Roundtable: SF vs. The Future
I saw William Gibson on tour in the UK last year and he addressed this very point. I quote here from my report of his speech, which he told me on Twitter he thought was a good summary of what he said:
Postulating as to why modern SF might be less interested in futurology, Gibson suggested that in order to predict the future it is necessary to have a stable present on which to build. The likes of Wells and Heinlein, he said, were sure of the nature of their world, and could thus confidently predict how it might change. The modern day SF writer is faced by a world that changes month-on-month, where technological advances come as a torrent rather than a trickle, and consequently prediction is a much more dodgy process. SF writers, he opined, were much safer dealing with space opera settings such as The Culture which are far enough advanced that there is no need to question how we got from here to there.
See http://www.cheryl-morgan.com/?p=9577 for the full text of my report.
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.
Pingback:Cheryl's Mewsings » Blog Archive » Busy Elsewhere
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.