I’ve been reading my way through a pile of Heinlein books lately and whilst many of his stories are timeless and brilliant, there’s also a few that… look a bit silly with the benefits of hindsight. The same is true of a lot of science fiction written in the past and set around the period we’re in now, from what I’ve noticed.
For example, it’s now 2010 and no-one has visited the moon in nearly 40 years- so not only do we not have lunar colonies and Pan Am Space Clippers, we’ve basically said that the moon is of less interest to us as a civilisation than the Simpson Desert.
Anyway, I was wondering if there’s a term for “serious” science fiction (as opposed to “pulp” science fiction) that turns out to be “wrong” by the time the period it depicts rolls around?
I’m not talking about “Retro-Futurism”, as that was generally very “pulpy”, but more serious works by authors that attempted to show Life In The Future™ and basically got it wrong- most liike because technology didn’t progress the way everyone thought it would (Still waiting on those flying cars and robot butlers!)
For the purposes of this I’m leaving out Atomic War-type scenarios as there was basically no way for anyone to know if that was actually going to happen or not, and also “Crystal Spires and Togas”- type social changes which- even when the stories were written- have generally always been acknowledged as, at best “Wishful thinking” and more commonly as “Fantasy… IN THE FUTURE!”
I’ve heard this referred to as “The Elevator Effect.”
The name comes from an example of how easy it is to miss a telling detail when predicting the future.
The example is that if you showed someone in the, say, 17th century a drawing of a modern city and had them describe life there, they would probably think that people in skyscrapers lived most of their lives in the because the climbing up and down stairs would be difficult.
Elevators would be a detail both too out of their experience and to detailed to latch onto
I’m not talking about stuff set in The Year 3000 after the Coming Of The Great Greek Arkleseizure, though- I’m talking about stuff written in (say) 1965 about the year 2015, which was Way Off In The Future in 1965 but is now only a few years away, and it’s patently obvious that we won’t be getting flying cars or fighting wars of independence against the Moon between now and then.
I think the “Science Marches On” trope is probably the closest to what I was getting at, from the looks of it…
Science fiction is not about the future. It is about the present. Science fiction writers don’t try to predict real futures (true at least 99.9% of the time). They use whatever seems cool at the moment to make a fictional point.
All science fiction is always wrong about all futures, even if the future is next year. People looking backward like to try to match what really happened with whatever notions that writers had years earlier. It’s a fun game, but has nothing to do with the actual stories.
Famous Golden Age writers like Robert Heinlein and Isaac Asimov were highly influenced by whatever was in the newspapers in the 1930s, just as science fiction writers of 2010 are highly influenced by whatever was in the newspapers over the last decade. They extrapolate off of those notions because they know that’s the background their readers will have as well. Remember cyberpunk? They wrote in a time that thought the Japanese were going to dominate. How many readers would have been impressed if they extrapolated a future in which the US remained the cultural force?
Real futures make terrible fiction. All sf futures are phony.
I read Steven King’s- “The Things They Left Behind”, today. I was touched, but I couldn’t help but think of the HundredThousands of others-WTC Squared… that we have eliminated in the exact same pain. Am I a traitor, or do I believe in humanity?
Ok as far as it goes. Good and interesting SF (as far as I’m concerned) is not especially about the present or the future; it’s about humanity. SF is about asking questions about what it is to be human, and placing the story in a fictional future is a good way to make us think about that question. The futuristic aspects can definitely be interesting, but they’re usually not the focus of the story.
As for the OP: SF is always wrong about the future, because SF isn’t about the future
As a corrollary to the OP then: Is there Science Fiction that is about The Future? Because saying that it doesn’t exist seems to be saying that Historical Fiction isn’t about The Past when much of it clearly is.
I agree with both of the above statements. The TVTropes entry seems to fit what the OP describes, but “Science Marches On” isn’t a term used in literary criticism or anything. I doubt there is any such critical term, because the concept isn’t important or useful enough to merit one. Very few science fiction predictions are correct, but right or wrong it could take decades or centuries to find out for sure. By that time the story will have sunk or swum based on its entertainment value and literary merit.
It’s still interesting to think about whether a science fiction story has correctly predicted the future, but from a literary perspective this is pretty trivial. It’s fiction, nor fortunetelling.
That said, the OP reminded me of when I read Philip K. Dick’s Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said a couple of years ago. The novel was published in 1974 and set in the then-future year of 1988. I was mildly amused by the presence of flying cars in the novel. We obviously didn’t really have flying cars by 1988, and still didn’t have them nearly 20 years later when I read the book. I doubt we ever will. I found myself wondering whether Dick really believed in 1974 that flying cars would be widespread within the next 15 years or if he just threw them in for fun.
