Introduction to the 1992 LITA President's Program

Science fiction's main goal is generally not to predict the future but to extrapolate on the present; however, it is almost a media cliche anymore to hear that science fiction has just turned into fact again. We have gone to the moon, we do have robots, and, yes, we are rapidly becoming cyborgs as we attach ourselves to a panoply of robotic gadgets: artificial hearts, livers, limbs, and a host of biosensors. The TV character who starred in The Six Million Dollar Man was essentially a cyborg. Although most of us are the couple hundred dollar model, it won't be long (especially given the proclivities of the American medical profession) before many of us will become progressively more expensive cyborgs.

Even though science fiction spent its adolescence in the ghetto of the pulp magazines, shunned by the arbiters of highbrow taste, it, not unlike the field of librarianship, came to a quick maturity as the Information Age unceremoniously catapulted both professions front and center onto the world stage of an increasingly New Order. Science fiction has intersected mainstream culture and has become a "mode of awareness," a significant way of conceptualizing our cultural condition.

Like librarianship, science fiction finds itself in a privileged position. It, more than any other genre, mirrors and engages the technological culture which is coming to pervade every aspect of human society. Today we are honored to have with us three of the most outstanding representatives of this cultural dialectic, one that will take us to the edge of technology--and hopefully to freedom.

Hans Moravec is the world's foremost mobile roboticist. He has suggested that we are disappearing into our machines. "We are," he has stated, "very near the time when virtually no essential human function, physical or mental, will lack an artificial counterpart." Since the brain is an extraordinary processor of information, we may be able to "download" it into robotic bodies. Immortality, maybe; stupid robots, guaranteed. Imagine the power of gods before us. Hans has explored that territory and will share with us his adventures.

Bruce Sterling has been called the Robin Hood of the Data Forest. Often speaking for the Unspeakable, he has sounded the call about exploitation, commodification, and downright treachery on the Electronic Frontier. Providing much of the philosophical underpinnings of the "cyberpunk movement," Bruce is an expert on the denizens of cyberspace, that computer-generated reality that opens ever further the human imagination--for good or ill. When law only protects the powerful, the vested interests, the franchised wealthy, some champion of necessity is coughed up from the streets to stir the rag-tag throng into less than passive acceptance.

David Brin has synthesized an enormous amount of fact and knowledge from numerous fields, rolled it into a ball about the size of the earth, and put many of our brains into a conceptual spin. David has called science fiction writers "the little literary cabal who form the R&D division of the Department of Myths and Legends of the new culture. We are scouts, the ones who explore the edges, who point out dangers that may lurk, not just on the horizon but perhaps some distance beyond it. We warn of possible mistakes and create chilling scenarios to make them mythically believable. And in so doing, we hope to prevent them from coming true." He also has the vision of an optimist who thinks we are capable of more wisdom than folly... maybe a bit more hope than despair.