Well, no flying cars–a flying SUV 'd be dangerous anyway— but hey, we’ve got triple-bladed razors now…and millions of cable-tv channels…!
I heard that
originally, the title of the novel was “1948”,
but that it had been changed to keep it from becoming obsolete…1984 the year has come and gone, quite a while ago; what are they gonna do now?
The novel was published in 1948. If Orwell had called it Nineteen Forty-Eight, people would have assumed it was an appointment calendar, not a dystopian and chilling view of the future.
Piers Anthony’s Bio of a Space Tyrant projects a future in which the United States has colonized Jupiter and (cough cough) the Soviet Union (communism intact) has taken over Saturn. Annoyingly, there’s not a single mention of Canada, but that’s a side issue.
No need to pick on Heinlein about writing of a swampy Venus. All the science fiction writers did it in the 40s and 50s. Asimov wrote several short stories set there. Robert Sheckley, William Tenn… It was a convenient, close-by locale. Just like the arid, once-lush and now desert Mars was. Burroughs, Leigh Brackett, Heimlein, Sheckley, Bradbury,… I think they kept it up even after it was clear that the nearby planets were nothing like that because they didn’t want to lose an attractive setting that didn’t require lightspeed to go to. After 1960 they started moving things to other solar systems. (look at the way Sheckley redid “The Humors”, set on Mars and Venus, into the novel Crompton Divided, set in various solar systems.)
And the Hilton, Howard Johnson, and Bell System logos are all obsolete.
Plus, I don’t think you see any LEDs on any of the control panels.
It’s been a looooong time since I read it, but IIRC the term used is “all-night branch” or “24-hour branch.” So that part has yet to be.
RAH also backfilled the Venus/Mars issue, in a way. In To Sail Beyond the Sunset Maureen Johnson compares her timeline with that of Jubal Harshaw, and one of the differences is that in Jubal’s (and ours), “Venus is uninhabitable and Mars is a bleak, almost airless desert”–implying that they are otherwise in her timeline. Slick move, Bob. . . .
I think some of y’all are missing the point of the OP; it’s not science fiction rendered obsolete by the passage of a particular year, but by advances in scientific knowledge. The year is arbitrary, but the theme of 1984 is far from obsolete. The idea of a government working over time to change speech so that people will eventually be incapable of even thinking anti-government thoughts is still pretty chilling. Of course, one thing that might prevent that is the prevalence of modern electronic communications, including the Internet.
Come to think of it, something in 1984 that really hits home now is how the government maintained a perpetual “state of war” to justify any measures they wanted to take. (Exactly when do we declare an end to the “War on Terrorism”? Wouldn’t it be great if we could wrap up the “War on Drugs” at the same time? Smooth sailing after that!)
Of course, hundreds of stories have been rendered obsolete by social changes more than scientific changes; 25th century starships with all-male crews, etc. Not to mention the faster-than-light drive that’s maintained and repaired by a grease-smeared Brooklynite who tunes the hyperspace valves with a big monkey wrench…
That is pretty darn scary.
“She’ll no take it, Captain!”
“Listen you dipsomanic Scotsman, give me more power or I’ll send Checkov down there with a big monkey wrench!”
“It’s on the way, Sir!”
Oops. I stand corrected.
And enlightened. Thank-you!
AGREED! AGREED!
I’ve been HOPING someone else would notice this, and make the point.
Not that I’ve been waiting in silence…
However, every time I’ve tried to express this idea IRL conversations, I get shouted down.
How un-American of me, to question or be suspicious of my government ! And at a time like this!
For free speech, these ARE dangerous times.
Science fiction has always been an excellent vehicle for social commentary and/or criticism of those in power…
and THAT will never become obsolete.
We can hope so, but…
I work as a (substitute-) teacher in the public-school system,
and I can tell you that the extreme “political correctness” that’s being not only taught to the youngsters, but enforced,
IS just a little too close to the practices described in 1984.
That, combined w/ the tendency of the media–espec. in movies–to re-write history so as to reflect currently popular ideas…
anyone else notice that?
Well, sure, that’s what Hollywood does, from Batan to Hunley to the Wild, Wild West. (Although we all know that Hunley was the most historically accurate file ever made.) 
If the Civil War were shown as a bunch of normal Americans killing each other, it would be either horrible or boring; if the current war, be it WWII or Afghanistan were shown without Good Guys and Bad Guys, the movie would go unseen.
Heck, you’d get flamed like hell on this board if you admitted that Nicholas II was incompetent, or that Carnivorousplant couldn’t spell.
