# Predictive failures of science fiction **URL:** \ **Category:** Cafe Society\ **Created:** [June 20, 2004, 7:38pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/predictive-failures-of-science-fiction/251333 "2004-06-20T19:38:19Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 2
**Author:** ![BrainGlutton](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/82dd89/32.png) [@BrainGlutton](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/BrainGlutton)\ **Post date:** [June 21, 2004, 5:27am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/predictive-failures-of-science-fiction/251333/21 "2004-06-21T05:27:08Z")
> [@Exapno Mapcase](#): > > **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. !!! News to me! I’ve never read such a story, and I consider myself a hardcore SF reader! Could you name some examples? (I’m well familiar with the subgenre of “Connecticut Yankee” stories where a time-traveler, or group of time-travelers, actually introduces modern technology to a long-past period – but that’s a different kind of story entirely.) ---
**Author:** ![Askance](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/askance/32/8281_2.png) [@Askance](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Askance)\ **Post date:** [June 21, 2004, 5:39am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/predictive-failures-of-science-fiction/251333/22 "2004-06-21T05:39:32Z")
> [@BrainGlutton](#): > > Science-fiction writers … are supposed to … try to realistically imagine the future They are? Says who? Ray Bradbury, for instance, has said that he does not write to predict a future, but to prevent it. ---
**Author:** ![Little\_Nemo](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/little_nemo/32/3120_2.png) [@Little\_Nemo](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Little_Nemo)\ **Post date:** [June 21, 2004, 7:41am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/predictive-failures-of-science-fiction/251333/23 "2004-06-21T07:41:28Z")
> [@](#): > > 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. > [@](#): > > !!! News to me! I’ve never read such a story, and I consider myself a hardcore SF reader! Could you name some examples? There was a story by Harry Turtledove that pretty much used this exact idea. I think it was “Hindsight”. Exapno, I think you’re missing the point about science fiction. It’s rarely about technology; it’s usually more about how people deal with change (one form of which might be caused by technology). ---
**Author:** ![RealityChuck](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/realitychuck/32/195_2.png) [@RealityChuck](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/RealityChuck)\ **Post date:** [June 21, 2004, 12:36pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/predictive-failures-of-science-fiction/251333/24 "2004-06-21T12:36:44Z")
> [@Exapno Mapcase](#): > > 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. Excellent point. A big problem with modern SF is that you often need lots of experience reading SF to understand it. It’s hard to draw readers when things become so incomprehensible and the leap from the more space opera oriented filmed SF to the written literature is a big one. ---
**Author:** ![Alessan](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/alessan/32/465_2.png) [@Alessan](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Alessan)\ **Post date:** [June 21, 2004, 12:51pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/predictive-failures-of-science-fiction/251333/25 "2004-06-21T12:51:40Z")
Well… maybe that’s the case with so-called “hard” SF. You don’t need to know any science to follow Dan Simmons, say, or Gene Wolfe (you _do_ have to know literature and history, of course, but that’s a given). ---
**Author:** ![BrotherCadfael](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/977dab/32.png) [@BrotherCadfael](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/BrotherCadfael)\ **Post date:** [June 21, 2004, 1:01pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/predictive-failures-of-science-fiction/251333/26 "2004-06-21T13:01:53Z")
My favorite SF prediction is in Heinlein’s “Blowups Happen”. In this story, two engineers are out on the town, and the bartender tells one of them that he has a telephone call. His companion asks why did the office have to track him down at the bar, didn’t he have his pocketphone? The first engineer replies that he didn’t _want_ the office to call him, so he left his pocketphone back at the hotel. OK, the pocketphone, essentially the modern cell phone. A trivial extrapolation of then-current technology. Easy call. BUT, to see that this universal accessibility would inevitably become a royal pain in the ass… _that_, my friends, is true foresight! ---
