men’s adventures, women’s confession magazines, sports stories, true crime, and other genres.

For 80 years, science fiction has been able to find and recruit fans, and to transform a few users into cultural producers. It also made enough money not to perish under capitalism. And under Communism, Soviet science fiction was a huge success. It was much more popular than Soviet industrial design, which was ghastly and is now extinct.

Below the professional level of for-profit publishing, the subculture of science fiction fans exploited early, DIY duplication technologies such as Gestetners and the hectograph. There were letter-writing campaigns, amateur press associations, local writers groups, regional science fiction conventions galore. One might even argue that contemporary Web culture looks and behaves much like 1930s science fiction fandom, only digitized and globalized.

This long-vanished situation was not idyllic—it took form within a specific set of infra-structural conditions. Early science fiction writers and editors imagined they were selling popular fiction about science and technology. They were mistaken. That was a user-interface artifact. The platform was selecting a fraction of the population willing to consume radically imaginary works through print; that demographic partially overlapped with science wonks. Scientists never printed science fiction.

What science fiction’s user base truly desired was not possible in the 1930s. Believing their own rhetoric, science fiction users supposed that they wanted a jet-propelled, atomic futurity.

Whenever offered the chance at such goods and services, they never pursued them. They didn’t genuinely want such things—not in real life.

What the user base genuinely wanted was immersive fantasies. They wanted warmly supportive subcultures in which they could safely abandon their cruelly limiting real-life roles, and play semi-permanent dress-up. Science fiction movies helped; science fiction television helped. Once massively multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPGs) were invented, the harsh limits of the print infrastructure were demolished. Then the user-base exploded.

No sane person reads science fiction novels for 80 hours a week. But it’s quite common for devoted players to spend that much time on Warcraft.

This should not be mistaken for “progress.” It’s not even a simple matter of obsolescence. Digital media is much more frail and contingent than print media. I rather imagine that people will be reading H.P. Lovecraft—likely the ultimate pulp-magazine science fiction writer—long after today’s clumsy, bug-ridden MMORPGs are as dead as the Univac.

What truly interests me here is the limits of the imaginable. Clearly, the pulp infrastructure limited what its artists were able to think about. They wore blinders that they could not see and therefore could not transcend.

The typewriter limited writers. Magazine word counts limited writers. Even the implicit cultural bargain between author and reader introduced constraints on what could be thought, said, and understood in public. Those

mechanisms of interaction—the letter columns, the fan mail, the bookstore appearances, the conventions—they were poorly understood as interaction. They were all emergent practices rather than designed experiences.

One might make a Wittgensteinian argument here about the ontological limits of language itself. Wittgenstein once wrote a famous statement about the need of philosophers to tactfully shut up in the face of the unimaginable. It reads as follows:

 

“The whole sense of the book might be summed up in the following words: What can be said at all can be said clearly, and what we cannot talk about we must pass over in silence.”

 

Many science fiction writers, believe it or not, were capable of understanding Wittgenstein. User experience design, however, was far beyond them. It was also beyond Wittgenstein, because there are things we might imagine and speak about that we do pass over in silence because we are writing in books.

The “whole sense of the book” is not the whole sense of the words. Look at the weird “Google erudition” of journalism researched online. Consider the hybridized “Creole media” of blog platforms. The line commands in software are text as an expression of will.

Let me offer an older example here, to show how deep this goes. Consider the literary platforms of a thousand years ago. This remote period saw the birth, or rather the stillbirth, of the novel, with Murasaki Shikibu’s The Tale of Genji. This Japanese manuscript scroll, written with an ink brush in the late 900s