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What's your favourite Science Fiction book/TV series/movie/anime/other?
1 min read · Oct 11, 2022
I don't think it is a wild guess to say that many EAs have a more or less strong interest in science fiction. I want to spark this interest even more by starting with an unstructured question about our favourite pieces of sci-fi. If motivated enough I may also write something to justify why I think that engaging with sci-fi is not only pleasurable but also extremely useful.
I liked Dr. Stone and Madoka Magica. The first one is pretty good at being entertainment that also occasionally happens to teach you about practical science concepts and the impacts of new technology, and the latter thinking about what we value and why.
Overlord makes me think about AI a lot. Having a bunch of undead soldiers that can do stuff like farm 24/7 without getting tired or needing to eat is kind of like having robots that can automate work. It also completely unbalances the world economy. And having a bunch of powerful servants who were created to be loyal but don't know their master's goals leads to a lot of unexpected and sometimes pretty bad situations for people. As well as the fear that they might defect if they do learn the goals and disagree.
A lot of people like Serial Experiments Lain but it kind of went over my head when I watched it back in the day. Maybe I'll give it another try.
I just answered a similar question on another post before realizing the post was over a year old and pretty quiet. But yeah, the main takeaway is that I second Dr. Stone, I've written about its connection to EA a couple times at this point, and while it's not my favorite piece of science fiction, or even probably my favorite anime, I think it is a good fun show that's unusually relevant to EA.
Oh your post is probably what got it on my radar then - thanks!
Oh wow, I'm glad to hear it!
What would you say is your favorite scifi or anime?
Both are pretty difficult. With anime in particular there are plenty I like isolated things about, but my favorite all things considered is probably just a really well done one overall like Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood or Deathnote. As for science fiction broadly, for a long time my favorite novel was Daniel Keyes' Flowers for Algernon, though I haven't read it in a while. The Dispossessed by Le Guin comes to mind as a very well done one too, but I'm leaning more towards Frankenstein lately, which is more personal because I wrote my capstone on it, and its connections to my current ethical interests. Short fiction is probably easier, my favorite short story is probably Thirteen Ways of Looking at Space/Time by Catherynne M Valente, which is sort of science fiction.
FMAB is pretty widely liked. It used to be my favorite, but nowadays I think I put more emphasis on things that change the way I think. It has been a long time since I watched it though so I might change my mind if I rewatched.
Frankenstein makes me think about AI as well since it's all about creating something with greater capabilities than a human.
I've been meaning to read The Dispossessed. Will have to check out those other ones.
I more or less agree with that on FMAB, I think it’s a really well done show, but didn’t significantly change the way I think. As a rule most of the anime I’ve seen has some sort of serious flaws in execution or content, much of the appeal I get from anime is shows that are somewhat more unique in their strengths but also have more weaknesses, like Dr Stone. FMAB is unusually well executed which makes it sort of easier to point to as the overall best, it is just a basically strong story, even though I probably enjoy shows like Dr Stone better as a rule.
I think Frankenstein does connect to AI writing, and that may be the genre it’s had the most overall influence on, but personally I think the connection between this and current AI issues is fairly weak and may have taught the genre some of the wrong lessons. I connect it more directly to animal rights actually. The philosophical connection is pretty clear, because most contemporary animal rights arguments start with the rejection of the moral importance of mere species membership.
This is played out in the content to some extent as well, for instance the creature is canonically a vegetarian or vegan,
“My food is not that of man; I do not destroy the lamb and the kid, to glut my appetite; acorns and berries afford me sufficient nourishment.”
and even plausibly a utilitarian,
“I felt the greatest ardour for virtue rise within me, and abhorrence for vice, as far as I understood the signification of those terms, relative as they were, as I applied them, to pleasure and pain alone.”
(sorry I don’t have page numbers, I’m working from Project Gutenberg), and there are various other points in this and other pieces of Shelley’s work that hint at care for animals.
There is also circumstantial evidence for this concern, her husband Percy Shelley, along with her deceased mother Mary Wollstonecraft whom she idolized, were both concerned with animal rights. She even had some indirect connections to the philosophical radicals via her utilitarian father and her writing for the Westminster Review. There has been some replication of the anti-speciesism of Frankenstein in subsequent science fiction, but rarely with much interest in even vague connection to animals, so it is actually my personal opinion that science fiction ran with Frankenstein on the AI angle too much, and ran with it on the anti-speciesism angle too little.
Sorry, I can talk about some of this stuff too much when pressed, and think it can sometimes be unwelcome. I was tempted to make an even longer comment that went into the other pieces I recommended a bit, but I think I’m taking up too much oxygen in this comments space. Feel free to DM if you had anything more you wanted to discuss related to this though.