**Author:** ![BrainGlutton](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/82dd89/32.png) [@BrainGlutton](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/BrainGlutton)\ **Post date:** [June 21, 2004, 2:56pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/predictive-failures-of-science-fiction/251333/27 "2004-06-21T14:56:41Z")
> [@BrotherCadfael](#): > > OK, the pocketphone, essentially the modern cell phone. A trivial extrapolation of then-current technology. Easy call. > > BUT, to see that this universal accessibility would inevitably become a royal pain in the ass… _that_, my friends, is true foresight! Larry Niven wrote a story, “Flash Crowd,” based on the idea that if we ever develop teleportation, and use it as a personal transportation technology (he envisions “transfer booths,” which are like telephone boths except you can use them to teleport yourself to another transfer booth anywhere in the world if you have its number), then every time some interesting event is shown on television, thousands of people will immediately teleport there to check it out and then you have massive crowd-control problems – in some cases, spontaneous riots. Then there emerges a “Permanent Floating Riot Club” of criminals who take advantage of “flash crowd”-induced chaos to loot and steal. He wrote a lot of other stories about the social effects of transfer booths. That teleportation technology will ever actually be developed is, in my opinion, unlikely. But if it is, I bet the social effects will be much as Niven predicted. ---
**Author:** ![BrainGlutton](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/82dd89/32.png) [@BrainGlutton](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/BrainGlutton)\ **Post date:** [June 21, 2004, 2:58pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/predictive-failures-of-science-fiction/251333/28 "2004-06-21T14:58:48Z")
Since it is never remarkable when somebody fails to predict the future accurately, perhaps I should have titled this thread, “Predictive **successes** of science fiction.” The successes are really what stand out. ---
**Author:** ![Fenris](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/fenris/32/498_2.png) [@Fenris](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Fenris)\ **Post date:** [June 21, 2004, 5:23pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/predictive-failures-of-science-fiction/251333/29 "2004-06-21T17:23:34Z")
> [@BrainGlutton](#): > > 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! You are misremembering. The premise of the story is that there is an internet-esque setup, complete with porn-filters, tech-support lines, streaming video, internet phoning, digital (as opposed to tape-based) answering machines, banner ads, etc. Granted, it’s a server/workstation model, but still. One individual workstation (a “logic”) develops sentience and A) breaks all the porn/anti-crime filters and B) can correlate unrelated data to make new conclusions (“People with blonde hair have x chemical in their system. Drink “Y” has a chemical that combines with chemical x to make an undetectible poison.” and C) Break firewalls instantly. Tell me that this early paragraph doesn’t sound like the internet: > [@](#): > > You got a logic in your house. It looks like a vison reciever used to only it’s got keys instead of dials and you punch the keys for what you wanna get. [He explains how it works and that you can get TV broadcasts through your logic, you can phone people through your logic, logics can act as answering machine] But besides that if you punch in the weather forcast or who won today’s race at Hialeah or who was mistress of the White House during the Garfield adminstration [or stock quotations], that comes on the screens too. [It also does math, and keeps books and it’s connected to all the other logics in the country]" the [bracketed] stuff is my abridgement for space purposes. Fenris ---
**Author:** ![DocCathode](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/doccathode/32/18773_2.png) [@DocCathode](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/DocCathode)\ **Post date:** [June 21, 2004, 5:29pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/predictive-failures-of-science-fiction/251333/30 "2004-06-21T17:29:59Z")
> [@RealityChuck](#): > > 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. I demand **RealityChuck** be banned immediately! I’m typing on a computer- Which could store the contents of my overflowing bookshelves Has an expansion slot allowing wireless communication Has a port for infrared communication Has a pad which responds to touch Has a color liquid crystal display Weighs less than 5 pounds And mine is an out of date model Just in this room I have A video camera-no developing, no worry about exposing the tape to light etc 2 plasma spheres, balls of lighning that are safe to touch Digital watches Pocket calculators A CD player- no stylus, just a laser A laser pointer- It cost me $4 new. More holograms than you can shake a stick at Color television An LED flashlight which as bright as the standard model I own- but the LED gives off a negligible amount of heat, and the flashlight is smaller than my pinky. A radio control car small enough to fit in my pocket. $3.99 Numerous toys which incorporate silicon chips, and transistors 3-D comic books Nylon, polyester and other synthetic fabrics A hearing aid the size of a walnut (I bought it for use in a project) Paxil, Ritalin, Lithium Carbonate Velcro The color photographs in my wallet An ATM card Disposable pens As Paul Simon said “This is the age of miracles and wonders.” I see wondrous and undreamt of things without even leaving my bed. A walk to the quickiemart will reveal even more spectacular things. And a quick scan of the newspaper will show we are indeed living in the fantastic world of tomorrow. ---
