical private eye. His origin story is intensely science fictional, because it is intimately bound up in the story of the spreadsheet – the most science fictional technology most of us will use in any given day.

That’s the seductive power of the spreadsheet: it’s a tool for asking what if? With just a little training, anyone can use a spreadsheet to build a model of some real-world phenomenon, from an ecosystem to a convenience store, from a lemonade stand to a retirement savings plan.

Change a box and all the numbers dance in their gridwork of faint gray lines, and the future is revealed, with a terrible and false precision. Terrible and false because the model is a model, it’s not the world, and each of those sharp figures and formulae obscures a fuzzy, squishy set of assumptions, guesses and elisions. The model can suggest, it can guide – but it cannot predict.

The future is up for grabs. That’s the point of science fiction: not to predict the future, but to inspire it, or ward it off.

Likewise, a spreadsheet can help inform guesses or inspire strategies, but woe betide the person who takes the spreadsheet for the future, the map for the territory.