On Tue, 18 Sep 2012, Hunter wrote:
> This is why I love science fiction, including sci fi that is set two,
> three, four hundred years in the future. It pushes the imagination to
> inspire people to see if it is possible. Science fiction only set
> about 50 years in the future is nice but it doesn't push the
> possibilities to the limit.
>
But set it far enough in the future, and they can just make things up.
Just because someone thinks "warp drive, hey that's a good thing" doesn't
mean it can exist. Nobody's going to be around that far in the future to
complain when the book is wrong.
A lot of science fiction, as fun to read as it is, has turned out wrong
already, leaving us with disillusion. The planets aren't hospitable, not
the way we read about it back when. Travel to the moon isn't even
happening, when all the fuss back then was about the first step, the
assumption being that once it was done, it would become routine. What if
there is no valid method of getting to another solar system, other than
taking forever? The "language" of science fiction has infiltrated us, I
doubt anyone doesn't know about the idea of "warp drive", yet that doesn't
make it real, does't mean someone can figure it out once it's "invented".
Far from people solving these things, we've ended up with nothing, and not
even the illusion that we'll be in space "any day now". I'm not sure a
reality has been created to replace that now false reality we grew up
with.
I'd also argue that good science fiction is based on reality. So you
can't extend that to the way future, but you can to the near future. And
then it's not so much that science fiction has caused science to happen,
but that the science caused the fiction, and then time enough later, the
real science has become practical.
Science fiction often hasn't been good about seeing the future, except
when extrapolating. I was rereading Heinlein's "Door INto Summer" a few
weeks ago. The main character is in 1970, creating useful robots, then
goes into deep freeze till 2000. When I read it about 1976, the first
future it looked to was in the past, and no level of robots like in the
book. It was also a weird selection, cheap robots, something like $39.99,
but a waving of a magical wand about how they are really powered.
Something bout memory tubes, which suggests no real "intelligence". And
then he cooks up a drafting machine, yes it's better than doing it by
hand, but he doesn't envision being able to save things electronically?
He just wants to be able to type and have the diagram plotted out on
paper. He later stuffs all the blueprints and written material in the
robot, no sign of using computers for writing, and keeping things
electronically.
It's easy to claim that science ficiton invented things, but often it
works the other way around. And you can have some great vision set
hundres of years in the future, and if somehow the invention comes true,
it just may have happened anyway.
Yes, a lot of current science fiction is in the near future, about social
things rather than technical. It's missing something by not being about
technical, perhaps lost something because the future caught up and we
dont' see those Pan Am flights to the moon. That may have made science
fiction more conservative, or maybe it's because the authors coming in
were more interested in the social aspects. It was pretty common in the
golden age for the authors to have interest in science, to have hobbies
like astronomy or chemistry or amateur radio, I'm not so sure that happens
with the incoming authors now. So they write about the world they dream
of, which is differently socially, rather than the technological gadgets
that were often important to the authors in the old days. Of course, once
those things were "invented", it's harder to come up with a different
future technology wise, so that technology may have moved to the
background.
The reality is the future is our childhood, that time when we read science
ficiton so heavily and believed in that future. The "real future" ie now,
is very different from what was anticipated, yet also never quite as good
as what we expected.
Michael