What I thought was really funny wasn’t the flying cars, which I could accept as a common science fiction device, but the fact that people were still listening to LPs. There’s an important scene where the hero needs to listen to an album, and he has to do it on a record player – not because he’s a vinyl snob, but because it’s the standard recording format in this “future” world. This is a guy who’s used to zipping all over town in his flying car! It was like reading about a moon colony where everyone had a rotary phone.
Of course, the funniest thing about all this may be that Dick was actually right about people in 1988 still listening to vinyl records. CDs had been commercially available for several years by the real 1988, but LPs were still around and I don’t think I knew anyone with a home CD player until at least 1990.* A truly accurate prediction of how people listened to music in 1988 would have included the cassette Walkman, though.
*ETA: I guess younger adults had them before then, but kids my age couldn’t afford them and our parents hadn’t shifted formats yet. Heck, there was still an 8-track player in my house in 1990, although it had been unused for years.
I have to say I’m often impressed with the “little touches” that actually end up being more “factual” than the overall setting.
For example, the main character in Double Star has access to a computer database of every single person that another character has ever met, and their notes on those people. The story (and several others) also reference waterbeds (ironically not that common nowadays even though they were invented based on the descriptions in the stories AIUI), and there’s another in which a character has a recognisably modern mobile phone in a story written about 30 years before the idea was even close to practical.
But yeah, you’d think PKD would know that, in 1974 there was no way there would be flying cars within 14 years- so I can only assume he threw them in as a fun “nod” to the idea that The Future Should Have Flying Cars.
Why would there be? Would someone reading an early issue of Galaxy in 1951 care about a story set in 2010 giving the real problems we face today? They cared far more about the issues they faced back then.
But the real reason that Exapno Mapcase is correct is that for any given year in the future, or for any given concept, there will be hundreds of stories each painting contradictory pictures. Thus, well over 99% of stories will be incorrect by definition in the details. Things are actually more similar, since many authors grab a common background when it isn’t crucial to the story, but these are usually wrong also.
In Oath of Fealty, one of the characters has an extra long phone cord and notepads and writing instruments on or around each of his phones. Because he’d forgotten an important idea when he was on the phone one day.
Mind you, this is a setting where a few people have implants in their brains that allow them to directly access a computer. The guy with the long phone cords wasn’t one of them, but clearly, wireless technology was available.
Now I think about it, I recall that some of H. Beam Piper’s stuff was “Science Fiction about The Future”, not “Modern problems IN SPACE!” but it’s been a while since I re-read any of his stuff besides the Paratime series.
It’s impossible - not almost impossible or highly difficult - impossible to imagine a complete future world. Writers always work like impressionist painters. They have a large overall background frame and then sketch in a few foreground details. They spend much more time on the latter than on the former, so little wonder that they come out better.
As a social scientist in a hard science discipline I’ve been driven crazier by the year. You can be a world-class physicist at the age of 25 but understanding the social sciences takes decades. Took me decades, certainly. The vast, vast majority of sf writers are as bad as social sciences as they are good as the hard sciences. Their understanding of sociology, political science, even economics is somewhere under zero. But that’s what worlds are. That’s what the future is. It is a world made of people and of what people do, sometimes with technology and sometimes not, that we live in. Now imagine that every detail of how people react in those worlds is as clueless as the most idiotic posters in GQ. That’s a big reason why I can’t read sf the way I used to. The future is sociology, not technology. That’s why it’s always wrong.
Heinlein’s writing did keep the modern waterbed from being invented. But just as with every other invention that’s credited to him, the waterbed was around long before Heinlein ever wrote a single word.
Exapno is right – any correct prediction of the future in science fiction is just plain dumb luck. Writers aren’t interested in prediction – they’re interested in taking an idea and developing it to see how people behave.
Other than the main idea, most science fiction assumes (unspokenly) that other technological elements are the same as they were (or were predicted) when the story was written. And that doesn’t matter – anything other than the main idea is unimportant to the story.
The biggest problem for the science fiction genre today is the insistence of many readers that the stories be scientifically “accurate.” It’s an impossible goal, and also limits the field. (John Campbell insisted on plausibility, not accuracy).
That’s certainly something I’ve run up against in my own writing efforts- people say “Nuclear Physics doesn’t work that way!” or “Quantum Probability Mechanics would mean that X would happen, not Y, and so Z is just silly in this case”. So I tried writing steampunk stories. And people said “The Victorians didn’t have Spaceships!” and “There’s no breathable atmosphere on Mars!”
It’s incredibly frustrating. :smack:
Still, this thread has raised some interesting ideas about Science Fiction’s role…
Zeerust maybe ? Not sure - on the one hand, Google only throws me back to TVTropes for that word, on the other hand I’m sure I’ve heard it before there ever was a TVTropes, so…