That’s not, nor ever has, been true. It’s one thing for movies to make that mistake, but for a serious article it’s as bad as, well, vacuum tubes in The Future.
There are a lot of planes that have no electronics (outside of radios and whatnot) that can be harmed by EMP. They’d keep flying until they ran out of fuel, And aircraft with electronic engine controls (FADEC) are shielded, and should the EMP be too strong for the shielding, have fail-safe limp home modes. EMPs aren’t going to cause aircraft warning lights to flash randomly and the aircraft crash. They’d never get FAA certification if they were that vulnerable.
That’s one thing Star Trek TOS got right. I love their little square colored memory discs, whatever they are.
I have probably read more science fiction from the 1930’s than from the 2020’s. Is this kind of thing still going on? Can anyone point to a science fiction work written within the past five years ago where the space driver whips out her space cell phone to use the space GPS to calculate a course to the local cafe to order a space latte, in a similar way to the old Heinlien stories of the astrogator using a slide rule to calculate a course to deliver wheat?
Then you are correct, I have no idea what your point is. You keep talking about how dated references shouldn’t be in a story, but apparently, you aren’t saying that they detract from it.
You keep strawmanning things like stories referencing Gasoline or Biden, things that you just made up, not actual references to any stories in existence, so it’s a bit hard to grok what exactly it is that you are wanting us to petition science fiction writers to do.
For instance, your Biden example. If the story is set before 2028, then having president Biden makes sense. If it is set after 2028, then it’s not just dated to use Biden, it is wrong. But your complaint is not about specifics like that, your complaint wasn’t that they used a k-622a vacuum tube when everyone knows that they went out of production in 1943, your complaint is that they used vacuum tubes at all, similar to complaining that a story set in 2030 makes reference to the President of the United States, rather than the Triumvirate of the North American Alliance.
I tried to give a better example for your gasoline analogy, but you decided to dismiss that and double down on your complaint about science fiction writers not predicting the future accurately, and asserting that if they can’t, then they should just make shit up.
Like I said, if your complaint isn’t about dated references in science fiction, something that you have actually complained about in this thread several times, even going so far as to castigate any author who doesn’t take future audiences and the world that they live in into account, then you have done an extremely poor job of actually presenting what it actually is that you are complaining about.
The thing is that any extrapolation into the future is going to be wrong. We’ll be using some technologies decades from now that we currently assume should be obsolete by then. And conversely may soon stop using some bits of current technology in favor of something new.
Any prognostication about ‘easily extrapolated’ technological trends is going to be more often wrong than right, sometimes hilariously so. Just look at Ray Kurzweil’s predictions over the years.
We just can’t tell right now. The people around in 50-60 years are the only ones who will be able to tell us if we were right about the world 50-60 years from now.
For a real example of this sort of thing, I’ve read sci-fi stories written during the Cold War that make references to the Soviet Union still existing in the far future. And no, I don’t fault the authors for not extrapolating that the Soviet Union would collapse.
I’m sure there have been lots of science fiction works written in the last five years that have badly misread upcoming technology (or social trends). But we won’t know which ones they are until a few more years have passed.
I mean, heck, if you had asked me in the 90s, I would have told you vinyl record sales would be vanishingly close to zero by now and certainly replaced by CDs or whatever the physical successor to CDs was (memory cubes or micro-diskettes or plasmon holospheres or whatever). A lot of people would also have made that very easy extrapolation of trends.
And that would have been largely incorrect in not one but two different ways: vinyl is somehow now the predominant physical media for music sales again and the replacement for CDs is not physical but digital media and it happened relatively fast. The latter is somewhat obvious in hindsight but was not so obvious back then.
A relatively recent example: in Dan Simmon’s Hyperion, from 1990, a far future private investigator remarks to the reader that having access to someone’s (equivalent of) credit card data is useful for finding that person, which by only a few years later would seem like a “well, duh!” statement, but is not played that way in the book
I know - I just used your post as a jumping off point.
But it annoys me when movies get that wrong. The one in the front of my head is Broken Arrow*, which has an EMP cause a military heli to crash. Nope, not gonna happen.
* hell, they didn’t even get the title of the movie right! “Broken Arrow” is code for a lost or jettisoned weapon. What they wanted is “Empty Quiver”. Maybe empty quiver sounds too sexual for the filmmakers (that’s what she said!)
I am idly wondering whether ‘vacuum tube’ technology may have some sort of renaissance when industry and data processing occurs on a large scale in the vacuum of space. Maybe some arrangement of ‘tubeless vacuum tubes’ might be useful for various applications in the relatively distant future, when flows of charged particles can be maintained within systems without any need for containment.
