SF Predicting the Future

[ShannonA]

Here's an interesting article on science-fiction's failure to predict the future:
http://www.sfsignal.com/archives/006389.html

To quote in part:


Many times throughout my life I have heard fans of science fiction promote the genre by stating how many times its authors have predicted the future. Look at the works of Jules Verne, Isaac Asimov, Frederick Pohl, Arthur C Clarke, and others and you'll find many examples of things that they predicted that came true. From submarines to waldos to geostationary satellites science fiction has either influenced science or science has eventually caught up to the ideas of science fiction. Certainly we can continue to be smug in the belief that our genre is an accurate look into the future.

It's not true of course. But how wrong have authors been? Well...



Well ... although writers sometimes get lucky, I think their hit ratio is pretty poor, to the point of being pure chance. Just looking at the major movements of the last few decades, cyberpunk is a pretty good example of a major bit of speculation that continues to be almost entirely wrong. I think all the writing about singularities is similarly going to prove irrelevant as the decades pass.

If anything, movies are even worse than books because they just don't seem to have the depth to allow for any meaningful speculation, and thus we're still getting space operas and space westerns and pretty much anything but serious SF.

Thoughts?

[Pat]

When discussing the Big Three classic science fiction writers, the example that always comes up is Arthur C. Clarke's prediction of the geosynchronous communication satellite. Such a huge volume of writing, and the best he managed to do was predict a middlingly-important application among a vast series of revolutions from radio to the microchip to the personal computer and the internet, six years before it actually happened. Virtually every major technological revolution surprises us. Hard science fiction can sometimes successful explore the ramifications of an incremental improvement, but get more than 10 years out and the best guesses turn from extremely improbable to ridiculously wrong.

Science fiction is about exploring the human condition, not predicting the future. Even if the author gets a single piece of progress right, everything else in the book will look like absurd garbage in a few years. That's why, more and more, I'm coming to respect Stanislaw Lem. His science is purely fabulous, strange and wondrous creations with no relation to our current understanding of the physical universe. But for all that, it's more plausible than a straight extrapolation of current trends. Because we don't understand all the developments we see reported in the news or on tv today. Why would the average protagonist in the future understand the inner workings of a specialized field of technology? Instead, Lem develops the logical consequences of a fictional technology with well-defined capabilities and limits, and places it within a plausible culture of science. Even if he's not one himself, he understands scientists and the culture of scientists, so it sounds reasonable. And that's all we can really hope for in sf. Just enough of a skeleton on which to hang our suspension of disbelief, so the writer can get on with the business of exploring what it means to be human.