Roundtable: SF vs. The Future
— posted by Karen Burnham at Wednesday 26 January 2011 @ 2:12 am BST
If there is a hole in the heart of science fiction, and there is, it’s space travel. Today Gernsback would not be ‘wetting his pants’ with techno-delight. He would be wondering, ‘Where are the ships? Why are we all still here?’
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Category: Discussions.
Comments
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Time January 26, 2011 at 10:05 am
[...] talking of the future, there’s a new Locus Roundtable post up. In this one we talk about whether science fiction’s view of the future has been overtaken [...]
Comment from SF2 Concatenation
Time January 27, 2011 at 10:42 am
With regards to the previous comments as to the future being unpredictable (which is true in the science sense) it is possible to make assumptions about trends etc. (And so for example we have the UN global population forcast for the 21st century.) Meanwhile SF is a bit like a blunderbus that sometimes points at a target called the future but with many shots missing but a few hitting the target.
As a bit of fun we (a team of mainly scientists and engineers who run a website) make some predictions for the near and medium term future at the beginning of every other year. We have done this for the best part of a decade. Our latest New Year prediction snippet is here (and we do seem to have quite a few hits).
See http://www.concatenation.org/news/news1~11.html#predictions
Comment from SF Strangelove
Time January 26, 2011 at 3:35 am
As Ceclia Holland says, “Whatever happens next, it won’t be anything we’re prepared for.” The future is unpredictable by definition. If science fiction can be said to be predictive surely it is the broken-clock-showing-the-right-time sort of blind luck. Being predictive is a story we tell ourselves about science fiction after the one of the blind luck ideas becomes real.
The future arrives in fits and starts, one halting step at a time, and when we glance backward we see that “the past is another country” and that we are transformed. The science fiction community goes through periods where it narrows its view of tomorrow and is susceptible to groupthink, before eventually breaking out in new directions. Always, writers need to shrug off yesterday’s tomorrows and find their own way. Never mind prediction. Offer a vision of a possibility and readers will gather like moths to a flame.