by James Wallace Harris, Tuesday, October 23, 2018
Science fiction writers believe they can extrapolate from current events and imagine possible scenarios that will prepare readers for the world of tomorrow. Science fiction writers never claim to have crystal balls that predict an exact future. Instead, they write stories that will never come true but theoretically could. Generally, they are of two types. Let’s make dreams come true (i.e. colonize Mars, build intelligent machines) or let’s avoid a nightmare (i.e. a fascist America, an eco-catastrophe).
But, how good is science fiction at extrapolation? What invention or social movement in the last 100 years has the genre fictionalized using extrapolation and speculation? Here’s an overview of the last 100 years that came quickly to mind. I put links to Wikipedia for those of you who want deeper reminders.
- 1920’s – The Roaring Twenties, The Jazz Age, Prohibition, The Lost Generation, the stock market bubble and crash, Charles Lindbergh’s flight, women getting to vote, the rise of the KKK across America, gangsters
- 1930’s – The Depression, talking movies, Big Bands, The New Deal, the Dust Bowl
- 1940’s – World War II, the A-bomb, V-2 rockets, the United Nations
- 1950’s – The Korean War, The Cold War, the H-bomb, television, Sputnik, NASA, interstate highways, Beatniks, Rock and Roll
- 1960’s – The Viet Nam War, The Space Race, the Counter Culture, Civil Rights, Feminism, Gay Rights, Ecology, Apollo 11, Surveyor, Mariner, and Pioneer spacecraft, hippies, LSD, back to nature communes, muscle cars
- 1970’s – The Oil Crisis, Watergate, Apple II, Atari video games, Viking Landers, Voyager spacecraft, environmentalism, organic farming, singer-songwriters
- 1980’s – The Space Shuttle, MTV, IBM PC, The Macintosh
- 1990’s – The Hubble Telescope, The Internet, World Wide Web, Amazon.com, Dolly the sheep, German reunification, the collapse of the USSR
- 2000’s – 9/11, Hurricane Katrina, An Inconvenient Truth, iPhone, Barrack Obama, New Horizon spacecraft, high definition TV, Columbine
- 2010’s – VR, Boston Dynamics robots, Donald Trump, Sandy Hook, active shooters
Were there any SF tales written before these decades that imagined their significant events? Science fiction’s big winner has always been space travel. Would we have gone to the Moon if science fiction hadn’t imagined it many times for hundreds of years? Did Robert Goddard build rockets because of the fiction he read? A few science fiction writers wrote about the atomic bomb before 1945, but they got their ideas from scientists who were already talking about them.
Of course, this is getting away from my topic. There is a difference between claiming science fiction speculates about the future based on current trends and saying science fiction pushed us into doing something. Science fiction lasts longer than people’s inspiration and brainstorming sessions. The more I read about the history of science fiction, the more I discover that science fiction writers were always inspired by inventors and scientists, rather than the other way around.
What I’m talking about is different. There’s a famous cover to the July 1968 issue of Analog Science Fiction for the story “Hawk Among the Sparrows” by Dean McLaughlin. It shows an SR-71 Blackbird-like jet sitting on a WWI runway with a biplane in the background. That cover represents fun hindsight for a time travel story. But what if a 1918 issue of The All-Story Weekly featured that cover painting? Extrapolating that biplanes would eventually evolve into something spectacular like the SR-71 is what I’m talking about. How often has science fiction done that?
Here’s Harry Grant Dart’s 1918 artistic imagination of future aircraft/spacecraft. Not quite Lockheed SR-71s, are they? I’m not sure just how capable we are of extrapolation.
In 1911 Hugo Gernsback wrote Ralph 124C 41+ that contained many inventions he expected to be invented in the future. Just follow the Wikipedia link to read a rather long list of them. It’s 1925 hardback cover apparently shows a doctor interviewing a patient over a videophone. Science fiction has a pretty good track record of imagining possible future gadgets, but generally, their authors were inspired by current technology. Hugo Gernsback was probably the biggest proponent of technological extrapolation, but by the 1930’s science fiction had become 99% adventure fiction.
Science fiction seems less capable of extrapolating Black Swan technology, especially the social repercussions of those gadgets. The genre just wasn’t ready for computers, especially personal computers, the internet, the web, smartphones, and most of the technology of the last several decades. Science fiction quickly embraced all this technology, but only afterward. Evidently, change is happening faster than science fiction writers can imagine it.
