Exaopno’s quite right about SF being about the present. I just read John Scalzi’s Old Man’s War and The Ghost Brigades. They’re great books – the latest take on Soldiers of the Future, and are invariably compared to Starship Troopers and Forever War. But the ideas and terminology are heavily linked to Right Now. Soldiers use PDAs (Scalzi doesn’t even bother to say what that set of initials stands for) and similar current computer concepts and terminology. In twenty years – less, probably – these books are going to look horribly dated. But Scalzi didn’t write them for twenty years from now. He wrote them for Now.
That said, there are some writers whose exttrapolations are pretty hard not to judge against the actual performance of the reality when that eventually came around. Take Jules Verne. His 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea is probably his best known work, and a classic, and he extrapolated about the submarine. A lot of it is pretty good, too. Verne did his homework. But he managed to miss at least two items, the absence of which looks odd in retrospect. His Nautilus carries no torpedoes – Nemo sinks ships by ramming them. It seems a very weird omission. Certainly there were plenty of projectile weapons under other circumstances to suggest the idea. Real-life Submarines well before Verne had used explosives. Bushnell’s Turtle had, back during the Revolutionary War. It had gone off, too, although not attached to the British ship Eagle it was trying to sink. The Civil war Hunley had successfully sunk the Housatonic with its spar-attached torpedo. Neither of these was a free-running device, but that’s the kind of thing Verne could extrapolate.
Even more surprising to modern eyes, the Nautilus lacked a periscope. Arguably the periscope is not as obvious an idea as we might think, but it’s definitely a missed extrapolation.
I’ve heard it said before that the original significance of the Television as a medium of entertainment was overlooked. At first, everyone seemed to think it was going to be primarily or solely an instrument of communication. Heck, Verne himself uses it as such in two of his works, and it was shown in that fashion even after Huge Gernsback began his pioneering broadcasts that were clearly one-way and not communicative (Carl Sagan got it wrong in Contact. Long before Adolph Hitler got beamed into space, Gernsback’s station was broadcasting pictures of …Felix the Cat.)
Another pretty obvious mismatch between the predictions of fiction and reality was the use of robots and computers. Man-shaped robots were ubiquitous in old SF, of course. And, even after computers came on the scene, they continued to be huge and unwieldy, with people using slide rules and differential analyzers. Nobody seems to have anticipated Moore’s Law and miniaturized computers (I was at a lecture Asimov gave in the mid-1970s, where he pointed out that he “got it right” with “Pocket Calculators”, using the actual term in his “Foundation” stories. He even read a brief passage that talked about the “red numbers”. “I even got the color right!” he bragged. But only a couple of years later the calculator manufacturers switched from the energy-gulping red LED displays to more efficient LCD displays. Asimov may have been rightm, but only for a brief while.)
And, despite Wells’ writing about “The World Brain” and Murray Leinster’s “A Logic Named Joe”, and quasi examples in a couple of promotional films from the 1960s, SF almost completely missed the Internet. Even as late as the early 1990s, when it was becoming a popular reality, not resptricted to DARPANET and the like, you didn’t have anything like it showing up in SF stories. NOW it’s there, in Harry Turtledove’s Colonization series and Scalzi’s books and others. But people were surprisingly slow to latch onto this idea.
