Perhaps the best way I can interpret Collins' "Sail On! Sail On!: Anthropology, Science Fiction, and the Enticing Future" is the reflect on my own encounters with anthropology and science fiction.
I like science, I started as a chemical engineer, switched to systems engineering, considered majoring in biology, and now am double majoring in math and anthropology. I'm considering graduate school in some area related to math, whether pure, applied, biostatistics, systems engineering, or something of the sort. I've also taken art classes in the past, both as a hobby, and because the epistemological nature of art differs greatly from that of STEM subjects. I also greatly enjoy a lot of science fiction. I honestly have no idea what I would like to do as a career. Mostly I'm doing math in order to have a particular discipline, but how I would like to apply it I have no idea, and this decision seems so much harder when today's world is so inter-disciplinary. All I know is that I would like to 1) contribute to human knowledge 2) contribute to social progress 3) write a novel 4) pursue a healthy and fruitful life.
Collins' article thus struck a cord with me as I've always wondered why I found that I like anthropology, when I really have no affinity for history, philosophy, economics, literature, etc. I always thought that it was a combination of wanting to understand the human condition, wanting to expand my cultural horizons, and because the patterns of human phenomena manifested in society and culture pose interesting complex problems to study (science is the study of patterns in natural phenomena, while math is the study of patterns themselves (which is probably why I like math but hate anything computational)). And moreover, I like the anthropology that deals with contemporary and emergent human phenomena over reconstructing the past. Thus the idea Collins proposes that Anthropology and Science Fiction are in a way related, and that SF is in many ways a means by which to conduct anthropological or ethnographic experiments and thought experiments resonated very powerfully. It was one of those light bulb moments in which you immediately grasp onto the idea. It was something I had not ever realized, even though I had considered science fiction to be the genre of understanding hard to dissect ideas such as those of the human condition, precisely because by playing with the rules, we come to understand their consequences. And while I agree that human imagination is far less creative than nature itself (evolution creates life far more interesting than human imagination could ever conceive of), the use of such speculation in anthropological studies is I think a very powerful tool in dissecting our anthropological preconceptions, hypotheses, and theories. Not least of which because our ideas of the future ultimately shape how that future unfolds, even if our actual future does not resemble what we imagined at all (still no flying cars!).
I was pleasantly surprised, yet in retrospect I should have expected, that many science fiction writers have anthropological backgrounds.
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