Project Hieroglyph aims to instill 'thoughtful optimism'

In a recent article for Future Tense, Ed Finn, director of the Center for Science and Imagination at Arizona State University, explains why positive science fiction stories are important for our future.

Co-editor of Project Hieroglyph, an initiative that aims to break science fiction writers’ addiction to the negative, Finn laments, “Every new book and movie is about the world ending catastrophically or, even worse, not ending and staggering on into some horrific post-apocalyptic hell-scape. And at the same time … we seem to have also lost our ambition to do big new stuff.”

Both the Center for Science and the Imagination and Project Hieroglyph are Finn’s response to this troubling, dystopian view of the future. Through them, he hopes to instill a sense of “thoughtful optimism” in today’s thinkers and leaders.

“I like to think of Project Hieroglyph as science-fiction about the present,” says Finn, “stuff that we could do now if we simply set our minds to it.”