**Author:** ![ralph124c](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/8797f3/32.png) [@ralph124c](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/ralph124c)\ **Post date:** [June 21, 2004, 6:12pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/predictive-failures-of-science-fiction/251333/31 "2004-06-21T18:12:07Z")
I think the amazing thing about Sci-Fi is how ACCURATE most of it has been. Take Jules Verne, for example…most of his predictions have come true. Of course, he was wrong about a lot of things, because scientific knowledge was solimited in his day. What most SF writers have missed big time…the ecological catastrophy that we face due to overpopulation. I am no pessemist, but I don’t see any strong efforts by our “leaders” to try to correct these problems…and I think this is because most politicians are lawyers, with very little scientific understanding. One question i have: many SF writers have postulated that mankind will become wise, generous and non-evil…when is this going to happen? :smack: ---
**Author:** ![Spectre\_of\_Pithecanthropus](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/spectre_of_pithecanthropus/32/12343_2.png) [@Spectre\_of\_Pithecanthropus](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Spectre_of_Pithecanthropus)\ **Post date:** [June 21, 2004, 6:53pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/predictive-failures-of-science-fiction/251333/32 "2004-06-21T18:53:09Z")
I suppose someone should mention the fast and easy interstellar travel and commerce of the Asimov and Star Trek universes, since that will presumably never come to pass unless our fundamental understanding of physics is wrong. Although I suppose we have to give them a pass on that. Limiting space stories to creaking, multi-generational starship colonies or suspended animation “sleeper” ships is …well, limiting. ---
**Author:** ![Exapno\_Mapcase](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/exapno_mapcase/32/1051_2.png) [@Exapno\_Mapcase](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Exapno_Mapcase)\ **Post date:** [June 21, 2004, 6:56pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/predictive-failures-of-science-fiction/251333/33 "2004-06-21T18:56:58Z")
> [@Little Nemo](#): > > Exapno, I think you’re missing the point about science fiction. It’s rarely about technology; it’s usually more about how people deal with change (one form of which might be caused by technology). Excuse me? I wrote: > [@](#): > > Extrapolation of the future is a meaningless game unless it is tied to the effect it has on human beings. And much science fiction has accurate “predictions” because it is talking about technological trends that have already started but are little noticed outside of the scientific and technical community, like Brin’s _Earth_. I’m old enough to have lived through a number of bear and bull markets in stocks. Whenever one comes along, journalists go back and comb through the literature and anoint as geniuses those who correctly predicted the outcome. But in fact the economic community predicted every possible outcome: one of them had to be right. Was that person wise or merely lucky? The proof comes after the next change in the market. Is that person correct again? Almost never. We are very good at going back and picking out anything that looks like it might have been an accurate prediction, even if we have to torture the interpretation to get it to conform with current reality. Some of these predictions look to be very prescient in hindsight. Some of them certainly are. But I have less and less confidence that I know which are which as the years go by and see a very different future arrive than anything I read about as a boy. ---
**Author:** ![HPL](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/h/3da27b/32.png) [@HPL](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/HPL)\ **Post date:** [June 21, 2004, 7:21pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/predictive-failures-of-science-fiction/251333/34 "2004-06-21T19:21:53Z")
> [@BrainGlutton](#): > > 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. > > . I remember in Arthur C. Clarke’s novel of **2001: A Space Oddessy** , Dr. Floyd had something like a PDA he was using while on the shuttle to the moon. It mentioned that he could use it to read any newspaper on earth instantly, which would be updated every half hour. That was in the late 1960’s. Maybe not quite the internet we know today, but a pretty good start. ---
