How well does science fiction predict the future?

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This is something I was wondering about as I was offering my two cents on another question. Does science fiction predict the future? I'm sure most sci-fi fans can point to some item here or there that proved prescient (such as Arthur C. Clarke's vision of communications satellites), but isn't the vast bulk of it simply wrong?

― Mark Klobas, Thursday, 5 August 2004 02:34 (twenty-one years ago)

Have you ever noticed that a lot of the early distopias (1984, Brave New World) all have the helicopter as our prime mode of transportation. They got that one wrong.
Like a lot of other things I think sometimes we see the things we want to see when analyzing these books. A lot of people would look at those books I mentioned and say, "see, they said it would happen and look, it has." But maybe it's just the tail wagging the dog. Nah-mm sayin'?

― Moti, Thursday, 5 August 2004 03:16 (twenty-one years ago)

Wrong? Sure, but I don't think science fiction's really about predicting the future, for the most part, so it's not really an issue. Most of the time, it's just fantasizing about what could be, the author's don't necessarily expect things to work out that way... Or even think it's possible.
I'm very fond of SF myself, but I never really read any of it as attempts at predicting the future. Sometimes there are allegorical reasons behind it (Banks' Culture, Haldeman's "Forever War", or, better yet, Kapec's "War Of The Newts" - if that can called SF), while most of the time it's just "heyy, we need new things to go gee whizz over" fantasy-fest of trying to imagine nifty, more-or-less possible futures. To the extent that SF has successfully predicted the future, I think it's mostly because the technology at the time opened paths into imagining new ideas, which then were eventually also implemented in real life.

You'll soon see that Childhood's End is our future, though! Up the alien overlords!
I shouldn't post while this close by sleep-land.

Xpost: My dad mentioned a nifty little treat from a novel he read in the 50s. Astronauts from various parts of the world were gathering in America to head into space to blow up an asteroid - or something along those lines. Big fancy rocketship and all, naturally.
How'd they get together? Why, they spent weeks getting to America by boat! Futuristic! And effective, to boot!

― Øystein H-O (Øystein H-O), Thursday, 5 August 2004 03:39 (twenty-one years ago)

Oystein is right - this isn't at all what at least 99% of SF is aiming to do, and I think it's a complete category error to judge it this way. Obviously bits of any fiction set in the future might come true at some point, but that's accidental.

― Martin Skidmore (Martin Skidmore), Thursday, 5 August 2004 09:29 (twenty-one years ago)

I think SciFi can become a reality. What about the space elevator? They're actually going to build that. And look at an artist's rendition of what the Huygens probe is going to look like parachuting to the surface of Titan. Total SciFi book cover there.

― Vermont Girl (Vermont Girl), Thursday, 5 August 2004 10:28 (twenty-one years ago)

Hard SF aims at plausibility, and given the amount and quality of it out there it's not surprising that you see some realized concepts. SF often does a good job of predicting a general concept without getting that concept's details right.

Fundamentally, though, SF is rooted in the ideas and concerns of the time in which it was written. Witness the rocket ships and emphasis on cold war ideologies, but little understanding of how the information age was going to transform human interaction until about 1980 or so, when we started to see cyberpunk.

― selfnoise, Thursday, 5 August 2004 11:34 (twenty-one years ago)

I think Ian M. Banks might be right that an intellegent species that doesn't blow itself up will inevitably move towards a socialistic, machine-run society. Call me an old lefty.

I reckon we'll blow ourselves up before we get there.

― Wooden (Wooden), Thursday, 5 August 2004 13:43 (twenty-one years ago)

I agree with Oystein that science fiction isn't about predicting the future; it's more about insight into our present. Still, many people LOOK to sci-fi for its allegedly predictive value, and as he points out, people use it to shape their attitudes about what's to come. Yet why do so many people do this when it almost never turns out the way we expect it to? Are we so anxious about the future that we will grasp onto any vision that provides some sense of what's ahead, regardless as to whether or not it's actually predictive?

