Science-fiction writers (as distinct from fantasy writers) are supposed to, among other things, try to realistically imagine the future. But so far, they don’t seem to have a very impressive record of success.
For instance, sf writers have been writing about the future of computers since at least the 1950s. Some imagined computers developing into artificial “brains”, sentient AIs, that could do a lot of our thinking for us. (See the classic Isaac Asimov story “The Last Question,” where every human carries a commlink for asking questions of the vast central computer, AC.) The cyberpunk writers of the late '70s and early '80s did a bit better, envisioning how virtual banking would affect the economy and create a new class of hacker-pirates. But, to my knowledge, no SF writer predicted the Internet in its current form. None of them ever imagined that not only would personal computers become cheap and widely available, but that one of their most important uses would be as a text-and-graphics-based personal communications medium. Nobody ever envisioned anything like the Straight Dope Message Board.
(To put that in perspective, when Alexander Graham Bell was working on the telephone he imagined it would be used as a broadcast medium like radio, not a two-way personal communications device.)
Why is it that science fiction writers, who put so much mental effort and energy into predicting the future, always seem to get it wrong?
And how does their record compare with that of non-literary “futurists”? Remember Karl Marx and his determinist, dialectical model of history? Remember Paul Ehrlich’s mid-1970s prediction of a global population explosion leading to mass starvation? Seemed reasonable at the time. Today there’s a new breed of “futurists,” like those at the World Futurist Society (http://www.wfs.org/), which publishes The Futurist magazine. But it might be too soon to form any judgment of their predictive powers.
I disagree. SF writers are required to present a plausable future, nothing more; they’re storytellers, not prophets. They can’t accurately predict anything, anyway - chaos theory can’t accept that - so they shouldn’t really try anything beyond internal consistancy. In fact, the less predictions, the better, because that way the story won’t date itself as quickly.
That falls under “implausable”. If Heinlin had just saud that calculations were done by the “numbertrons” or something, and hadn’t elaborated, there wouldn’t have been a problem.
What about Asimov’s robots? Never mind the impracticality of the Three Laws – practically all of his robots are androids, robots in generally human shape. I doubt that’s what they’ll really look like. I mean, the shape with two legs, two arms, a head with eyes on the front side only – that’s just the best a blind process of natural evolution could do. Engineers can get more creative.
A short story called “A Logic Named Joe”, written in 1946 by Murray Leinster, is nearly spot-on about the practicalities of the Internet. The basis described for the technology is completely different, but the day-to-day impact and usage is very accurate. If that’s not accurate enough, you could also look to Ender’s Game, by Orson Scott Card, which not only has Internet message boards, but two of the main characters trolling. But that was written much later, when what would eventually become the Internet already existed in its infancy, so perhaps not as impressive a prediction.
BrainGlutton, the rationale for Asimov’s robots being humanid in shape is that a humanoid robot can use tools designed for humans. Most of them are intended to be versatile, and if you replace a robot’s legs with wheels or treads, for instance, it couldn’t drive a car (which several of his robots do). Even so, though, there are still a fair number of non-humanoid robots in Asimov’s stories, for specialized purposes (robot brains that don’t do much besides think, vaguely animal-like robots which perform simple tasks like pest management, and so on).
And at the time that Heinlein was writing those stories, using a slide rule to calculate jumps was, in fact, plausible. The significance of calculating machines was not yet realized at the time. You’ll notice that inhis later stories, after computers were invented, he has the calculations being done by computers.
Asimov’s robots don’t bother me - they’re designed by human beings, and human beings design thinks certain ways for certain reasons, or for no reason at all. I think it’s a mark of Asimov’s peculiar lack of imagination (the man was a genius for extrapolating, but he couldn’t look more than one step in the future - he couldn’t deal with too many unknowns), but it still works.
It is an axiom among science fiction writers that all science fiction is about the present.
You can only get your audience to understand the underlying meaning of your story if you extrapolate off the current understanding of the world into the future. Even if you were some sort of seer, capable of seeing into the true future, your audience would be lost if you gave them a world based on future inventions, technology and social conventions that had yet to be thought of.
And there should always be an underlying meaning to the story. Extrapolation of the future is a meaningless game unless it is tied to the effect it has on human beings.
And, of course, science fiction writers are themselves human beings, and no human being in history has ever had a good notion of what the future would look like, barring a few random hits and predictions that look good in hindsight. The world is inherently unpredictable because too many different factors are changing at every moment.
SF writers do have a terrible record of predicting the future. And that’s exactly the way it should be.
I read a short story around 1980 or so that did a pretty good job of predicting online gaming. I scoffed at it; the idea of being able to play a computer game at home, and access that same game (and same RPG character) the next day at a public data terminal seemed to me to be like… science fiction.
Furthermore, I don’t think ANY writer has the necessary background in enough fields to really be able to extrapolate what things’r gonna be like in 25 years, simply due to the sheer, insane number of variables in question. Isaac Asimov held multiple degrees in assorted fields, and even HE couldn’t get it all nailed down. What chance to the rest of us have?
I read that story. It’s not about computer users communicating with each other, it’s about an Artificial Intelligence offering to answer all their questions. Very different from the Internet. In Leinster’s story, the AI actually comes up with new inventions and formulas for people who ask for them. E.g., a drunk asks, “How can I keep my wife from finding out I’ve been drinking?” And the AI tells him he can sober-up immediately by mixing a brand of shampoo with a couple of other easily obtained substances – producing a formula that no human had discovered or invented. Would the Internet could do that!
