# Tips for scifi on avoiding zeerust **URL:** \ **Category:** Cafe Society\ **Created:** [April 30, 2013, 11:33am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/tips-for-scifi-on-avoiding-zeerust/657084 "2013-04-30T11:33:40Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 13\ **Page:** 4
**Author:** ![Lemur866](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/lemur866/32/434_2.png) [@Lemur866](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Lemur866)\ **Post date:** [May 1, 2013, 8:51pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/tips-for-scifi-on-avoiding-zeerust/657084/61 "2013-05-01T20:51:15Z")
You’re not going to have a “flying car” unless you have antigravity. Antigravity is magic–maybe someday humanity will be able to engineer gravity but it’s not even something on the drawing boards. Fusion power at least we can see how it might work, even though we can’t yet actually make it work. Antigravity is something else entirely. The best that can be said for antigravity is that at least it wouldn’t totally violate the laws of physics, like FTL/time travel does. But the thing is, if you postulate antigravity devices small enough and cheap enough and reliable enough to shove into your average schmoe’s beat-up flying Studebaker, there are about a million other applications that would render the flying car obsolete. ---
**Author:** ![armedmonkey](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/d6d6ee/32.png) [@armedmonkey](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/armedmonkey)\ **Post date:** [May 1, 2013, 9:10pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/tips-for-scifi-on-avoiding-zeerust/657084/62 "2013-05-01T21:10:06Z")
> [@artemis](#): > > That’s actually a superb way to insure your stories will date badly. We may not notice that people supposedly living in the 26th Century are behaving exactly like early 21st Century Westerners, but future generations sure will! But see, there you’re wrong. Think about what it would be to be a Roman Citizen in say, the year 50 CE. You got a job, a family, and you spend too much of your time bitching about local politics at the local watering hole. That was _two thousand_ years ago. Do you think people are going to change that much if you add another five hundred? It’s when you predict big changes in society that gets you in trouble. ---
**Author:** ![armedmonkey](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/d6d6ee/32.png) [@armedmonkey](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/armedmonkey)\ **Post date:** [May 1, 2013, 9:42pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/tips-for-scifi-on-avoiding-zeerust/657084/63 "2013-05-01T21:42:21Z")
As an addendum to the above, there is famous quote by Plato circa 500 BCE. > [@Plato](#): > > The children now love luxury; they have bad manners, contempt for authority; they allow disrespect for elders and love chatter in place of exercise. “Get off of Facebook and go play outside, damnit!” That was 25 centuries ago. ---
**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:** [May 1, 2013, 10:00pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/tips-for-scifi-on-avoiding-zeerust/657084/64 "2013-05-01T22:00:45Z")
> [@drewtwo99](#): > > Write like Frank Herbert. That’s your tip. I read Dune for the first time 2 years ago and didn’t notice a single fleck of zeerust. That’s because they’re set \*really _far in the future. Gen Wolfe’s New Sun books have avoided zeerust for the same reason, as do Roger Zelazny’s_ Lord of Light \*and _Creatures of Light and Darkness_. ---
**Author:** ![artemis](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/91b2a8/32.png) [@artemis](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/artemis)\ **Post date:** [May 1, 2013, 10:24pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/tips-for-scifi-on-avoiding-zeerust/657084/65 "2013-05-01T22:24:40Z")
> [@A Monkey With a Gun](#): > > But see, there you’re wrong. Think about what it would be to be a Roman Citizen in say, the year 50 CE. You got a job, a family, and you spend too much of your time bitching about local politics at the local watering hole. That was _two thousand_ years ago. Do you think people are going to change that much if you add another five hundred? If you actually knew much about ancient Roman society, you’d know how laughable that statement is. They had very different ideas about human equality (or lack of it), the role of women and men in marriage, the role of the citizen in relation to the state, the rights of children, etc., than we do. Yes, they were human and accordingly dealt with universal human concerns, but their society was structured very differently from our own. That’s likely to be true of future societies as well. Go read some of Robert Heinlein’s juveniles: one reason they feel so very dated is that the societies he describes feel exactly like 1950s America, even though the stories are supposedly set in the future. ---
**Author:** ![ralph124c](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/8797f3/32.png) [@ralph124c](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/ralph124c)\ **Post date:** [May 1, 2013, 10:55pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/tips-for-scifi-on-avoiding-zeerust/657084/66 "2013-05-01T22:55:53Z")
Good topic…how about a more realistic scenario. Suppose the USA spends trillions on advanced solar power systems-then a breakthrough in fusion power makes it all obsolete? Or suppose Arthur C. Clarke’s prediction (“don’t commute, communicate”) come true…after we have spent trillions on high speed maglev trains (and nobody uses them). ---
**Author:** ![TBG](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/c89c15/32.png) [@TBG](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/TBG)\ **Post date:** [May 1, 2013, 11:18pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/tips-for-scifi-on-avoiding-zeerust/657084/67 "2013-05-01T23:18:47Z")
Star Trek using data tapes is a pretty big one for me, though I guess you can fanwank that into they just call them tapes for some reason (lots of people did this for video game cartridges, back when video games actually had cartridges) but they’re actually some sort of solid state descendant of flash drives. They also had those mechanical counter for the clock when some baddie was gonna destroy the ship in “one earth hour” or some such, though I think they might have digitally replaced those in the remastered versions. Of course, then there’s the Eugenics War and WW3, which were supposed to happen in the 1990’s… guess coming back to save the whales must’ve shifted us into an alternate timeline from them. ---
