!!! 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.)
They are? Says who? Ray Bradbury, for instance, has said that he does not write to predict a future, but to prevent it.
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).
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.
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).
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!
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.
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.
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:
the [bracketed] stuff is my abridgement for space purposes.
Fenris
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.
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:
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.
Excuse me? I wrote:
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
When you make me your Emperor. 
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 (from a University of Kentucky “Interactive Communication Systems” course).
Anyhoo…