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.