# Science fiction gets mythology right more often than details

Markdown copy of https://realalpha.app/s/science-fiction-gets-mythology-right-more-often-than-details/ on Real Alpha, the best minutes from long interviews with the people building AI. Cite and link the page, not this copy.

- Speaker: [Ken Liu](https://realalpha.app/people/ken-liu/) · Author · Created the Dandelion Dynasty and “The Paper Menagerie,” the first fiction work to win Hugo, Nebula and World Fantasy Awards.
- Host: [Aditya Agarwal](https://realalpha.app/people/aditya-agarwal/) · General partner, South Park Commons · One of Facebook's first engineers, he helped build its first search engine; later CTO of Dropbox.
- Show: Minus One
- Episode: [AGI, Sci-Fi, & Storytelling | Neal Stephenson, Ken Liu, Cyan Banister, & Joscha Bach](https://realalpha.app/v/J7FN53FqB1U/), May 21, 2025
- Moment: 20:40 to 25:11 of the episode (5 min), playing on https://realalpha.app/s/science-fiction-gets-mythology-right-more-often-than-details/; the episode from there: https://realalpha.app/v/J7FN53FqB1U/?t=1240

## Quote

> “science fiction authors almost always get the future wrong in terms of the specifics, but they **get the mythology of it right**.”
> — [Ken Liu](https://realalpha.app/people/ken-liu/) at [20:43](https://realalpha.app/v/J7FN53FqB1U/?t=1243) · Minus One

## Takeaways

1. Technical predictions are hard because the future has many possible paths.
2. Science fiction works through myths, not just technical accuracy.
3. Stories can capture a shared human yearning about technology.

## About this segment

Ken Liu argues that science fiction often misses technical specifics but succeeds by expressing enduring myths about technology. That distinction explains how stories can shape the future without predicting it.

From “AGI, Sci-Fi, & Storytelling | Neal Stephenson, Ken Liu, Cyan Banister, & Joscha Bach”, May 21, 2025. [Watch the full episode](https://realalpha.app/v/J7FN53FqB1U/)

## Transcript

Transcribed by machine (Whisper) from the episode’s audio, so a word may be off here and there.

[20:43](https://realalpha.app/v/J7FN53FqB1U/?t=1243) I mean, the way I sort of say this is science fiction authors almost always get the future wrong in terms of the specifics, but they get the mythology of it right. So let me try to explain what that means. And I think, if anything, right, this almost 80 years worth of AI research has sort of been focused really on just answering Turing's original question, which is, can machines think? And at the time, what he said was, you can't really answer that question because we don't know what thinking means.

[21:16](https://realalpha.app/v/J7FN53FqB1U/?t=1276) So all we can do is to play this imitation game, and that's the best we can do. Now, the imitation game has over and over again revealed that what we call thinking is actually a whole bunch of different things put together, right? I mean, I think originally people thought it would be very hard to teach a computer to play chess and win. Turned out to be fairly easy, actually. Again, people thought it would be hard to teach computers to write sonnets and to write essays and to compose symphonies.

[21:48](https://realalpha.app/v/J7FN53FqB1U/?t=1308) Turned out to be somewhat easy. compared to other things that seem very simple for humans to do. So I think I was surprised, personally, because I had been led by a lot of sci-fi that I read into thinking that the ability to carry on a conversation about the world requires a sense of consciousness and awareness. In other words, thinking in the sense of having a conversation requires having self-awareness and consciousness.

[22:21](https://realalpha.app/v/J7FN53FqB1U/?t=1341) Turned out that was not true at all. You can have a machine that can have a conversation and think in that way without having consciousness or self-awareness or any of those things that sci-fi authors were obsessed with. So over and over again, right, our engagement with Turing's original question has peeled away layers of new kinds of thinking. People sometimes criticize this and say that, you know, those of us who say, well, machines are still not, quote unquote, thinking are moving the goalpost.

[22:51](https://realalpha.app/v/J7FN53FqB1U/?t=1371) Well, yes, that's the whole point. We don't know what the goal is until we try it. The goalpost needs to be moved. That's the whole point. There's no new thing to look at. The things that we can do are interesting, but the things that we want to do are even more interesting. So back to this question about creativity. I have lots of thoughts on this and we can get into it later. But fundamentally, my thinking here is it's entirely normal and actually very common for science fiction authors, regardless of how technical they are, to get the future wrong.

[23:25](https://realalpha.app/v/J7FN53FqB1U/?t=1405) Because the future is just very unpredictable. You know, we have this tendency to look back to the history of technology and say this is the only way it could have happened. Of course, that's not true. Any number of things could have happened. And a lot of times, the path we happen to end up on is, you know, just because of luck, blind luck, honestly. And so it's very hard for sci-fi authors to predict the future in that very technical, detailed sense, no matter how technical you are.

[23:56](https://realalpha.app/v/J7FN53FqB1U/?t=1436) But really good sci-fi authors are not interested. in getting the details right. If they want to write sci-fi that's actually interesting and influential and something that can be remembered, they have to remember that what they do fundamentally is myth-making. Sci-fi is nothing more than the newest province of that ancient empire called fantasy. That's what Le Guin says, and I fully agree with her.

[24:23](https://realalpha.app/v/J7FN53FqB1U/?t=1463) What sci-fi authors really do is we delve into the collective unconscious and excavate, if we're lucky, monsters and gods that will allow us to talk about technology, this language of technology, in a useful way. So Mary Shelley was not technical at all. And yet, she excavated one of the most potent gods of sci-fi ever. The creature is there lurking every conversation about technology. Her technical details are entirely wrong.

[24:58](https://realalpha.app/v/J7FN53FqB1U/?t=1498) And that is not interesting. What was interesting was that she got the mythology right. I would argue that all the sci-fi authors you actually enjoy and will keep on reading are the ones who got the mythology right.