Better Business Through Sci-Fi
Why are C.E.O.s and military leaders paying novelists to imagine the future for them?
Illustration by Mark Pernice
About five years ago, Ari Popper enrolled in a course on science-fiction
writing at the University of California, Los Angeles, hoping to distract
himself from the boredom of his day job as the president of a
market-research company. “It was, like, the best ten weeks of my life,”
Popper told me recently. “But I knew I wasn’t going to pay the bills as
a science-fiction writer.” Still, the course gave him an idea: since
businesses often spend money trying to predict how the world will
change, and since speculative fiction already traffics in such
predictions, perhaps one could be put in service of the other—corporate
consulting through sci-fi narratives. Soon, Popper quit his job, moved to a smaller house*, and launched his own firm, SciFutures. Today, his network of a hundred or so authors writes customized stories for the likes of Visa,
Ford, Pepsi, Samsung, and NATO. Popper calls their work “corporate
visioning.”
A company that monetizes literary imagination might itself seem like a
dystopian scenario worthy of Philip K. Dick. “There can be a little
tension,” Trina Phillips, a full-time writer and editor at SciFutures,
acknowledged. The authors’ stories, she added, which range in length
from a few hundred to several thousand words, are “not just marketing
pieces, but sometimes we have to pull back or adjust to accommodate a
brand.” She and Popper have found that clients generally prefer happy
endings, though unhappy ones are permissible if the author also proposes
a clear business strategy for avoiding them. Rarely is there room for
off-topic subplots or tangential characters. Phillips mentioned one
story that initially featured a kangaroo running amok in a major North
American city. The client, a carmaker, asked that the marsupial be
removed.
One spectre that appears often in the stories is the “dematerialization”
of shopping. “The prospect of removing all friction from shopping is
very frightening for companies that rely on consumers coming into the
store and being swayed by packaging and pricing,” Popper said. He
expects that, in the next decade, artificial-intelligence programs will
do an increasing share of home shopping, often without any direct human
supervision. They will keep track of inventories; negotiate prices for
goods such as garbage bags, dog food, and groceries; and order new
products on behalf of consumers. Companies that market directly to A.I.
software, rather than to humans, might gain a competitive advantage.
Popper showed me an illustrated story written for a candy manufacturer.
It imagines consumers touring a chocolate factory and donning
virtual-reality headsets so that they can experience firsthand the
sustainable growing practices of the cacao farmers and the humane
treatment of workers along the company’s supply chain. After the tour,
the smiling consumers return home, download a patented recipe for the
company’s chocolate bars, and use 3-D printers to print the treats. The
moral of the story seemed to be that, despite technological changes that
could harm a candymaker—wouldn’t it be cheaper and easier to 3-D-print a
generic candy bar?—the company would remain relevant far into the
future. Very little about the characters, from their fawning interest in
product narratives to their total devotion to the company’s particular
formula, was plausible.
One of SciFutures’s more prominent contributors is Ken Liu, a Hugo
Award-winning author and the translator of the popular Chinese
science-fiction novel “[The Three-Body
Problem](https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00IQO403K/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?_encoding=UTF8&btkr=1).”
Liu told me that he relishes the level of influence that the firm
offers. “As a freelancing gig, it’s not much money,” he said; typically,
stories pay a few hundred dollars. “But you have the chance to shape and
impact the development of a technology that matters to you. At a
minimum, you know that your story will be read by an executive, somebody
who’s actually able to decide whether to invest money and develop a
product.” Liu dismissed the notion that writing science fiction for
corporate clients compromised something essential about the genre. “I’m
not a big fan of this vision of the artist as some independent, amazing
force for good,” he said. “Everybody writes in a context for an
audience.”
The audience that gives SciFutures writers the most freedom to imagine
negative outcomes is, not surprisingly, the military. “Those stories can
be grittier,” Phillips said. “They already do a lot of
worst-case-scenario planning.” Last year, she and her colleagues
produced thirteen stories that were read and discussed in a workshop for
forty senior officials from a range of NATO member countries. One
involves a “smart gun” that gets hacked, nearly causing a massacre of
civilians. Another, told from the perspective of a twelve-year-old girl
in Uruguay, describes a group of child soldiers around the world who
shoot targets through an online gaming site without realizing that the
game is real: they are operating drones and other remote weapons that
kill enemies of the Russian government. (Readers familiar with Orson Scott Card’s novel “[Ender’s
Game](http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2010/09/20/the-face-of-facebook),”
from 1985, may notice some similarities.) A
third story follows a member of a Chinese “Fear Battalion,” a group of
soldiers who have been genetically modified to emit a pheromone that
induces terror in anyone who smells it.
Popper began working with NATO after meeting Mark Tocher, a
defense-planning analyst and retired Canadian Air Force officer, at a
conference. “The military is always accused of fighting the last war,”
Tocher told me. “This was one way of expanding our strategic thinking
about the future.” Yet some of the stories demonstrate how fiction can
fall short of reality. In one of them, written before the 2016
Presidential election, a concerted Russian propaganda campaign enflames
an uprising in Estonia by inundating online networks with fake news. The
story ends with a NATO operative injecting “truth bombs” into the
social-media stream, trusting that people will recognize and respond to
accurate information, effectively neutralizing the Russian meddling.
“Civilian know-how and willingness to participate were going to win this
fight long before they needed to bring tanks in,” the main character
thinks. “The best deterrent to conflict was truth.”
*An earlier version of this article incorrectly stated that Popper sold his house prior to starting SciFutures.