**Author:** ![BrotherCadfael](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/977dab/32.png) [@BrotherCadfael](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/BrotherCadfael)\ **Post date:** [June 21, 2004, 7:35pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/predictive-failures-of-science-fiction/251333/35 "2004-06-21T19:35:17Z")
In Heinlein’s **Friday** , published in 1982, there is an information terminal linked into pretty much every information resource on the planet. Not quite the 'net, but not a million miles removed, either. On the other hand, 1982 is late enough that the information terminal described is only a minor extrapolation of then-current art. One of the more interesting questions asked of the information system was “Who owns you?”. It declined to answer. This also has resonances with today’s Internet. ---
**Author:** ![Voyager](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/voyager/32/133_2.png) [@Voyager](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Voyager)\ **Post date:** [June 21, 2004, 7:47pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/predictive-failures-of-science-fiction/251333/36 "2004-06-21T19:47:59Z")
> [@BrainGlutton](#): > > 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? Uncle Hugo would have loved that story - except he might have asked the author to take out the sociological stuff. He thought sf was all about predicting the future. The revolution of the golden age was to make sf about people and the effect of technology on them, and to have the characters assume the technology. Though there was some sociological sf even in the '30s - I’m thinking of “The Gostak (Dostak?) and the Doshes” where a man from the present arrives in some other world and finds the inhabitants all worked up over nonsense, to him, words. ---
**Author:** ![Voyager](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/voyager/32/133_2.png) [@Voyager](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Voyager)\ **Post date:** [June 21, 2004, 7:59pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/predictive-failures-of-science-fiction/251333/37 "2004-06-21T19:59:52Z")
> [@Exapno Mapcase](#): > > **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. 🙂 When I was at Illinois in 1974 I was a heavy user of the PLAO system. We had the equivalent of chat rooms, newsgroups, IM, and interactive games at least as good as those which exist today. It was not run on the net, but served by one CDC computer, but it used satellite links so that people in Illinois communicated seamlessly with people in Cornell and California. Don Bitzer’s dream was for almost universal service. i wrote a Star Trek column for the Plato newspaper. There was no spam, but there was a feeble kind of porn - obviously no one could get away with much. And the Arpanet was much older than 1979. I used it in 1974 to log into Stanford to play with the Parry AI program. And a professor of mine at MIT said in early 1973 that the purpose of the net was for people at MIT to send foo to people at Stanford, and for them to send bar back. My favorite misssed prediction - that the first landing on the moon would be televised. ---
**Author:** ![gobear](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/g/8dc957/32.png) [@gobear](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/gobear)\ **Post date:** [June 21, 2004, 8:04pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/predictive-failures-of-science-fiction/251333/38 "2004-06-21T20:04:39Z")
> [@Voyager](#): > > Uncle Hugo would have loved that story - except he might have asked the author to take out the sociological stuff. He thought sf was all about predicting the future. The revolution of the golden age was to make sf about people and the effect of technology on them, and to have the characters assume the technology. Which in itself is a predictive failure because if we’ve learned anything from recent world events is that the sociological stuff is every bit as important in determining the future as technology. ---
**Author:** ![BrainGlutton](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/82dd89/32.png) [@BrainGlutton](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/BrainGlutton)\ **Post date:** [June 21, 2004, 8:16pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/predictive-failures-of-science-fiction/251333/39 "2004-06-21T20:16:49Z")
> [@ralph124c](#): > > One question i have: many SF writers have postulated that mankind will become wise, generous and non-evil…when is this going to happen? :smack: When you make me your Emperor. 🆒 ---
**Author:** ![Beauty\_Personified](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/e480ec/32.png) [@Beauty\_Personified](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Beauty_Personified)\ **Post date:** [June 21, 2004, 8:56pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/predictive-failures-of-science-fiction/251333/40 "2004-06-21T20:56:30Z")
Interesting thread - every time it appears. 😉 That said, I really have nothing to add to the discussion. But I do have a link to a PDF of Murray Leinster’s [_A Logic Named Joe_](http://www.uky.edu/~jclark/tel201/lectures.html) (from a University of Kentucky “Interactive Communication Systems” course). Anyhoo… [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/predictive-failures-of-science-fiction/251333.md?page=1) [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/predictive-failures-of-science-fiction/251333.md?page=3)