Here’s an interesting article I missed just before Christmas: ‘Tech Billionaires Need to Stop Trying to Make the Science Fiction They Grew Up on Real.’

Charles Stross’s piece in Scientific American argued that today’s Silicon Valley billionaires grew up reading classic science fiction – but now they’re fixated on trying to make it come true. The problem is not just whether any of this is possible, desirable, or where we should really be putting our efforts (colonies on Mars! Living in giant orbital space stations! Immortality!). To Stross, the real problem is that it embodies a dangerous political outlook.

Stross is a science fiction author himself, a multiple Hugo Award winner whose books include Accelerando and Halting State. But he sounds self-effacing about sci-fi: it’s not a branch of science that advances by experimental inquiry, but a form of popular entertainment that (typically) seeks a bigger audience by selling ideas.

Nonetheless, as he notes, science fiction is also a “profoundly ideological genre – it’s about much more than new gadgets or inventions.” Technologies (real or imagined), and the societies in which they are embedded, are inescapably political. They suggest priorities – which problems matter and which don’t, who makes decisions and who doesn’t, and who can afford them and who can’t.

And to Stross (and others), much of the sci-fi that by their own admission has inspired quite a few tech billionaires has some very worrying foundations – in anything-goes capitalism, technology treated as a quasi-religion, racism and colonialism, eugenics, and even fascism.

As Stross notes, it’s not that every sci-fi creator has a political agenda, rather that, as in any genre, there can be quite a lot of small ‘c’ conservatism, not to say copying, that transmits ideas down generations. Despite this, or because of it, “it leaves us facing a future we were all warned about, courtesy of dystopian novels mistaken for instruction manuals.”

‘Mistaken’, though? As I suggest in my new book, the dystopianism is exactly why these billionaires like the look of some of these futures. It’s not because they’ve forgotten the (often glaringly apparent) lessons of much dark future sci-fi. To the billionaires, these are not warnings but promises.

Of course Elon Musk et al. dream of a cyberpunk future – a world of untrammeled corporate power, private police forces and legal systems, and amazing technologies that are the playthings of the uber-rich (including ‘life extension’). Of course they welcome – or regard as normal, unremarkable, ‘natural’ – these futures of unremittingly gross inequality. And of course they regard these futures as achievable, even inevitable (ironically, at the same time they often bemoan socially-critical sci-fi as being ‘too pessimistic’).

But their futures don’t have to be ours, even if some aspects of the future might be unavoidable. Science fiction can indeed act as a guide – but not a guidebook.

Come With Me If You Want To Live: The Future as Foretold in Classic Sci-Fi Films, is out now from Lexington Books. You can read more about it here.