Highly likely, seeing all the Oz references in The Number of the Beast and his other works.
What I find interesting: none of the Sci-Fi futurists ever speculated much on the very conservative nature of society-its easy to extrapolate about Iphones and rocket ships, but why are we still laboring on with a 13th century legal system (laws written in archaic , obscure language); and our 19th century government runs amuck, wasting resources at a furious pace.
Because we’re still human.
Agreed, I’m reasonably sure Verne’s own rocket to the moon didn’t use nuclear energy.
And don’t forget Cavorite.
Now called exclusively Upsidaisium (Up), after a controversial IUPAC ruling released in tandem with the International Astronomical Union’s ‘Dwarf planet resolution’.
Fuckin’ dwarfs.
Read The Gate to Women’s Country by Sheri S. Tepper, or The Parable of the Sower by Octavia Butler, and get back to me on that.
Usually, though, SF writers don’t write SF in order to PREDICT the future, and it’s a mistake to read SF to try to figure out what the future will be like. SF writers usually have a story they want to tell about how people will react to different societies, cultures, and technologies. For instance, David Brin wrote about a society in which people have access to cloning technology in Kiln People. The clones only live about 24 hours, and if the original (rig) wants to, s/he can accept the clone’s (rox’s) memories of its life. People clone themselves in order to study, in order to have sensual experiences, and to do household chores, among other things. Brin probably doesn’t think that this sort of technology would ever exist, he’s just saying what if it DID? How would humans react? And it’s an interesting story.
And I’m beyond reasonably sure that Verne’s spaceship wasn’t a rocket.
I’m waiting for chairdogs and beddogs from Frank Herbert. I would love to sit down in a fur-lined recliner that conformed to your shape, purred, and walked itself around as needed. I don’t think he ever explained how much they poop, though.
“Oh, sorry about that, the ottoman has a bit of diarrhea and the recliner barfed up its breakfast again…”
No they’re not. In the 50s, led by the Catholic Church and Protestant social conservatives, they had a lock on all movies, TV and comic books, censoring all sorts of content, including sexual content. Check out the Hayes Code and the Comics Code Authority. They are pathetically weak compared to their power in the 1950s. I would love to hear your argument that they are more powerful nowadays.
… maybe in another thread?
Works for me.
don’t forget to link to it.
One big one a lot of them missed is the demographic transition. A number of SF stories I’ve read have some government-imposed limit on the number of children a person or couple is allowed to have. China has that now, but the demographic transition and the availability of effective birth control solved that problem in most of the developed world with no government intervention required. In fact, it arguably solved it too well in some advanced societies, such as Japan, which are now dealing with issues of having too many old people relative to the number of young people.
That of course ties into their missing Women’s Liberation- women’s employment opportunities are one of the factors that go into the demographic transition.
Irony piled on irony. The Chinese government now feels that it has to censor the internet to keep out (among other things) the porn that we’re sending them.
You could easily find some people who think there are ill effects. You may agree or disagree with them, but there are people who have that opinion.
That was a respectable scientific opinion at the time, assuming these stories were written before 1962. That’s when we sent Mariner 2 to Venus and learned that the surface is too hot for swamps or intelligent life as we know it.
Isaac Asimov’s story The Dying Night makes a similar mistake that is understandable for its time (the story was written in 1956)- the story hinges on the idea that Mercury is tidally locked to the Sun. We learned in 1965 that that isn’t true. Asimov actually insisted that a postscript saying that Mercury’s rotation isn’t tidally locked to the Sun be printed with every reprinting of The Dying Night done after the discovery.
Another Asimov story, The Dust of Death, hinges on the then-current idea that the atmosphere of Titan was made up of hydrogen and methane. We discovered in 2005 that Titan’s atmosphere is 98.4% nitrogen and 1.6% methane.
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I thought I’d read everything by Asimov, but * The Dust of Death* is new to me. Can you tell me in which collection it might be available? Thanks.
I’m not the one making the extraordinary claim, I think Lemur should start the thread.