From The Literary Hub:
The problem with setting fiction in the near future is that it keeps coming closer—and usually about twice as fast as one expects. By mid-century, will we still stare at our phones? Or will we instead use bionic contacts (already in development) that project images of our incoming texts? Will we even call those brief messages “texts”?
Speculative fiction pioneer William Gibson likes to inform interviewers that the true point of sci-fi is not to prognosticate. (His classic Neuromancer, written in 1984 and set in about 2035, failed to predict mobile phones, as did the movie Blade Runner, in which clunky, stationary videophones predominate.) And yet: a would-be speculative novelist winces imagining their invented world becoming obsolete only years after a book appears. Worse still, one doesn’t want to include details that are passé even prior to publication. In our fast-moving world—Amazon’s Alexa made her debut in late 2014 and starred in a Super Bowl ad that counted on pop-culture familiarity only three years later—the chances of getting the near-future wrong are greater than ever. Yet more and more novelists, intent on penning semi-realistic sci-fi hybrids, seem to be taking the chance.
When I first imagined a novel set in 2049 about a much older woman and the robot delivered to care for her, threatening the livelihood of an immigrant nurse, the world was a different place. The iPhone was a year old. I wasn’t even using a dumbphone yet. iPads, Fitbits, and voice assistants like Siri weren’t on the market. I’d never downloaded an app, making me an unlikely novelist to guess what the world might look like a few years hence. Just the fact that I’d use a word like “hence” probably undermines my reputation as an aspiring futurist.
. . . .
My favorite speculative fiction, just like my favorite historical fiction, is neither escapist nor distant; in fact, it is sneakily but urgently reflective of problems bearing down on us today. Sometimes, this type of fiction does its most powerful work addressing the issues that we, both collectively and individually, aren’t culturally or emotionally ready to face. Where journalism hits the door of denial, fiction can worm under the sill and through the cracks, showing rather than telling: This can happen. Or even more powerfully: This is already happening.
Link to the rest at The Literary Hub
In the words of the late, great Jerry Pournelle —
You can’t predict the future, but you can invent one.
Besides, it’s more fun.
If you read any collections of Golden Age (40s, 50s) Sci-fi, you’ll see just how wrong you can get. You’ll also see the concerns of the author and the times are reflected in the constructed future. It can be fascinating, if approached from that perspective.
Speak for yourself. I have my personal helicopter in the garage and my flying car in the driveway.
Doable, if a bit pricey for the car. (~$250k for the Moeller.)
But the helo is more affordable: The Mosquito XEL runs $27k prebuilt.
Your book sales must be pretty good. Congrats.
The one I have my eyes on is an electric, like the chinese eHang, but with retractable swing arms for the fans under the SUV chassis. That one is still a couple years off.
It really is the 21st century out there.
Things can only get more interesting from here on out.
Especially if the warp drive experiments as JSFC pay off. 🙂
One can only hope. What I really want isn’t warp drive. I want the teleporter. I am SO tired of commuting, or driving long distances.
Oh, that one gets real nasty real fast.
You ever read Alfred Bester’s THE STARS MY DESTINATION? It’s about a world where (most) everybody can be taught to teleport. Very, very messy place. (Very mysogynistic society, as a result. Which is one of the themes of the story.) Considered one of the greatest SF novels ever. To some, the best of the 20th.
Larry Niven’s FLASH CROWD short used teleportation booths scattered around the world. Also showed some likely social downsides.
I think both underestimated the mess potential by orders of magnitude. If nothing else, imagine floating riots or homeless camps, or worse, teleporting stalkers or assassins.
It would require a very different human society to survive generalized teleportation. I think we’ll be hoofing it for a long time. 🙂
The incorrect predictions of the future are part of the reason I find it hard if not impossible to read old sci-fi. I can’t separate the author’s inaccurate prediction from reality in the same way that I can enjoy historical fantasy/SF or alternate history. Alternate history knows the history and intentionally creates a different path in a way that makes sense. There’s no such logic in faulty extrapolations of the future. I remember trying to read Jules Verne’s “Paris in the Twentieth Century” a while back and being constantly kicked out of the story, not just because his version of the twentieth century was incorrect but because the explanations it kept giving were incorrect. Like when it explained how sky trams existed because they’d tried underground trains but those didn’t take off because they reminded people of the grave. I could accept a divergent history for reasons like “the guy who invented the tram lucked out in ways that the guy who invented the subway didn’t, in this world” but not reasons that amount to a basic misinterpretation of how humans as a whole will react to something en masse.
I went off and read the full text. It was mildly amusing, and by that I mean the writer explains her assumptions without recognizing that they are assumptions. Easily done, and not meant to be a criticism per se.
Arguably, SF or any other genre of fiction, is not about prediction, so the title of the piece leads to an answer of it can’t.
The other thing I observe is that literary writers are not what you’d describe as technophiles.
I’ve seen a few SF authors get tied up in the “predicting the future” thing. Hey, if they want a hobby, fine… but I don’t expect accurate predictions of the future from my entertainment. I just expect to be entertained.