The trouble with predictions

It didn’t happen that way, but we enjoy the stories in spite of that.

Our consultants have recently come upon a cache of science fiction stories we remember from our youth.  Many were set in the far future that’s now the past, if you believe the years as written.  Others are set in a future that is now past because the events they describe have happened, if not exactly as described.  Others are still technically in the future, but things almost certainly won’t happen that way.

It’s easy to get caught up in the game of Finding Wrong Predictions.  The first landing on the Moon was not made by a finned, Buck Rogers sort of rocket; and it wasn’t closely followed by colonization and the first manned Mars landing.  Well, that’s easy enough to excuse.  And in any case, as we’ve mentioned, much of science fiction was (and is) not so much careful forecasting of the future as warnings of what could happen, or exaggerating something to make a point, or just playing out an idea somewhere safely away from the here and now.  Almost all aliens we’ve seen behave as recognizable humans with some aspects emphasized or reduced, regardless of their shape.

There are two things that strike us now about these recently uncovered stories.  The first is the fact that computers in them, while well beyond anything existing at the time of writing, are both far larger and far less capable than your smartphone.  Indeed, they can’t even compare with the first desktop models.  (There are stories with computers that are much more powerful, but those tend to be almost human in behavior, and are a sort of disguised human.)  That has at least one overwhelming effect on the stories: people have to go everywhere.  The sort of robotic probes that have told us so much about our Solar System just don’t appear.

The other thing is that the social structures and attitudes of the mid-twentieth century are projected more or less intact.  One story has a woman showing up on a space station, causing the foreman there to panic; the other couple-dozen workers there are all male.  Though the story’s point is one of sexual equality, it relies on a background of assumed inequality in order to work.  There are authors who were more imaginative, but as a general rule few foresaw the vast social changes of the past half-century.

We enjoyed reading the stories anyway.  They are well-written an enjoyable as stories, which was of course their main purpose originally.  (We can skip over the expositions of weightlessness and suchlike basic physics that are now familiar, realizing that the authors couldn’t assume their readers were familiar with them at the time of writing.)

And we realize that there is another function that (old) science fiction performs.  By showing us how our reality is different from the world there envisioned, it tells us something important about recent history.  Which gives us a great deal to think about.