I don’t think movies are intended to be historically instructive, nor should they be, although the History Channel’s “Movies In Time” is interesting.
I think that we have at least three categories of obsolescence, here:
First, a story is prominently set at a certain time. When that time comes and goes without the events of the story, the story is behind schedule. This is where 2001 and 1984 fail, of course, as well as the Star Trek backstory, some of Asimov’s first robot stories, and many others. This is probably the most forgiveable, since the story might just be a little late.
Second, there are stories where something is presented as possible, but which later turns out to be impossible (if it were known to be impossible when the story was written, that’s not obsolescence, it’s artistic license or incompetence). Habitable Mars/Venus is the most prominent type in this category.
The third case is where something is presented as difficult or impossible, but is later done in real life. The most blatant example is Asimov’s Everest story, of course, but other examples would include Picard’s comment about Fermat, or Heinlein’s World War II story which said that nuclear bombs were impossible. World-girdling computers to do simple math probably fall here, as well.
The third class can also be combined with class 2, if two advancements come in the wrong order. For instance, all the old stories with interstellar travel, but no electronic computers. Either computers are easier than the authors thought, or interstellar travel is harder, or both.
I would not count stories to be obsolete due to social changes, though, since social changes tend to go both ways. Perhaps, for instance, by the time interstellar travel becomes possible, we’ll be back to a patriarchal society, so an all-male crew will be plausible.
Welcome to the SDMB, hillbillycavewoman! You can practice vBcode in the “About This Message Board” forum.
To quote someone, you need to have a
after what they said.
e.g.
Will show up as
What’s more, the Voyagers that have been travelling since 1977 won’t leave our Solar neighborhood for a couple thousand years. That is, centuries from now, they’ll still be closer to our Sun than to any other star.
Ditto Pioneers 10 and 11, though one of these apparently strays into Klingon territory and meets an untimely end in Star Trek V.
This is what’s known as “hijacking a thread”. Verging off topic. Might make a good thread of its own, tho.
I’ve a father and step-mother who are school librarians. So I know the inner working of our city library more than usual. This “political correctness” extends to libraries. When I suggested the best beginning book in a particular field was “The Dummy’s Guide to…something” the reference librarian acted like I might be asked to leave. What appears on the bookshelves is rigorously filtered by politics of various sorts. I mean: a library that has garbagy “Goosebumps”, but won’t allow bright orange books in the “Dummy’s” series, even when they’re written by known authorities???
Getting slightly back to the topic, Orwell was using science fiction to make pointed comments about his own society. Being politically correct has been popular since men could shake a stick. This is the sort of thing in sci fi that never gets dated.
The talk about 1984 brings to mind Steven Pinker’s book on linguistic The Language Instinct. In it he argues, among other things, that Newspeak would never prevent people from thinking of concepts simply because the language doesn’t have a word for it. Now this is not something that has been conclusively proven, at least not to everyones’s liking, but there is a fair amount of evidence that humans have an innate capacity to learn a language given a fairly minimal amount of information. A sort of corollary to this is the idea that humans create new meanings to words and new words wothout being taught them. In other words, Language does not equal thought (exactly).
This means that if you can concieve of a cioncept like “liberty” or “frreedom” but there isn’t a word for it in your language you can extend the meaning of a word or invent a new one to describe it. We’ve all had (I assume) that feeling of something being on the tip of your tongue, there must be a word for it. But sometimes there may not be a word for it.
Some people, including perhaps Orwell, read the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis and thought that it meant that language determines your reality. Whether or not this is what Sapir and Whorf meant by their hypothesis, it is probably more accurate to say that language has a strong influence on your perception of reality. An analogous comparison might be to say that vision doesn’t determine reality, but it has a strong influence on it. 1984 still has lessons to teach us, including the one about Newspeak, but the idea that you can engineer people’s thoughts as precisely as Newspeak was envisioned as being able to do is most likely obsolete.
Slight Hijack- The original title for “1984” was “The Last Free Man in Europe”.
I’d be a mortal enemy of Pinker, if I was still in the field. Well, maybe. A flash intellectual trying to make a name for himself by defending (what he imagines are) outraging hypotheses.
Thinking depends on crutches of various kinds. As a writer, I must sound out the words I’m composing to gauge their effect on a hypothetical audience. Without words in this case, nothing can be communicated. So there are situations where words are indispensible to thought.
I think we’re probably past the point where we’ll be using consumable fuels in our moon buggies, like all the tractors in Lester Del Rey’s novels.