Oh yeah that makes sense, I agree. Yeah, FMAB is often a good "first anime" to recommend since it does lots of things pretty well.
I'm really curious, how would you improve Dr. Stone? I think it could be improved but I'm not overflowing with ideas on how to do it at the moment.
Oh, I forgot about him being vegetarian. I think the reason the AI angle is more popular is because of how much more similar he seems to be to humans than animals. There are so many qualities people think of as being human capabilities/behavior that he does even if not all of them are 100% human monopolies. Talking, walking on two feet, planning, reasoning, taking strong moral stances, etc.
I think it's also harder to tell a story about animals without anthropomorphizing them into something else whereas with AI we don't really know the possibilities so you can kind of do anything easily.
Hmm I don't think it matters - we're the only ones keeping this post afloat right now. But we can if you want.
If you think it’s alright, I wouldn’t mind continuing the conversation here, though feel free to jump in and tell me if it bothers you Luca.
On the point of Dr Stone’s flaws, I don’t think it is incredibly flawed overall, there are other animes I like, including much more popular ones like Attack on Titan and Demon Slayer, which I think are significantly more flawed. I mostly just think that FMAB is an outlier in its polish, and is well executed beyond this. I think many of the things I think of as Dr Stone’s flaws are fairly minor in the grand scheme, for instance Senku can be even more obnoxious about his intelligence than HPMOR Harry, to the point of coming off as pretty mean to his best friend sometimes, though this improves a bit over time. There are also pretty overused catchphrases like “10 billion”, “this is bad”, and Gen’s pig latin that get annoying. Maybe more substantially there are moments of distractingly inconsistent rigor/rationality, for instance the stone wars arc when they spend months on making a cell phone only to make a passable tank as an afterthought. Again though, I like Dr Stone, and although it comes off to me as rougher around the edges, I don’t think it’s egregiously flawed.
On the point of Frankenstein, I think that the connection to animal rights and AI is pretty similar overall, the creature is both literally an artificial intelligence and literally a non-human animal, but bears little resemblance to how either is portrayed elsewhere in fiction and serious discussions. Cynically, the reason the animal rights connection didn’t take off might have something to do with the animal rights being less popular. Less cynically, writing about AI was more unique at the time than writing about non-humans, so it left a deeper impression. Either way, I think both provide worthwhile readings, even if I prefer the animal rights one.
Thanks for sharing. Yeah, I can see what you mean - Senku can be a bit annoying. I think that also makes him a more realistic character too, though maybe they overdo it a bit at times. I found Gen's syllable switching (like saying the second half first) on certain words really grating and it seemed to come out of nowhere. I didn't remember him doing that at the beginning. I think it would be super cool to try and make more stories like Dr. Stone where it's entertainment but also learning real stuff is a tool the characters use to progress the plot.
Oh, that's an interesting point about the tech. I think the phone was more important since they needed to use it earlier and it was key to their plan for trying to win without killing, but they could have been in trouble if they ran out of time.
Those are probably both true. I'm kind of surprised sometimes when I see people who don't care about animal rights at all. To me it seems like it would make it likelier/easier to dismiss other forms of suffering too. Both individually and as a society. I remember some research indicating a connection between specieism and other forms of prejudice but I'm not sure how much that link has been explored. Maybe more stories about animals would help.
If I recall the cellphone mostly had a substantial role in the war when Gen pretended to be Lillian, which I don't think was part of that plan from the beginning, and doesn't seem like it was a priori all that likely to work. This might be a nit pick, but it's just still hard for me to see a realistic strategy in which spending all that time on a cellphone was worth skipping out on any other technology they could have used that time to make, even for a peaceful resolution. I kind of see that part as having just been to show off how you could make such an advanced technology with such primitive resources, which is cool but sticks out without some better in-canon justification.
Also, is this roughly what you were thinking of with the overlap between animal rights and human rights?
Yeah I can see what you mean - they could have taken a less flashy and more straightforward approach. It would be interesting to think about what else they could have made or done with what they made instead that might have been better.
Yes - I didn't think about looking at how humane laws for people correlate with animals though. That's really interesting.
Do you write fiction at all?
No not really, I haven’t written any fiction in a long while, I mostly just blog now. And you?
I have some ideas and I'm starting to flesh them out so yeah!
Nice! I'm pretty busy right now so I can't guarantee efficiency, but feel free to send me any outlines/drafts if you would like feedback.
Oh thanks! I think I will once I get them a bit more organized.