Roundtable: SF vs. The Future

Russell wrote: “I’m scheduled for cataract surgery in a few weeks, so the trifocals may be going away, to be replaced by multi-focal lens implants. Replacement parts. Whoda thunkit.”

When my father had cataract surgery in the 1970s, he was in the hospital for days, and his recovery at home took weeks. For about a week he had to hold his head immobile, and the family hired a nurse to sit with him during the day to make sure he did just that. My friends and relatives who have had cataract surgery lately, including my older brother, describe a process that sounds a lot more like popping into the dentist for a 10-minute cleaning.

I read an article years ago by a heart surgeon who was himself a heart patient, a survivor of multiple heart attacks beginning in the 1960s. The article described how his treatment after each attack reflected the improvements in cardiac medicine through the years. After his first attack, the doctors basically put him in a hospital room and watched him to see whether he’d survive, knowing nothing else to do for him other than make him comfy.

These routine miracles of medical technology are certainly a promise of the sf future fulfilled, or en route to being fulfilled, for at least some of us. (Medical economics is, of course, another story.)

Cecelia wrote: “Maybe when we pretend we’re projecting into the future we’re only dealing with the now. which is what fiction is supposed to do anyway.”

This is of course why Harry Harrison’s collection seemed so 20th century to Paul D.F. Harrison’s futures really were depictions of the 1950s, 1960s, etc., as seen by the attitudes of whatever decade he was writing in. Today’s space operas, steampunk novels, alien-invasion movies, etc., will date similarly.

Harrison, who’s still very much Among Those Present, could tell us what watching this happen is like, if we asked him … as could Fred Pohl, Brian Aldiss, James Gunn, Carol Emshwiller, etc.

Gary wrote: “It may be that Campbell was such a megodont lumbering through the circus that we overlook the fact that SF has offered a whole panoply of different futures.”

Certainly Will Jenkins’ “A Logic Named Joe” (Astounding, 1946), a hair-raisingly prescient story about home computing and the World Wide Web, offered a different future indeed — with, alas, no takers. It was a Road Not Traveled, at least not by sf writers of that generation. If Campbell and his stable had leapt upon the possibilities of that story, the history of science fiction and maybe of the 20th century would have been quite different.

Stefan wrote: “The vision that drove science fiction at the start of the twentieth century was macroscopic and outward looking. The reality of technology at the start of the twenty-first century is that it’s application is, if not more microscopic, at least focused more inwardly, on refinements of existing systems and their hitherto unexplored possibilities. We’re all like Matheson’s Shrinking Man, discovering a world of wonderful in the subatomic universe.”

Long ago, circa 1990, I attended a talk by Tom Wolfe, and what I chiefly remember is Wolfe’s argument that you could track our growing self-absorption by the titles of our really successful magazines through the years: TIME, LIFE (a bit narrower focus than Time), PEOPLE (narrower still), US, and finally SELF.

Interesting that you mentioned Matheson’s The Shrinking Man, since it was the textbook “horror novel” that Cyril Kornbluth deplored in his 1957 University of Chicago lecture — symptomatic of a genre that looked at the universe in horror, and retreated inward. Kornbluth said he hoped such fare never became dominant in pop culture, because it would mean society had changed for the worse.