Interesting point . . . Here’s a thought experiment: Suppose a contemporary SF writer from 2004 time-travels back to the 1920s, and then writes a series of stories about life in 2004 as it actually is, with television and the Internet and shopping malls and the gay marriage controversy and fundamentalist Islamic terrorism and so on and so on . . . and tries to sell it to Hugo Gernsback’s Amazing Stories. Would Gernsback buy the stories and publish them? Would anybody? And if the writer spent his/her own money to publish them, and some people of the 1920s actually bought them and read them – what would be the public reaction?
It’s unlikely a story set in actual 2004 would spark much interest back in the 20s. People wanted wonders, and it would all seem pretty tame. We’re still stuck on Earth, after all.
Sorry, but “androids” did not mean any type of robot until Star Wars. An android was an artificially created human being – organic in nature. A robot was anything mechanical, though usually they were created in a humanoid form.
The robots in “R.U.R.” were actually androids (though Capek gets a dispensation ). Another good example are those in Silverberg’s Tower of Glass. George Lucas started using “'droids” and confused the issue, but CP30 and R2D2 are quite clearly robots.
> Isaac Asimov held multiple degrees in assorted fields . . .
No, he didn’t. He had a bachelor’s degree and a Ph.D. in chemistry (and maybe also a master’s degree in it). He said that he considered becoming a history major in college but decided not to. Later in life he became good at reading up in a subject and becoming enough of an expert to write an introduction to the field. He had definite limits in his knowledge. For instance, he said that he knew no math beyond calculus. He knew no languages except for English, German/Yiddish (which are close), and maybe Russian, which he learned as a child. As brilliant as he was at writing introductory books about many subjects, he never became a real expert at anything except chemistry, history to a limited extent, and just maybe certain areas of literature.
> What about Asimov’s robots? Never mind the impracticality of the Three Laws –
> practically all of his robots are androids, robots in generally human shape.
Not a very long-term prediction but DAvid Brin absolutely nails the Internet (without the porn) in Earth. He wrote it in 1989 and posited…
Universal access in all locations
Wireless access at high speeds
The flood of email causing people to develop filters to automatically handle email
Database connectivity to answer questions
News filtering a la google news
Message boards (though incorporating sound and video)
Online friendships (at one point after the disaster at the end on messageboard moderator start trying to take a headcount of survivors
Online chats with celebrities
Internet radio
Search engines
and a host of others.
I realize he was only a few years ahead of the curve here but that’s still a pretty good depth-of-perception from the first glimmers that were out there in the late 1980s.
In the afterward he specifically bitches about the problems of writing fiction set less than 50 years in the future. Especially in one spot…
His first drafts were written before the Soviets started disintegrating so he has them still around and helping humanitarian causes. He second draft was after they got shaky. So his test-readers accused him of being to liberal with his handling of the Soviets and later readers accused him of being to conservative.
Ben Bova made some fairly good predictions about an internet-like service back in the 70’s in Colony. And he predicted a world where there was no cold war and the biggest source of international tension was organized terrorism. Of course he also set part of that same story on the human colonies in orbit and on the moon.
Exactly so. When you read science fiction critically, you soon see that writers are extrapolating one particular (or a very small) set of notions and that the rest of society is very like their current world.
One of my favorite bad examples (from a famous, well-thought-of writer) is Speaker for the Dead, by Orson Scott Card, which is set on another planet in the year 3000+ and still has basically a current middle-class American culture at its core.
Every once in a while someone starts a “what works will still be read/listened to/watched in 50/100/500 years” thread. The answer is that nobody has a clue. Not even a smartass making a flip remark would have answered that question in 1954 by saying that rock music and its derivatives would dominate world musical culture, and much other culture; would spark a youth culture that rules the worlds of fashion, movie making, and advertising; would change the bases for technologies; and would decimate copyright laws. That society could only be satiric in 1954; it couldn’t be taken seriously.
BrainGlutton, the writer who goes back in time and writes stories set in his world idea has been done in many variations over the years. Pure nonsense. No modern writer could write in the style of the 1920s and 1930s because we’ve lost any contact with the ways those worlds thought. You could say we’ve lost an innocence that they had about the future.
We’re also poisoned by knowledge. Everything we understand about science was essentially unknown to scientists at the time, much less the lay reader. Our truths wouldn’t seem true, even in a science fictional sense, to them.
Warning: mini-rant. :eek: SF was far more accessible to outside readers back in the 1920s-1950s because the extrapolations then were just more and shinier tech. Ordinary people could understand rockets and robots. Today’s extrapolative sf tries to portray half a dozen scientific advances changing the basics of humanity all at once and are almost incomprehensible to anyone who doesn’t read three science magazines and everything written in the field for the past 50 years. Again, you could say we’re poisoned by knowledge: we have too much and hardly any writer has a grasp on how to make it all available to the general reader. That’s why Michael Crichton is far more famous than all the rest of them put together. He takes one current idea and sets it in our world. He leaves the future to the fools who think they can still make it readable.
JC, Arpanet had been around over a decade by 1989. Even I had had a computer for five years by that time, and I had friends doing a lot of that stuff with Arpanet. If Brin had written it in 1979 it would have been a lot more impressive. If he had written a book I could finish it would have been impressive, too.
). Another good example are those in Silverberg’s Tower of Glass. George Lucas started using “'droids” and confused the issue, but CP30 and R2D2 are quite clearly robots.