As science and technology has made its mark on the human condition, fiction has had to adapt to the new realities. It’s been remarked here multiple times how many plot devices have been made obsolete by cell phones and by DNA testing. Entire swathes of science fiction have been made obsolete by modern discoveries. The invention of nuclear weapons led to Superman being amped up to godlike levels of invulnerability because he had to remain unkillable by any extant technology. Police procedurals now take ubiquitous public surveillance for granted. Nowadays it is far from a given that a woman who gives birth to a baby is its genetic mother, or that she had sex with the genetic father.
So what advances do you imagine will change fiction over the next fifty years or so? One I was thinking of the other day is that Batman is probably going to have to change in his athletic tights for a suit of powered armor, and maybe holographic camouflage. He’s already had to add night vision and long-range microphones to his equipment.
I wonder what was the first work of fiction which depicted a criminal having to take care to not leave any fingerprints behind? (Fingerprint identification going back at least as far as Twain’s “Puddin’Head Wilson”).
That’s an example of Doyle cleverly taking an advance in criminology and showing how you can’t unthinkingly apply it. R. Austin Freeman’s novel The Red Thumb Mark (1924) makes the same point.
Holographic camouflage has already shown up in George Takei and Robert Lynn Asprin’s novel Mirror Friend, Mirror Foe (1979) as futuristic ninja gear. Myself, based on the novel and especially on its cover, suspect this is Takei getting off on the time they gave him a fencing foil in Star Trek
I recall reading that Larry Niven had trouble when writing The Mote in God’s Eye. As a plot point, one character was supposed to have difficulty recalling some specific details, but Niven couldn’t figure out why anyone would have trouble with such things in the future, when easily-searchable computer databases should make it trivial to just look something up. He used the excuse that the person just couldn’t remember the correct keywords to search with.
Now, having passed through the glory days of the internet and Google searching, it’s really hard to find some things just because of the deluge of crap that shows up in so many searches. So we’ve looped back around to not being able to just search for some simple detail. Niven never thought that people would pollute his wonderful databases with so much dross.
On the subject of fingerprints being used as identification, a number of years ago I read a story in an anthology of “future crime” stories which revolved around the fact that at some point in the future the human population had increased to the point where a single fingerprint found at a crime scene actually matched to two different people. And the tag line to the story was a police detective speculating that at some point in their future there might be two people who have all ten of their fingerprints match.
