Against Transcendence When technology appropriates the transcendental it becomes science fiction. By Jason Pontin Science fiction is to technology as romance novels are to marriage: a form of propaganda. Both recapitulate in narrative form the fondest illusions of the practitioners of a commonplace but difficult activity, and so contrive to make the ordinary seem exhilarating. Technologists spend their days devising novel solutions to discrete problems. The problems, if not the projects with which they are associated, are often boring. But in science fiction, technologists are heroic. The future is interesting because of the influence of technology. But most notably, in science fiction, technology always possesses a pseudoreligious quality. Technology, it is implied, will somehow allow us to transcend our ordinary, human selves. When the science fiction writer and journalist Bruce Sterling was asked why so many science fiction novels ended with their heroes transcending t
Life after the Academy