I was re-reading the short story “Call Me Joe” by Poul Anderson this weekend. It’s a science fiction classic from 1957 dealing with the exploration of Jupiter through the use of genetically engineered clones.
There was an anachronistic clunker in the story; Anderson mentioned the use of vacuum tubes at a few points in the story. This was not unique to this story. I can recall vacuum tubes being mentioned by other classic science fiction authors in stories set in the distant future.
It’s not like any reasonably good guesser wouldn’t have seen vacuum tubes were not going to be in widespread use in the future. Transistors had been invented in 1947 and integrated circuits were being developed in the fifties. Anyone should have been able to predict that when we built robots and starships and bases on Mars we would not be using vacuum tubes.
Is there some reason why these classic SF authors put vacuum tubes into their stories of the future? Was it perhaps a case that vacuum tubes had been a “gee whiz” technology from their youth and they couldn’t incorporate its obsolescence in their thinking?
It shouldn’t be about technological prediction. But well-written science fiction should try to incorporate the idea that the future will be different from the present.
They needed a different data pad for each subject they needed to study up on. It shouldn’t have been a hard guess to know you can download as many subjects to one data pad as you want.
But perhaps this wasn’t the effect the writers were trying to go for but rather they wanted to convey to the viewers: Wow! Look at how hard this character is working. Which wouldn’t have been conveyed had the character only been holding one data pad.
Maybe the same is true with the vacuum tubes. The writer wants to paint a picture the reader can imagine. In 1957 I don’t know that a lot of readers could imagine ICs and what that would look like. But they probably could with vacuum tubes.
In my work, I often need to compare documents side-by side. Were I working on a tablet kind of thing, it would be easier to do that if I had two or more tablets. As it is, I use an oversize monitor or a two-monitor set up, so I can spread things out, but if I wasn’t sitting at the same desk everyday, and had to use a tablet, I’d want more than one.
The real trick would be being able to easily share data between the tablets, if I want to copy and paste from one document to another. Something like in The Expanse, where you can just “toss” data from one handheld device to another, or to a wall screen.
It is different. Just not in every detail, and it routinely gets details wrong. It’s not unusual to even ignore scientific facts for the sake of the story.
But that doesn’t mean it needs to incorporate the idea that future technology is necessarily different.
That’s a strange and very limiting condition. Or perhaps stereotyping what SF is about.
Most of what Ted Chiang has written would be an example. Much of his material is considered to fall into SF but features technology at or below modern standards (“Omphalos” or “Tower of Babylon” or “Story of Your Life”).
A lot of steampunk is really about doing the reverse - trying to envision something approaching modern technology with outdated tech. Very few people would say steampunk doesn’t fall under the SF aegis.
Or, if we’re looking for “Golden Age” (though I’d say we’re living in that now, to be honest) SF examples, a lot of Heinlein’s stuff falls into this - though Heinlein himself resisted the SF label for his works except for “Fahrenheit 451” which ironically would probably be considered by many to be his least SF work.
So, no, it doesn’t really bother me if an SF story does not dip into futurism. When there’s a subgenre of SF that deliberately incorporates anachronistic technology, it tells us that the state of the art or beyond in technology is not a required feature of the genre.
In 1957 transistors were mostly low gain, low frequency, germanium devices. Integrated circuits were unknown. Vacuum tube technology was outpacing transistors for a while. There were cold cathode vacuum tubes, button size vacuum tubes and Nuvistors. All out performed transistors. So, in 1957 a futurist would rely on vacuum tubes for anything requiring high frequency, high power or long distance communication.
You’re assuming “reasonably good guesser” and “Anyone” keep up with the latest happenings in technology. I work in IT, fix computers for a large law firm, I can assure you, A LOT of people no nothing about the workings of technology, or the latest advancements. The stories I could tell…
Also, maybe the author just liked the idea of vacuum tubes, and wanted them in the story.
Although the transistor was invented in 1947 and well-publicized at the time, tubes were still the dominant technology in radios and TVs. Transistor radios were being made in the early 1950s, but there weren’t a lot of them, and they were expensive. “Cheap” transistor radios cost $40 when Anderson’s story came out (equivalent to $370 today). Ten years later, I was still watching Star Trek on a black and white TV crammed with vacuum tubes.
So the technology was known, but hadn’t made it well into the public mind. You could argue that, as a science fiction writer, Anderson should have seen this coming, but SF writers don’t always perceive the future clearly. Big surprise there.
Robert Heinlein and George O. Smith wrote about spaceships using vacuum tubes and using navigational computers that were analog, using linkages similar to a Norden bombsight rather than electronic digital computers. Smith’s Venus Equilateral series was written mostly before 1945, do it’s not surprising. But when he wrote a 1973 story that fit into the series he tried to keep his technology consistent.
I freely admit that I know far less about the authors and works of this period than several other posters, so I may be completely wrong about this, but:
It’s always been my impression that a lot of Golden Age sci-fi authors were themselves hands-on technology enthusiasts - the kind of folks that would have been building their own radio sets as teenagers. I always thought that a lot of them were writing their own first hand experiences with vacuum tubes and bus bars and all the rest, but writ large, projecting their personal experience with amateur electronics tinkering into spacecraft engineering.
So, not so much that vacuum tubes were the whiz-bang technology when they were kids, but that vacuum tubes were the technology they were actually intimately familiar with, and could write knowledgeably about, and enjoyed thinking and writing about.
Science fiction is aways about the time it was written.
The author may have preferred referencing some real technology instead of a technobabble dump that distracted the reader from the ideas of the story.
I recall one Poul Andersen story, I believe about Dominic Flandry, where a spacecraft’s targeting computer consisted of “micro miniature vacuum tubes”. They were obviously not the tubes we think of today, or in 1950.
Bradbury was a massive Luddite who thought transistor radios and television were the fall of civilization. He died a bitter boomer (in “okay, boomer” terms if not in years) in a world that was a distopian nightmare to him.