One of the comments on my last 'blog post, by the inimitable Alexander Jablokow, brings up the idea of what he describes as "consensus futurelike places" as story settings, which may or may not have anything to do with the author's actual vision of what the future will look like.
This is not a new idea. Ever since the Gernsback era, science fiction has had a "default" vision of what The Future is going to look like. The indispensable Tropes Wiki has one version here.
Interestingly, we seem to go through periods of "contending futures" in which there are rival visions, which then settle down to a single standard for a while. In the 1970s, for instance, the expansionist view of humans spreading through the Solar System and across the Galaxy found competition from the dystopian picture of an overcrowded, resource-poor Earth in a Solar System which turned out to be a lot less hospitable than anyone had previously realized.
In the wake of the Cyberpunk boom we seem to have gone through another period of competing futures, when the transhumanist visions of people like Bruce Sterling or Greg Egan bumped against the more humanist ideas of Kim Stanley Robinson.
Right now I'd say we're developing a new consensus future, based on slower-than-light interstellar travel, a kind of "Lite Transhumanism," and the growing suspicion that we're alone in the Galaxy (or nearly so). The "Orion's Arm" project neatly encapsulates a lot of what is becoming standard SF furniture.
I think it's almost inevitable that something like this will happen, especially in genres like science fiction and fantasy. These are stories which (mostly) don't take place in the world we see around us. Consequently writers must manage the difficult task of depicting an entire future society without bogging down a short story in endless exposition. If you can save yourself a thousand words or so by simply using off-the-shelf concepts like "robot" or "spaceship" or "Galactic Empire" you'll naturally do it.
One aspect of this which fascinates me is the moment when the meaning of a stock trope shifts. "Spaceship" once meant a pointy-nosed rocket with tail fins, capable of launching from Earth, visiting other worlds, and returning in one piece -- right up until 1960 or so, when it turned into a piece of real-life hardware, much more flimsy and constrained than its fictional forebear.
"Robot" once meant a mechanical man with an electronic brain; now it's a machine of virtually any shape, controlled by an "Artificial Intelligence" which acts more like a spirit than a mechanism.
And so on. I submit that the times of transition, when future worlds collide and science fictional tropes bounce off their real-world applications, can be very fruitful times for literature. The Cyberpunk writers of the 1980s and 1990s were overhauling the standard future as the implications of the computer revolution and the fall of Communism were making it obvious that the future wasn't going to look like either Star Trek or A Canticle For Liebowitz.
So, venturing to predict the Future of the Future, I suggest that we'll see another shift in scientifictional futures sometime around 2020. The environmental apocalypse trope will have burned itself out by then (or become part of the fabric of daily life) and we'll be seeing the first fruits of the new private-enterprise space age (or its failure).
As to what form that future vision of the future will take . . . wait and see. We're still writing it.
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