technology doesn't arise in a vacuum

April 1, 2018 6:49 PM

I'm looking for short works of speculative fiction or anthropology that discuss how society and nature shape technology. Ideally, they should address this question: how do different kinds of social norms, cultures, laws, physical environments, and biologies influence what science or technology is developed in the first place, and how it is adopted?

Traditionally, a story would start with a recognizable model of social culture in a similar universe, with all the same physical and moral laws as ours, etc., then Suddenly, Technology Descends From The Sky! and examine how the world changes for the worse. (Looking at you, Black Mirror.)

I am specifically looking for stories that invert or complicate that trope by examining how different organisms in different settings will shape their technologies differently in the first place, and how the lack of certain social structures may mean that certain technologies don't take root or are adopted in unexpected ways. The different settings don't have to be radically weird or invented from scratch: it could be simply in a different place and time on Earth, e.g. Antarctica in the 1700s compared to China in the 1900s compared to Sumeria 3000 BC. If the work discusses the feedback loop between society/nature and technology, rather than a one-way relationship, that's even better.

I've read a good amount of sci-fi and spec fic and nothing comes immediately to mind. I'm familiar with the works of Asimov, Card, Dick, Lem, Gibson, Stephenson, Le Guin, Chiang, Borges, Bradbury, and Pullman, and I think Le Guin's work and Pullman's work are probably the best fit, e.g. the wheel-technologies of the mulefa are a function of their skeletal structure. I haven't read Haraway but think she might be relevant.

Nonfiction is very welcome—I am not very familiar with the history/anthropology/sociology literature but one thing that comes to mind is the famous paper on the Nacirema.

Since I'm short on time, I'd prefer short stories/papers or novellas, but books are also fine. Specific and striking quotes from these works would be absolute gold.

posted by icosahedron to Society & Culture (8 answers total)

You could try the Sleepless Trilogy by Nancy Kress. The middle novel and last novels, Beggars and Choosers and Beggar's Ride, might address your parameters.

Beggars and Choosers centers around the introduction of new, unfathomable technology to normal people by genetically engineered supergeniuses. Beggars Ride centers around how that technology changed and radically altered society, and what happens when that technology is inexplicably withdrawn.
posted by Crystal Fox at 7:44 PM on April 1, 2018 [2 favorites]

Best answer: Check out afrofuturism. Nnedi Okafor has written a number of relevant short stories. The Mother of Invention comes to mind first.
posted by ChuraChura at 11:07 PM on April 1, 2018 [1 favorite]

Best answer: Maybe too contemporary, but how about the widespread adoption of mobile payments in China (and Kenya) because credit cards never took root?
posted by batter_my_heart at 11:25 PM on April 1, 2018

Best answer: In the Kim Stanley Robinson novel "The Years of Rice and Salt," the Black Death is far more virulent and lethal, and wipes out 99% of Europe, taking with it what we now call Western Culture. The book follows progress of the remaining people, cultures, and nations, to speculate about which familiar movements of people, technologies, and so on, take place in lieu of European expansion and the European Renaissance and Enlightenment, etc. Interesting read with a long timespan.
posted by Sunburnt at 12:37 AM on April 2, 2018 [1 favorite]

In Children of Time by Adrian Tchaikovsky, there's a whole planet of sentient spiders who develop technology that's quite different from ours, based on a lot of chemistry rather than electronics (at least at first).
posted by signal at 5:01 AM on April 2, 2018

The Dandelion Throne series (first book is "The Grace of Kings") by Ken Liu is a perfect example. The author describes the genre of his creation as "silkpunk."
posted by adamrice at 7:33 AM on April 2, 2018

Best answer: It's been too long since I've read these works to know which chapters to suggest to you, but two classic Science and Technology Studies collections from the 1980s and early 1980s come to mind:
Shaping Technology/Building Society, 1992, edited by Wiebe Bijker and John Law (link is to a paywalled review by Thomas Gieryn)
The Social Construction of Technological Systems, 1987, edited by Bijker, Hughes, and Pinch.

These works came out of increasing interest in the sociology of science and technology in the 1980s, and are widely cited in the subsequent science studies/science and technology studies literature.

Haraway could be useful to you, but I'm not sure she'd have the kind of case studies you're interested in.

As for anthropology, maybe follow some citations out from Bryan Pfaffenberger's 1992 Annual Review of Anthropology piece on the anthropology of technology. The essay itself is also excellent.
posted by col_pogo at 1:26 PM on April 2, 2018

Best answer: Jared Diamond's 'Guns, Germs and Steel' seems to be the definitive non-fiction work on the relationship between the environment and human technology. He explores in great depth how the crops available to Europeans (via the fertile crescent in the Middle East) meant that farmers could support more than just themselves, giving rise to bureaucrats, soldiers and inventors. Thus Europeans had time to play around and invent steel, which Papua New Guineans (for example) couldn't do because their casava production necessitated everyone being a farmer. The large herbivores in Eurasia gave rise to pastoral agriculture, and thus germs like smallpox, which meant Europeans could wipe out Native Americans and Aboriginal Australians more quickly, because those peoples hadn't built up immunity to animal-borne microbes.

The environmental advantages of Europeans are then drawn together in an account of the Spanish's defeat of the Inca empire, and Diamond shows how the plants and animals available to Europeans made them unbeatable even when faced with much, much larger armies. There's a great documentary version available in full on Youtube if you want to check that out before you commit to the book.
posted by matthew.alexander at 2:27 PM on April 2, 2018