Why science fiction predictions hold back the genre

Science fiction sucks at predicting the future.

There. I've said it. Sliced that painful boil off my robot helper's shiny metal ass. Except it's 2010 and I don't have a robot helper. Instead, I'm still cleaning my house with my own hands. Raising my kids without an android nanny. Wasting time stuck in traffic instead of commuting with my own jetpack.

Nine years ago there were a spate of articles about how the future predicted in Arthur C. Clarke's 2001 failed to come true. Pan-Am was history instead of flying space shuttles, while moon bases and manned trips to other planets were mere dreams. And homicidal Artificial Intelligences? Forget AIs going on a murderous rampage--scientists were still working on getting AIs to navigate through mazes.

As I mentioned recently when Charles Tan interviewed me, science fiction's overall track record on predictions is pretty bad despite the genre describing a number of technological advances before they happened. One famous example is when Robert Heinlein wrote about waterbeds in his novels, leaving the 1960 inventor of an actual waterbed unable to patent his creation. Another example is John Campbell's Astounding Stories publishing the story "Deadline" by Cleve Cartmill in 1944. The story described how an atomic bomb would work--a full year before the first actual atomic explosion. Other technologies predicted by science fiction include scuba diving, digital books, space ships, and geosynchronous satellites.

But while science fiction has made a number of correct predictions, the genre strikes out far more of the time with its technological extrapolations. I mean, crack open any major SF novel from the genre's Golden Age and you will be swept away by flying cars, infallible lie detectors, and nuclear bombs which fit inside your mouth--and that's without mentioning examples of purely bad science like Campbell's love affair with the Dean Drive! More importantly, the genre has missed most of the major trends of the last half century, including the Civil Rights, Equal Rights and Decolonization movements, the Green Revolution, the creation of the Internet, the end of the Cold War, the beginnings of an information economy, and the slow speed at which humanity is reaching into space.

So while it's nice SF correctly predicted the waterbed, the genre failed to predict the sexual revolution which made people want waterbeds. And while SF predicted the atomic bomb, the genre fizzled when it came to accurately describing how those bombs would affect future generations (i.e., the Cold War and the fact that since their initial use during WWII nuclear weapons haven't been used in another war).

So when people tell me science fiction is about predicting the future, I want to laugh. But the good news is that the genre's failure at predicting the future need not be that big a deal.

Here's why: Instead of being about predicting the future, I see science fiction as humanity’s dream of the future. How we go about creating our future. How we go about surviving and processing the incredible changes facing us and dealing with the consequences of such change.  Seen from this point of view, science fiction has the potential to be the most vibrant of all literary genres because it deals with the issues and concerns which are of vital importance to today's world. The most successful science fiction stories have always been written and read from this point of view, instead of merely predicting an accurate future.

In many ways, the idea that science fiction is about predicting the future is a remnant of the genre's past. During the 1940s and '50s, genre promoters pitched SF as a way to inspire and teach people about science and technology. And during the era of Sputnik and atomic bomb beauty pageants, perhaps this was the correct thing to do.

But that time is long past. And while few writers and readers within the genre give more than lip service to science fiction being solely about predicting the future, the problem is that outside the genre the general public still believes literary science fiction is mainly about predictions. Why is this bad? Because it turns potential readers off the genre before they even open a book. After all, why would anyone want to read a genre about predicting the future when said genre repeatedly failed to predict the world we now live in?

Ironically, you don't see this problem with the visual representations of science fiction. When the public blows the hell out of everything in the Halo universe or sees the Millennium Falcon fly across the screen, few believe these are actual predictions of the future. Instead, the public sees SF films and games as a fun escape. As a dream of the future they can enjoy today.

But ask the general public to read a SF novel and you'll get at best a shrug, and at worst a dismissal of the entire genre.

Yes, there are plenty of reasons why so few people read science fiction, including the insular nature of the genre's fiction and the wrong-headed stereotype that SF remains the reading material of adolescent males. But I believe another reason people turn away from science fiction is fallout from the decades of promoting SF as a predictor of the future. After seeing so many of the genre's predictions fail to come true, the general reading public simply doesn't trust science fiction literature to tell them something new. They're unwilling to take a chance on investing their limited time in reading a SF book.

