Roundtable: SF vs. The Future
I get tired of all the whining about how disappointing the present is because we don’t have jetpacks and flying cars. The technological miracles we DO have are jaw-dropping, and at least twenty to fifty years ahead of what any reasonable prognosticator might have predicted we’d have by now from the vantage point of the ’60s–all the medical stuff Andrew pointed out, unbelievably sophisticated computer and communications skills, astonishing long-range (and micro) viewing capabilities, the beginnings of working nanotech, antimatter production, even the first hints of teleportation.
If this doesn’t generate a Sense of Wonder in us, the fault is in us, not the “future” we ended up with.
Similarly, it strikes me as sad that so many SF writers are dismissive if not scornful of Space, at a time when we know vastly more about the structure and makeup of the solar system, to say nothing of the rest of the universe, than we have at any other time in the history of humanity, immensely more than we knew in the ’50s and ’60s. This is a failure of imagination on our part, I fear.
As Ceclia Holland says, “Whatever happens next, it won’t be anything we’re prepared for.” The future is unpredictable by definition. If science fiction can be said to be predictive surely it is the broken-clock-showing-the-right-time sort of blind luck. Being predictive is a story we tell ourselves about science fiction after the one of the blind luck ideas becomes real.
The future arrives in fits and starts, one halting step at a time, and when we glance backward we see that “the past is another country” and that we are transformed. The science fiction community goes through periods where it narrows its view of tomorrow and is susceptible to groupthink, before eventually breaking out in new directions. Always, writers need to shrug off yesterday’s tomorrows and find their own way. Never mind prediction. Offer a vision of a possibility and readers will gather like moths to a flame.
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With regards to the previous comments as to the future being unpredictable (which is true in the science sense) it is possible to make assumptions about trends etc. (And so for example we have the UN global population forcast for the 21st century.) Meanwhile SF is a bit like a blunderbus that sometimes points at a target called the future but with many shots missing but a few hitting the target.
As a bit of fun we (a team of mainly scientists and engineers who run a website) make some predictions for the near and medium term future at the beginning of every other year. We have done this for the best part of a decade. Our latest New Year prediction snippet is here (and we do seem to have quite a few hits).
See http://www.concatenation.org/news/news1~11.html#predictions
And the gamey lovers e’er rest in a quandary on how to have the unloose minecraft accounts.
It also features some interesting caves and rock formations, so if those are your thing then check this out.
You would possibly be wondering, Random Mobile phone industry’s.
As Ceclia Holland says, “Whatever happens next, it won’t be anything we’re prepared for.” The future is unpredictable by definition. If science fiction can be said to be predictive surely it is the broken-clock-showing-the-right-time sort of blind luck. Being predictive is a story we tell ourselves about science fiction after the one of the blind luck ideas becomes real.