On Charlie Stross’ blog, Cat Valente (who’s filling in for Stross while he travels), has one of the better articles I’ve seen about science fiction and predictions. There’s a popular idea that SF predicts the future, but that’s not the case – there are very few instances in the literature where SF predicted a technology, a device, or an event in any real detail. Rather SF imagines futures that might be and how we’d live in them. More often than not, SF authors get it wrong, usually by omission – no one predicted that the moon landing would be televised, for example, although there were many stories about landing on the moon.
Valente looks at Star Trek, Deep Space 9, and makes some cogent observations. Star Trek got some things right, but they missed a lot – the Internet and social media, in particular.
As I watch everyone interact on the station, the lack of social media sticks out hugely to me simply because it is how so many of us interact with each other now–and especially over long distances. There is no hashtag for DS9 workers to tweet LOLSisko macros or talk to families back home. Everyone uses voice/video communication rather than text despite the security issues this obviously poses (and of course a social network of any kind poses security problems in and of itself, but provides rich narrative opportunities in that arena which I’ve yet to see explored much) and the fact that we are seeing even now many people shy away even from the telephone when given an alternative. We have the videophones of science fiction past–and no one much cares. We use it sometimes, but it’s far more of a pain to make yourself presentable onscreen, get the kids and dogs to leave you alone for long enough to Skype, and carry on an etiquette minefield of a conversation when a quick text or email will do for most business.
This doesn’t begin to cover the constant “come here and see this” requests, where said person will not be able to come there and see that due to falling plot. We live in a world already where no one need come and see anything, a quick picture upload obviates the need for O’Brien to come squint at your shit in person. Part of the reason, I think, that Minority Report continues to be a watchwod for interface technology is that it showed a new(ish) way for people to interact with technology. In DS9, instantaneous information tech is available and evenly distributed, but the writers do not live in a world, yet, where anyone has begun to figure out what to do with it. So walkie talkies are still, in 1999, the model for communication. DS9 cares about physical presence in a way we are already beginning to leave behind.
As for getting it right, Ben Bova nailed e-book readers and self-publishing in his 1989 novel, Cyberbooks. It’s not surprising that he got e-book readers – writers as far back as Isaac Asimov had them or something like them, but he went deeper and looked at how they’d affect the publishing industry.
The book focused on the invention of the first ereader, the Cyberbook. It was more of a satirical take on the publishing industry than a prediction of the near future, but that just renders the accuracy all that much more amazing. Here’s the money quote:
“Cyberbooks will bring down the cost of publishing to the point where thousands of writers who can’t get their works published now will have a viable marketplace for their books”.
Doesn’t that sound like the current state of self-publishing?
While it’s not clear that Mr. Bova predicted that so many would bypass the traditional gatekeepers, there is still a ring of truth to this. Would you believe it was just tossed off in a brief phone conversation near the end of the book? And there’s even more predictions in the book which have come true, including online sales and the amount of effort publishers put into resisting change.
Finally, I have to mention John Brunner’s The Shockwave Rider.
The Shockwave Rider is a science fiction novel by John Brunner, originally published in 1975. It is notable for its hero’s use of computer hacking skills to escape pursuit in a dystopian future, and for the coining of the word “worm” to describe a program that propagates itself through a computer network.[1][2] It also introduces the concept of a Delphi pool,[3] perhaps derived from the RAND Corporation’s Delphi method – a futures market on world events which bears close resemblance to DARPA’s controversial and cancelled Policy Analysis Market.
Brunner got a whole bunch of things right, mostly involving the social and cultural implications of a widespread distributed computer network. But his network wasn’t the Internet – it was the phone system – and his hackers punched out long strings of touch tone codes to enter programs. He got the technology wrong, but everything else that followed from it was pretty much dead on.