Toward a general theory of futurological failure

[mmcirvin]

Signifiers of the future came up again when I was talking to Kibo yesterday. He put forth the interesting hypothesis that such things as flying cars and holo-TV are useful as shorthand for "this is the world of the future" precisely because they are unlikely to exist any time soon. The world in which people have these things is a particular type of fantasy world that is clearly not ours, much like a world in which dragons and unicorns appear.

Perhaps in a bid to entertain plorkwort again, I was moved to begin a classification of ways in which science-fiction writers fail to predict things accurately. I can think of three major categories:

1. The shorthand signifiers of the future discussed earlier. Since print SF fans tend to regard them as clichéd, today they show up mostly in media science fiction, or in stories in which serious world-building is not a major concern.
2. Linear extrapolation of today's ephemeral trends beyond all reason. This is particularly common in satirical stories, and in the short-shorts Horace Gold used to print in Galaxy (I thought the Turkey City Lexicon noted this, but I can't find it in there). Douglas Adams parodied this in his anecdote about the "shoe store event horizon"; in her introduction to The Left Hand of Darkness, Ursula Le Guin compared these exercises to experiments in which lab animals are fed thousands of times the normal dose of a substance to find the LD50 threshold. In real life, the reaction usually comes much sooner than that.
3. A change applied in a vacuum, with failure to consider higher-order social or technical ramifications. Getting the ramifications wrong is pretty much unavoidable; sometimes these things only seem obvious in hindsight. (An example, pointed out someplace I have forgotten: Old stories often have autonomous, clever robots in them, which must have fantastically powerful microcomputers in their heads or bodies somewhere. If that's possible, then why aren't there smaller, dumber microcomputers jammed into every corner of the world, like we have now? Phil Dick seems to have gotten it, at least, with his "homeostatic" doors and vending machines.)

Science-fiction writers are not prophets, and after the Gernsback age few of them ever claimed to be accurately predictive futurists. So getting it wrong is no shame. What can be irritating is the failure to even try to do the kind of higher-order extrapolation I mention in my third item, since the surprise and texture it can contribute is one of the great literary pleasures unique to science fiction.

Comments

[ronebofh.livejournal.com]

Gersnback age?

I think combatting 3) can lead to some well-written stories. At least, it's what i'm leaning on to write my One Novel (to which i have added no words in the last month or so due to high levels of activity) and it seems to be helping a non-trivial amount.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

In that connection, the one moment I'm most proud of in my little story "Demons" is the appearance of the word "macromechanic". It's a retronym... OF THE FUTURE!

(Actually, Googling now reveals to me that the word is already used as an adjective in a specialized context in materials science, not tremendously far off from what I was imagining.)

[ronebofh.livejournal.com]

Yes, but... "Gernsback age"?

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

Hugo Gernsback's magazines in the thirties consciously identified themselves as having didactic value in introducing people to the wonders that would be forthcoming in the future. In the forties, there was something of a move away from that, though it's been pointed out that the Campbell Astounding writers did have a general default consensus view of how the future ought to turn out-- if you wrote about it going differently you had to state a reason for the deviation, like an apocalyptic war preventing the otherwise inevitable rapid expansion into the solar system.

[jwgh]

This is probably a subspecies of (2), but one thing that science fiction writers of a certain stripe tend to underestimate dramatically is just how difficult it is to dramatically screw up the Earth. I think of Brunner's The Sheep Look Up, for instance, which predicted a bunch of stuff that I think still seems plausable -- for instance, I have heard of people putting grafitti on SUVs because of their environmental badness, which is similar to one of the things described in the book -- but the world hasn't gone to hell in a handbasket nearly as quickly as Brunner seemed to think it would. (In the book the Mediterranean is completely barren and lifeless, for instance.)

What little of Stanislaw Lem's critical writing that I've read indicates that the failure to attempt to deal with (3) bugged the hell out of him, too.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

Yes, but damn near everything bugs the hell out of Stanislaw Lem.

[sunburn.livejournal.com]

Dan Simmons (Hyperion series (4 books) and Ilium (first of at least 2 books)) gets past #2 by inventing species of characters who, once created, commenced to make giant leaps ahead of humans, and hence can screw things up much faster than humans, the Earth, or the laws of physics can compensate. He also sets things so fantastically far in the future, records as to how much time has passed are mostly gone, usually due to a cover-up of some kind.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

I read Hyperion and Fall of Hyperion recently and thought they were excellent. The one thing I found jarring was the detective's tale, whose standard cyberpunk cliches are already terribly dated, down to the 3l33t cobw0y who gets his brain burned out by black ice, or whatever Simmons called it. (I think that Simmons intended those bits to read like a pastiche of a Forties hard-boiled private-eye story, but they actually ended up reading like a pastiche of William Gibson.)

[sunburn.livejournal.com]

I suspect you'll enjoy Endymion and Rise of Endymion which, though it shows all signs of having been written after a point at which the author thought he had completed the series in Fall of Hyperion, namely that the author offers revisionist versions of minor elements of those books (the cruciform parasites that immoralize the humans, as well as the motives of the ousters, and not least the true nature of the Shrike, the Lord of Pain), do offer a great story about a new character and a couple characters from the old series. I can't explain it, but after reading the first two books that you've read, an idea was stimulated in my brain that our acquaintance Ranjit, who had read the second pair of books, confirmed was a major element of those books, so I wonder if the idea wasn't contained within the subtext of, or else a natural extrapolation from, the first pair of books. (Simmons had taken the idea to a substantial and wonderfully sinister extreme.)

So I recommend them. If you're going to read Ilium, you might benefit from a quick brush-up on The Iliad, because for reasons I won't explore, many of the human characters in Simmons' book are witnesses of the events of The Iliad. I've never read that particular epic and I enjoyed the book, but I suspect a reader familiar with Iliad will get more out of it.

[schwa242.livejournal.com]

When I was younger, I stopped hoping for a magical Back to the Future II world of flying cars, not because of the scientific hurdles to overcome, but the legal and social ramifications. They would give drunk drivers the oppurtunity to not only get into deadly wrecks, but wrecks that come crashing through your roof. Tall buildings are now targets of damage beyond the first floor. They'd either be allowed for a very select few, or they'd be completely hands off, with some onboard computer to pilot you to your destination.

-- Schwa ---