出版与作家生涯2017newyorker.com
大公司和军方花钱请小说家为他们写科幻
Big Companies and the Military Are Paying Novelists to Write Sci-Fi for Them
导读
这篇报道讲大公司和军方出资请小说家写科幻，用虚构叙事来预演未来、风险与战略。对写作者来说，它提醒我们：命题写作和委托写作也能产生好作品，关键是把约束转化为想象力的框架。
可以直接用的写作要点
- 01
委托写作并不等于失去创作自由：历史上企业约稿科幻常以广告、内刊或特定议题为载体，作者仍可在限定框架里完成有个人风格的故事。
- 02
遇到客户指定立场时，可以先写一个反命题版本，再写一个正面回应版本；阿西莫夫给IBM内刊的案例说明，客户最终可能反而选中更悲观的那一稿。
- 03
把反乌托邦/未来场景当作思考工具，而不仅是娱乐：它能暴露乐观偏差，逼出更多样、更有反思性的选题。
- 04
训练“未来战争/未来社会”式的世界构建能力，这种能力可以迁移到战略、研究和公共写作中。
HN 评论精选
委托写作常带着明确用途和立场，但作者仍能在命题内创作；客户甚至可能最终选择与初衷相反的版本。
企业委托创作故事由来已久。比如阿西莫夫的《My Son, The Physicist》就是一家电子公司委托、放在《科学美国人》广告里的；IBM内刊《Think》也曾约他写故事回应J.B. Priestley那段“未来数十亿人全被编号登记、没有天才和原创心灵”的噩梦，他写了《2430 A.D.》。有趣的是，《Think》先嫌它没有反驳原引文，阿西莫夫又写了《The Greatest Asset》来反驳，结果《Think》最后还是更喜欢第一篇，刊发了《2430 A.D.》。
tzs查看英文原文
Companies commissioning stories has gone on for a long time. For example, the Isaac Asimov story "My Son, The Physicist" was commissioned by an electronics company to run in an ad in "Scientific American". Another Asimov example. "Think", IBM's in-house magazine, commissioned Asimov to write a story based on this quote from J. B. Priestly: > Between midnight and dawn, when sleep will not come and all the old wounds begin to ache, I often have a nightmare vision of a future world in which there are billions of people, all numbered and registered, with not a gleam of genius anywhere, not an original mind, a rich personality, on the whole packed globe Asimov write the story "2430 A.D." about a world where Priestly's nightmare had come true. (The title comes from his estimate of when human population at its current growth rate would reach the point where the Earth had so many people that there were no resources left for non-human animals). The funny thing about this story is that "Think" rejected it, because they wanted a story that refuted the quotation. So Asimov wrote another story, "The Greatest Asset", that refuted Priestly, and sent that to "Think". "Think" then decided they liked the first story better and ran "2430 A.D."! I'm pretty sure that there was at least one other similar case with Asimov.
虚构未来战争的能力可以转化为现实战略分析，世界构建是一种可迁移的稀缺技能。
这让我想起一件事：《使命召唤》的首席编剧因为擅长想象未来战争，后来去了智库工作。
bbctol查看英文原文
Reminds of this story from a while ago: the head writer for Call of Duty switched to working at a think tank, given his experience imagining the future of warfare. http://foreignpolicy.com/2014/09/22/call-of-duty-star-video-game-director-takes-unusual-think-tank-job/
用反乌托邦叙事对抗乐观偏差，能把未来想象变成研究选题和公共表达的工具。
我们曾为软件工程研究提出类似做法：研究者容易对未来过度乐观，而明确用“悲观未来/反乌托邦”来框定研究，可以缓解乐观偏差，催生更多样、更发人深省的研究方向。论文用《太空堡垒卡拉狄加》《辐射3》《人类之子》三个流行文化反乌托邦说明，反思灾难场景既能带来研究机会，也能让研究更易被非专家理解，并与当下相关。
rahulpandita查看英文原文
We proposed something similar for the field of software engineering research. http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2983986 Pasting abstract here "Software engineering researchers have a tendency to be optimistic about the future. Though useful, optimism bias bolsters unrealistic expectations towards desirable outcomes. We argue that explicitly framing software engineering research through pessimistic futures, or dystopias, will mitigate optimism bias and engender more diverse and thought-provoking research directions. We demonstrate through three pop culture dystopias, Battlestar Galactica, Fallout 3, and Children of Men, how reflecting on dystopian scenarios provides research opportunities as well as implications, such as making research accessible to non-experts, that are relevant to our present."
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