The Future Engine: How Science Fiction Catalyzes Technology and Transforms Society

Science fiction has long been a source of uncredited inspiration to inventors and entrepreneurs, even just from books. Now that science fiction has mutated into graphic novels that become movies, and $500 million movies become global events, and the Air Force is advertising that if you join up, you’ll be bringing science fiction to life, what can we expect the impact on our culture to be? Science fiction to Americans is like water to a fish: so all pervasive as to be almost invisible. This talk will make the case for science fiction as the solution of most problems, and the lack of awareness of what science fiction actually is as the source of most problems.

Alex Lightman is the author of The Future Engine: How Science Fiction Catalyzes Business and Technology, to be published in 2010, and over 800,000 words mostly about technology and the future. He was invited by the Producers Guild to come up with guidelines for how producers of content other than movies and television could become official Hollywood producers, based on his pioneering work creating over 90% of the science fiction websites for Hollywood, and 90% of the Internet 3D sites, in the first six years of Hollywood studio websites. His projects have included Babylon 5 (the first official fan site), The Fifth Element, Titanic, Mortal Kombat, Blade, Xena, Lost in Space, and dozens of others. His Spawn 3D site won the Entertainment and Grand Prize categories of the only SGI web contest as well as “Best Avatar”. He is the Executive Director of Humanity+ and writes regularly for H+ magazine. 

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