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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