So my solution--stop pretending science fiction can predict the future.

Comments

[Patty]

This is something that has frustrated me for a long time.

I see SF at its very basic level as fantasy with futuristic toys. A friend of mine came up with the term Futuristic Fantasy. I think that insisting that SF makes a serious stab at predicting the future, or getting any kind of prediction right, is stifling the genre, and is trying to squish an over-sized foot into a shoe that will never fit it. Sure, some SF has high ambitions, but for me personally, I just want to read, and write, a rollicking story.

[Bruce Sterling]

Would you notice when it DID predict the future?

[Mark Pontin]

[1] There's been a lot of SF by a lot of different SF writers and -- kind of like the old notion of locking a bunch of monkeys in place before an equivalent number of typewriters (yeah, it's an old thought-experiment)till they produce the works of Shakespeare -- it turns out that SF writers have predicted everything.

Specifically, some SF writers have predicted every one of the things you claimed SF hasn't predicted: Civil Rights, Equal Rights and Decolonization movements, the Green Revolution, the creation of the Internet, the end of the Cold War, the beginnings of an information economy, and the slow speed at which humanity is reaching into space.

Go look at things like Brunner's SHOCKWAVE RIDER and Bruce's ISLANDS IN THE NET (for the Internet stuff) or J.G. Ballard (for the failure/slow advance of the space program). On the decolonization score, what do you think one of the genre's primary texts, H.G. Wells's THE WAR OF THE WORLDS, was about? Equally, though, other examples exist like the now-little-known Mack Reynolds's stories about decolonization (not particularly good, but Reynolds was a communist writer who wrote stories about decolonization for John W. Campbell's Analog).

[2] I bring all this up not because I'm making a strong claim for SF's primary role being fully accurate futurology. Obviously, fully accurate futurology is humanly impossible.

Rather, it's because to deny the futurology element in SF is both to deny a historical fact of the genre's development and to endorse the claim of your first poster that SF is just " fantasy with futuristic toys ...Futuristic Fantasy." There's an increasing number of people out there like her with no clue and no desire that SF be anything more just fantasy with, like, robots and spaceships instead of elves and dragons.

There's a story in the classic best SF stories of all time that the SFWA put out in the late 1960s called "The Cold Equations" by Tom Godwin. It's frankly neither very well written nor very entertaining. It's emphatically not "rollicking fantasy with any futuristic toys" since the only futuristic furnishing is the rocket with limited air and fuel that it's set on. And that latter element is the story's point and why it really does belong in an anthology of the classic SF stories.

The notion that SF's primary role is to create thought-experiments that treat alternative scenarios for how the future might be -- and for how the present really is and the past really was -- is an integral part of the genre, starting with H.G. Wells. Otherwise, yes, it is just fantasy with futuristic toys.

In which case, to hell with it.

[Jason Sanford]

Bruce: I believe so. At least with predictions about how our current times were supposed to turn out. Of course, if the predictions were as vague as those made by Nostradamus, then all bets are off on determining if they came true

Mark: I'm not sure the examples you give prove your point. For example, Brunner's 1975 novel Shockwave Rider did deal with an internet-like network between large centralized computing systems, as did Bruce's 1988 Islands in the Net. But ARPANET (an early network computer system) was already up and running before Brunner's novel, and by the time of Bruce's novel advanced networking systems were even beginning to be used for commercial purposes. So while both are very good novels, they described already existing technologies--albeit taking those technologies up a notch. To me, that means they were not predicting technologies which had yet to exist.

As for War of the Worlds, it did not deal with decolonization. Instead, it was a very effective novel about colonialism and imperialism. And Mack Reynolds's stories about decolonization were being published in the 1950s and '60s, ie during the time of the decolonization movements. So again, you can't be predicting something if you are writing at the time it is happening.

But all that said, you are totally correct about there being a great movement within SF which sees the genre as "thought-experiments that treat alternative scenarios for how the future might be -- and for how the present really is and the past really was." Amen to all that. But my point is that for too long SF wasn't pitched to the public as being thought experiments--it was pitched as predicting the future. Which is a problem. But that doesn't mean I want to deny the future aspect of SF, or that the genre is merely fantasy with futuristic toys. Far from it.