Probably various ingenious SF writers have come up with similar concepts over the years, but I can’t think of an example at the moment.
I watched that when it came out with an active duty member of the Canadian Armed Forces and two minutes didn’t go by without a comment like “grenade fuses don’t work like that” or similar. However, the “Would you mind not shooting at the thermonuclear weapons” quote makes up for quite a lot.
And that’s one of the things I thought was one of the bad ones. Yes, they show removable solid-state media, but they show them being used in such ways and such numbers as if they had the capacity of a 1990s floppy disk.
See, when the Soviets won WWIII, and imposed communism, all the competent software engineers were either killed or sent to gulags and died. No one left from then until the “present” of 2265 knows anything about proper coding. So there is no optimization of software or data storage. A word file now that’s only, say, 1 MB is 300MB in 2265. A single jpeg equivalent might be 500GB. A short film could be 4TB.
That’s why the main computer takes up three decks of space in the Enterprise. Not only is the software overly bloated, they probably are using vacuum tubes! (and we come full circle…)
You might think not. Most fantasy does not have technological elements in them. Some sf books go so far out of their way to make the technology irrelevant that they turn into fantasy. A recent example is N. K. Jemisin’s Broken Earth trilogy. It includes lots of science-y terms, was marketed as science fiction, won the Best Novel Hugo Award for each book, and made Jemisin a leading science fiction writer. Yet the world she builds - in a series whose world-building was loudly praised by almost everybody - is more fantasy than Tolkien’s.
Would that be is a plus in Little Nemo’s terms? It won’t date, but only because it wasn’t real technology in the first place.
So is fantasy the answer? Is Tolkien dated? The answer is yes, very much so. Tolkien is now considered sexist and racist and imperialistic for the characters he did and didn’t include and the way he paralleled his fictional world against our real world. Millions continue to practically worship him, but my feeling is that the number of new readers will continue to diminish or turn to the modern prequels and such that will reflect 2022 attitudes about these things. Look at the way Game of Thrones had to change the depiction of women from the first season to the last, especially cutting out the gratuitous nudity and making the characters late teens instead of in the first flush of puberty as in the novels.
Jeanette Ng won the John W. Campbell Memorial Award for Best New [Science Fiction] writer and her acceptance speech started with “John W. Campbell, for whom this award was named, was a fascist. Through his editorial control of Astounding Science Fiction, he is responsible for setting a tone of science fiction that still haunts the genre to this day. Sterile. Male. White. Exalting in the ambitions of imperialists and colonisers, settlers and industrialists.” The next year the name of the Award was changed to the Astounding Award for Best New Writer.
Poul Anderson was one of those Campbell writers. What should look dated today are the worlds he created and people he placed in them. The minor technological details shouldn’t matter at all. Almost everything from that time is tainted by the default assumptions of that era.
Jemisin’s adulation was very much due to appreciation of her flipping those assumptions and making several kinds of diversity the real center of her world. White men are distinctly secondary. Will that hold up in 60 years or will it looked forced or misplaced? No idea. I don’t even know whether she’ll be being read in 60 years, or be an old-fashioned curiosity like “Call Me Joe.” I don’t know if she gives a fuck. I do know she was right in addressing a book to the readers of today. Naming Biden as the U.S. President in 2022 doesn’t necessarily date a story. Writing a story about the supposed real world and naming the president Smith is a far worse flaw. Writing about the world readers know is far better than inserting generic gruel.
There is no alternative. Writers are right to worry about today’s worries. If a story lasts, it will last for every reason besides its technological details.
The story involve, IIRC, the frantic race to create a perfect square wave to fix a broken space ship.
My rich aunt gave me a good quality K&E one before I went to MIT, but I was happy to get a calculator to do my quals when I went to grad school.
I bought my first slide rule as a senior in high school. I used a $20 bill I found while out cycling. I was faster finding square roots and sines on it than the guy who bought the hand calculator.
I used that slide rule through my first couple of years at college. The third year I needed three place accuracy for my labs, so I borrowed a calculator when I could. By my senior year, full-function programmable calculators had come down enough in price that I could afford one.
I seem to remember having some school lessons on a slide rule in the early 1980s, but the memory is so vague that it could be false. I did own one once, though. But what I really want is a Curta.
Huh? He didn’t get that much wrong. The Earth does in fact contain caves, which is where he set his book. If by “hollow Earth”, you mean a thin shell, with most of the planet’s volume empty, yes, we know that’s wrong, and so did Verne. There were some writers who thought it was that way, but they’re not nearly as remembered as Verne is.