― Mark Klobas, Thursday, 5 August 2004 16:02 (twenty-one years ago)

I just want to say that I bought "War of the Newts" thinking it was called "War of the News" and was a little disappointed when I brought it home and saw the real title. Although I'm not sure why -- "Newts" seems much better now.

Anyway, I haven't read it yet. It's good?

― Casuistry (Chris P), Thursday, 5 August 2004 19:06 (twenty-one years ago)

Isn't it War _WITH_ the Newts? :)

― selfnoise, Thursday, 5 August 2004 19:16 (twenty-one years ago)

Arrr, so it is. The Norwegian translation is actually closer to just being "The Salamander War" ("Salamanderkrigen"), so I was a bit too quick on the keyboard.

I found the novel to be tremendous, myself. It has a sort of "Wyndham done right"* feel to it. It's a bit more thought-through and developed than this types of novels generally are. I bet a lot of students have had to sit through tedious and turgid lectures about it over the years.

*I don't actually dislike Wyndham, mind you. The Day Of The Triffids was pretty enjoyable in its own right.

― Øystein H-O (Øystein H-O), Thursday, 5 August 2004 19:47 (twenty-one years ago)

Oh yeah. "War With The News" was the really exciting title I misread.

― Casuistry (Chris P), Friday, 6 August 2004 21:12 (twenty-one years ago)

two years pass...

PKD wasn't too off, except he had too many droids running around

― kingfish prætor (kingfish 2.0), Monday, 13 November 2006 07:52 (eighteen years ago)

Neal Stephenson's been incredibly OTM, with Snow Crash at least. Although this is possibly because it was such a nerd hit that they started trying to implement some of it. The Earth was an inspiration for Google Earth, or so the story goes.

― stet (stet), Saturday, 18 November 2006 03:25 (eighteen years ago)

You what?
I don't think Stephenson even believed that model of the internet was likely when he was writing it, he was just riffing on Gibson. And the net isn't even moving in the direction of being analogous to the physical world.

― Ray (Ray), Saturday, 18 November 2006 16:50 (eighteen years ago)

O RLY?

― Joe Isuzu's Petals (Rock Hardy), Saturday, 18 November 2006 23:13 (eighteen years ago)

games != net
the most out-of-date blog, that was only ever read by two people, is still just one click away from yahoo.com. the whole idea of 'districts' and 'distance' just doesn't exist online, except as an arbitrary limit in games.

― Ray (Ray), Sunday, 19 November 2006 12:04 (eighteen years ago)

I was thinking of Second Life, actually. And yeh, the whole Street thing hasn't taken off as a literal net-access thing, but plenty of other stuff has.

― stet (stet), Sunday, 19 November 2006 19:39 (eighteen years ago)

and districts definitely exist online: boards are balkanisation -- compare something awful forums to ilx, for instance

― stet (stet), Sunday, 19 November 2006 19:40 (eighteen years ago)

But the point of the physical analogy in Neuromancer and Snow Crash is that it takes time to get from one district to another. In Snow Crash, it costs money to build a site near all the other sites, but space out in the sticks is cheap because it takes time to travel between the two. Neuromancer doesn't (that I recall) have the same geographical concentration of business, but it does treat cyberspace as analogous to physical space - travel takes time.
Even if people divide themselves by interest on the net, it is no trouble at all to be a member of something awful forums, ilx, salon, and playboy. If you choose not to, its because you're not interested, not because it would take half an hour to travel from one site to the other.

― Ray (Ray), Sunday, 19 November 2006 21:02 (eighteen years ago)

I think you're focusing too much on the "travel time" aspect of it. However, there are already communities you need to pay cash to join/have a piece of -- the SA forums, for one.

The thing I took from it was how the interface itself allowed manipulation of the data -- if you could "walk through walls" you could get into a site. Same with this: if you can get into the intranet page of a corp, all its assets are on display.

― stet (stet), Sunday, 19 November 2006 21:28 (eighteen years ago)

I think travel time is pretty core to the analogy of the net and the physical world, tbh. If all travel is instantaneous, we need a new metaphor.

― Ray (Ray), Monday, 20 November 2006 08:52 (eighteen years ago)

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