As Ballard said, fiction does not exactly predict or influence reality, but invents it by participating in it.Ĭapitalism itself could be thought of as a hyperstition: the financial system is based on future speculation that it invokes or invents in order to justify itself. The Cybernetic Cultures Research Unit coined the term “hyperstition” to describe this process of fictional elements that make themselves real by writing themselves into history, or rewriting history. I think of what I write less as dystopian and more as dislocative.” I love this idea of dislocative fiction, that shakes the present moment loose so you can look at its constituent parts. The author Omar El Akkad said in an interview: “I’m not as interested in the question of whether the ideas at the root of my fiction could happen, so much as I am with the fact that, for many people in this world, they already have. For all their great deeds and accomplishments, could they accept the reality of this machine? Could they believe that a few thousand years after their faded glory, humans would travel further in a few days than they did in their entire lives? I imagined their shocked expressions and looks of wonder. You just twist this and water comes out of the pipe, see? Have you ever moved this fast in your life?” No, it doesn’t know how to fight in a war. “Yes, this iron dragon is more powerful than a hundred elephants. I fantasized about what it would be like if a great hero of the past, say, Hannibal of Carthage or Emperor Wu of the Han Dynasty, were transported to my train and I had to act as their tour guide. To entertain myself, I walked from one end of the train to the other, watching the scenery sweeping by the windows: old villages, new industrial towns, woods, grasslands, fields filled with neat rows of crops like Lego studs, mountains in the distance keeping pace with us.

When I was seven or eight, I went on a long train trip with my grandparents.

Dear Cyborgs by Eugene Lim