The full title of this article is “Podcast with Karen Lord: Science Fiction and the Future of Science: Long-Term Thinking in Policy-making;” to read full transcript and listen to the podcast of Karen Lord’s conversation with Paul Shrivastava, visit the International Science Council. Paul Shrivastava is professor of Management and Organizations at Pennsylvania State University, specializing in the implementation of sustainable development goals. Karen Lord is a Barbadian writer of speculative fiction. She is known for her debut novel Redemption in Indigo, which won the 2008 Frank Collymore Literary Award, the 2010 Carl Brandon Parallax Award, the 2011 William L. Crawford Award, the 2011 Mythopoeic Fantasy Award for Adult Literature, and the 2012 Kitschies Golden Tentacle (Best Debut).

In the podcast, Lord shares her view on the potential of science fiction to shape the future of science in the Centre for Science Futures’ new podcast series, in partnership with Nature. Here are excerpts of the article and transcript.

Scientists and researchers increasingly value science fiction for its contributions to anticipating future scenarios. As part of its mission to explore the directions in which changes in science and science systems are leading us, the Centre for Science Futures sat down with six leading science fiction authors to gather their perspectives on how science can meet the many societal challenges we will face in the next decades. The podcast is in partnership with Nature.

The second episode features the Barbadian writer Karen Lord, whose latest book, The Blue, Beautiful World, was published in August 2023. We heard from her the lessons from the COVID pandemic, short-termism, and the power of literature to reach through time.

Karen Lord is a writer renowned for her award-winning works including Redemption in Indigo, The Best of All Possible Worlds, and The Galaxy Game, she also serves as the editor of the anthology New Worlds, Old Ways: Speculative Tales from the Caribbean. Her most recent book, The Blue, Beautiful World, was published in August 2023. She is from Barbados, in the West Indies.

Transcript

[. . .] Paul Shrivastava 00:29: Today, I’m talking to Karen Lord, an award-winning Barbadian writer, whose latest novel, The Blue, Beautiful World, imagines the transformation of our world after first contact with aliens. Karen also writes on the sociology of religion, ethics and values. Our conversation touched on lessons from the COVID pandemic, short-termism, and the power of literature to reach through time. I hope you enjoy it.

Welcome, Karen. Thank you for being part of this project. Can you tell us a little bit more about your pathway and relationship with science and science fiction writing?

Karen Lord 01:16: So I grew up with science fiction, I grew up enjoying science fiction. My undergrad was a science degree, but specifically, it was history of science and technology. And at that point, I realized, well, maybe I can combine the sciences and the arts. My first master’s was in science and technology policy. After that, I did in fact manage to work for a while in our Ministry of Foreign Affairs. So it gave me an awareness of how you have to move the knowledge of the lab to the implementation within the real world, as it were.

Paul Shrivastava 01:44: You are sort of a rare person who had a science background and went into implementing science policies and engagement. But generally, it’s the politicians who get the results of science, and they forget about the ethical questions that the scientists might have struggled with. How do we get scientists to come out of their comfort zone, of doing the science, into the action zone, helping people like you who are in the bureaucracy or in the policy infrastructure?

Karen Lord 02:14: So I’m going to push back a little bit against what you’re saying, because you’re almost making it sound that scientists are the good guys, and the politicians or the policy makers are the bad guys. But sometimes, it’s flipped. When you have a scientist, you have someone who is focused in a very particular field and may have a very narrow field of view, and may themselves be completely unaware as to how their discoveries can be expanded in ways that they may not have intended. So it’s definitely a conversation I think we need to be seeking. It’s a feedback in both directions.

[. . .] Paul Shrivastava 04:21: I want to push a little bit deeper into it in terms of lessons that we have not learned as a result of COVID. You go back now three years later, and the infrastructure has not evolved that much. We’ve moved on to the next crisis. So how do we learn the lesson?

Karen Lord 04:41: We basically have a situation, so many countries where a political term is four to five years. And I think that you do have an ethos of short-term thinking, but you’re not coming across people who are thinking, like, what do I need to put in place that’s useful for the country 50 years from now? What kind of structure do we have to build that’s about governance for the long-term, that looks at things much further down the line, that looks at what we need to do to maintain it?

You know, none of these things are easy answers, but I do like to think that they become a little easier if we come from a set of foundational principles. I’m using the term principle almost in a scientific sense now, not in a moral sense, not in a value-oriented sense. You don’t even have to attach a sense of altruism to it. It can really just be a case of, how do we make things more comfortable for everybody 100 years from now?

Paul Shrivastava 05:38: Yeah, that’s interesting. You brought out 50-years, 100-year time horizons. Even those are short compared to geological times that we are now starting to think about, the Anthropocene. So does science fiction have a role in kind of rethinking the time horizons that we live in?

Karen Lord 06:00: Well, science fiction’s been doing that for a very long time. We’ve always had, both for our near future, for our future, alien civilizations in the far distance, thought experiments of what it could be like, what it should be like.

One of the things that impresses me about literature, whether it is science fiction or poetry or anything, is that it is our one form of communication across the generations. I can pick up something that someone has written 200 years before, 500 years before, and it gives me a glimpse into what their hopes and fears for the future might’ve been. Sometimes, the mere fact of that is enough to shift the needle in your own head and think, well, if words can last this long, if words can have meaning this far from the originator, then what other things should I be looking at that also should have meaning further on from where I am right now? [. . .]

For full article, see https://council.science/current/blog/long-term-thinking-in-policymaking/