The team
@AlterMagIndia is creating a desi technoptimism magazine and I couldn’t be more excited.
I’ve always held a certain reverence for scifi as a medium. I consider it a fundamentally important pursuit. Let me explain:
As humans, we’ve crafted stories about every bit of the experience of being alive. Adventures and struggle, lands and oceans, wars and voyages. Real and fictional. We wrote about the past and the present, the shape of history and how we all got to where we are.
But we didn’t write much about the future.
It’s only a century ago, that we as a species had expanded our technological capabilities enough that we started wondering - where does this all go.
Sure there were stories of voyages to the moon or mythological space creatures, but they always leaned more fiction than science till that point.
But as recently as a century ago, we began writing in earnest, about where things go as our technological capabilities rapidly expanded, and we started on this exponent. Suddenly we were speaking about galactic empires and brain interfaces, machine men and automatons, fusion spaceships and healing tanks.
We became so much more ambitious as a species.
The futures we wrote directly shaped it into existence. We know because we live in it. With selfdriving cars and space stations, surgery robots and lunar landers, nuclear reactors and speaking computers. And a couple dozen robots sprinkled around the solar system right now. None of this is normal. Give it reverence for a second.
Scifi is a fundamentally important pursuit because it lets you imagine better futures without some asshole ruining it with the current turmoil of earthly problems. Cause yk, it’s fiction, back off.
Just solving for that clever little problem yeilds so much insight into what a brilliant future could look like, and what it’d take to create it.
Cultivating this lens and viewing the world through it has been a great source of pleasure for me. I consider it deeply important. And I believe we should spread it fervently.
To see scifi and technoptimsitic content from India, and seeing the stories being built right here told through that same lens, is really exciting. I’ll be tuning in.