Books like Brave New World, Nineteen Eighty-Four, The Handmaid’s Tale, and Stand on Zanzibar seem prophetic now because they appear to foresee our current social and political nightmares, but are they extrapolations? Weren’t they reactionary to the times in which they were written, and just happen to come into vogue again?
The 1909 short story, “The Machine Stops” by E. M. Forster is one of the most prophetic SF stories I’ve ever read. But it didn’t seem so in 1970 when I first read it. It was only recently, well into the Internet Age when I read it again, that I thought Forster was such a genius for writing it. The main character, Vashti, an old woman, is essentially a blogger using a machine to communicate with other agoraphobic citizens. Everyone lives alone in their rooms, communicating through the machine. Forster knows nothing about computers and networks, only imagines a very clever machine. Her son, Kuno wants to escape the machine. Forster says he was inspired by H. G. Wells’ “The Time Machine,” and it’s Eloi and Morlocks. But I can also imagine Forster thinking writing for magazines and book publishers was like being tied to a machine, and fantasizing about doing something in nature was appealing.
I am working on a science fiction short story. I’d like to think I’m imagining something people will do in the future that they don’t do now. But am I deluding myself? (I’m not going to explain my idea until the story is published.) I’d like to think I’m imagining something new, but I’ve got to analyze if I’m extrapolating or just describing what we do now in a new way.
The more I read old science fiction, the more I see science fiction in a different light. Science fiction has never been just one thing. Extrapolation has only been one aspect of the genre. Even as a kid, I didn’t believe people could predict the future. But I did think science fiction could be a cognitive tool for making good guesses. I’m now wondering if the best science fiction is deeply insightful about the present, and extrapolation about the future is a bunch of malarky.
I’m starting to wonder if I want to write a great science fiction story I should work as hard as possible to see into my own hopes and fears, set the story in the future, and then assume my dreams and nightmares might resonate with future readers.
JWH
Auxiliary Memory 
This reminds me of the preface to Olaf Stapledon ‘s Last and First Men. He said some clever things about trying to conceive of the future from the cultural matrix of today. I’ll have to look it up tomorrow.
SF has become what it is because it can be just as good as any other literature,but it is also different.Like general literature,it is concerned with the present,but looks at it in an insightful way without the limits imposed on it to be found there.
Maybe one reason Philip K. Dick is so popular today is he didn’t try to anticipate possible futures but was obsessed with his own current demons.
I’m not sure how popular he is today or how well known his name is now,but I think you are right,in regard to why he has apparently become more popular with a wider intellectual audience.
I think sci-fi always has to be a speculation of the present, cast forward into the future; as such it will inevitably be framed by current imperatives. The way some older sci-fi ‘dates’ underscores the process – its messages and themes cease to be relevant to changing society. But as you say, some of it doesn’t – and I think that’s because it engages with more timeless aspects of the human condition, the ones around which the artifice of social theme and trend is wrapped. It’s why Shakespeare remains so valid – and it’s true of various sci-fi classics.
I was impressed when I reread Robert A. Heinlein’s “Blowups Happen” which predicted problems with nuclear power plants…back in 1940. Some SF writers have a knack of forecasting the future by extrapolating the present. Others, like Philip K. Dick imagine futures that the Past somehow morphs into. Either method is powerful.
When I saw my first picture of the SR-71, I thought immediately of the July 1968 issue of this extraordinary plane. I have read on Kindle AREA 51 by Anne Jacobson — a seriously researched investigation of the development of its programs. (The U2 program was known only to those directly involved and President Eisenhower.) There was a secret unveiling of the plane in 1964, but the program was not declassified until 1976 and that is when the public saw the first photographs. The two images are so close to identical that I’m surprised no one has looked into this. (I understand that Robert Heinlein’s story about an atomic radiation weapon came to the attention of the Federal government.) I highly recommend Ms. Jacobson book. BTW — no aliens or flying saucers. I am a great fan of the Kelly Freas covers, but the John Schoenherr covers were works of art. I know both of those artists are now deceased. I started reading the magazine sometime in elementary school, probably 5th or 6th grade. A golden age for the magazine. It was published by Conde Nast and so the covers were gorgeous and the magazine itself was printed on good paper and had beautifully illustrated stories. John W. Campbell was, of course, like Maxwell Perkins, an editor of genius in spite of his occasional detours into the questionable. I still think there is a mystery behind this cover.