**Author:** ![armedmonkey](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/d6d6ee/32.png) [@armedmonkey](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/armedmonkey)\ **Post date:** [May 2, 2013, 3:40am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/tips-for-scifi-on-avoiding-zeerust/657084/68 "2013-05-02T03:40:29Z")
> [@artemis](#): > > If you actually knew much about ancient Roman society, you’d know how laughable that statement is. I’m not saying it’s the _exact_ same. What I am saying is the old adage that “the more things change - the more they stay the same”. We are talking about how scifi can avoid being dated. The easiest way for scifi to be dated is to invent either a utopia or a distopia that forgets that humans will still be, well, human. To make it timeless you look at the similarities between now and the past and keep those. ---
**Author:** ![Chronos](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/chronos/32/134_2.png) [@Chronos](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Chronos)\ **Post date:** [May 2, 2013, 4:05am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/tips-for-scifi-on-avoiding-zeerust/657084/69 "2013-05-02T04:05:27Z")
> [@](#): > > Quoth **Amateur Barbarian** : > > In most golden-age and 1950s sf, robots and computers can accept complex voice instructions but are unable to synthesize a voice. Egregious example: In _Danny Dunn and the Homework Machine_, the computer took input via a microphone, and produced output via a typewriter… And those were the _only_ ways it handled input and output. You couldn’t give it input using the typewriter, since apparently that was harder than interpreting speech. Even as a kid in the early 80s, I knew that was backwards. ---
**Author:** ![artemis](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/91b2a8/32.png) [@artemis](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/artemis)\ **Post date:** [May 2, 2013, 4:08am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/tips-for-scifi-on-avoiding-zeerust/657084/70 "2013-05-02T04:08:30Z")
> [@A Monkey With a Gun](#): > > I’m not saying it’s the _exact_ same. What I am saying is the old adage that “the more things change - the more they stay the same”. We are talking about how scifi can avoid being dated. The easiest way for scifi to be dated is to invent either a utopia or a distopia that forgets that humans will still be, well, human. To make it timeless you look at the similarities between now and the past and keep those. But the more things change, the more things change. Human emotions, in the very broadest sense, are universal - but the way human societies are structured is massively influenced by changes in technology, which is the very thing that science fiction is dealing with. Go and read science fiction stories written in the 1930s: one of the most striking things modern readers notice is the complete absence of women. If hey appear at all, it’s in a cameo role as a helpless damsel in need of rescue. Female starship crew members? Ridiculous! It stands out like a sore thumb to us today - but readers of that era just saw it as the Way the World Was. They didn’t imagine the way changes in medical science and advances in automation would alter the role of women in society. That was the point made earlier in the thread: it’s easier to imagine a gentleman using a robot butler than to imagine a world without a need for butlers (or more radically, a world without gentlemen). Who knows what future generations are going to find ridiculous? The fact that teenagers don’t have the vote in our futuristic tales? That our protagonist is wasting his time worrying about his rebellious child rather than packing the unruly kid off the hospital for a thorough psychosocial adjustment? That our stories feature parasitic old people who should be checking into the neighborhood Euthanasia Center (like any decent person would do)? That we totally missed how the invention of mechanical telepathy would affect human relationships? People may always be people, but future society will NOT resemble the current one. In important ways. Ignoring that inevitably produces jarring anachronisms. ---
**Author:** ![Tom\_Tildrum](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/e95f7d/32.png) [@Tom\_Tildrum](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Tom_Tildrum)\ **Post date:** [May 2, 2013, 4:41am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/tips-for-scifi-on-avoiding-zeerust/657084/71 "2013-05-02T04:41:19Z")
> [@Lemur866](#): > > Antigravity is magic–maybe someday humanity will be able to engineer gravity but it’s not even something on the drawing boards. [Article](http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-22355187): Antigravity gets first test at Cern’s Alpha experiment. ---
**Author:** ![Sam\_A.Robrin](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/sam_a.robrin/32/14497_2.png) [@Sam\_A.Robrin](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Sam_A.Robrin)\ **Post date:** [May 2, 2013, 6:21am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/tips-for-scifi-on-avoiding-zeerust/657084/72 "2013-05-02T06:21:07Z")
> [@artemis](#): > > Go read some of Robert Heinlein’s juveniles: one reason they feel so very dated is that the societies he describes feel exactly like 1950s America, even though the stories are supposedly set in the future. The first example that popped into my mind was the list of Rhysling’s “naughty” songs in “The Green Hills of Earth”–the sort of fare that _would_ have shocked audiences … in 1947. ---
**Author:** ![Amateur\_Barbarian](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/59ef9b/32.png) [@Amateur\_Barbarian](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Amateur_Barbarian)\ **Post date:** [May 2, 2013, 12:57pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/tips-for-scifi-on-avoiding-zeerust/657084/73 "2013-05-02T12:57:49Z")
> [@Chronos](#): > > Egregious example: In _Danny Dunn and the Homework Machine_, the computer took input via a microphone, and produced output via a typewriter… And those were the _only_ ways it handled input and output. You couldn’t give it input using the typewriter, since apparently that was harder than interpreting speech. > > Even as a kid in the early 80s, I knew that was backwards. Computers had begun to take final shape by then, so you were cheating. 🙂 I find a more egregrious example in Asimov’s early robot stories, where robots could take and exectute complex oral commands but not speak. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/tips-for-scifi-on-avoiding-zeerust/657084.md?page=3)