Last time I explained how the Hieroglyph anthology didn't accomplish its goal, because of the very nature of science fictional prediction.
If you look at those iconic Hieroglyphs from my earlier list through the lens of metaphor and plot device it becomes quite clear how many of them were invented as story elements first and became predictions only by accident.
• The Spaceship: This is both a metaphor and a plot device. As a metaphor it's obvious — you're literally ascending to the heavens. As a plot device it lets your characters have adventures on places that aren't Earth.
It's important to remember that SF had spaceships long before it had rocketships. Jules Verne used a giant cannon to send a crew From Earth to the Moon, and H.G. Wells used magic antigravity to do the same in The First Men in the Moon. There were plenty of other balonium-drive spaceships in early SF, in stories by people like George Griffiths or William Astor. Even one of the most beloved of the old pulp SF series, The Skylark of Space and its many sequels, relied entirely on balonium drives.
Meanwhile real-life rocket developers like Goddard, Tsiolkovsky and Von Braun were at work building machines that could reach the upper atmosphere or lob a warhead at London, and SF writers jumped on the bandwagon. Spaceships became Rocketships and we all patted ourselves on the back for predicting them.
• The Robot: This is a stone-cold metaphor and nothing else. For a century SF authors have been writing stories about slaves, oppressed workers, prejudice, emotional repression, logic puzzles, parenthood, technology out of control, militarism, superheroes, and the nature of humanity. Nobody's ever written a story about the real machines they're building up at iRobot.
• The Cyborg: This can be a metaphor for dehumanization or the encroachments of technology, or it can be an excuse for characters to have superpowers. What's interesting is that the world is filling up with cyborgs as more people get medical devices, wearable tech, etc., and none of them thinks of themselves as anything but human. I predict that the metaphorical use of cyborgs is going to disappear entirely in the next few years, precisely as the tech becomes ubiquitous.
• The Ray-Gun: Beam weapons aren't even a plot device, just cool set dressing — it's not a pistol, it's a SPACE pistol. The real-life laser turned out to have very different features from fictional ray-guns, but authors cheerfully slapped the name onto their old blasters and beamers anyway. I think ray-guns are actually a kind of anti-metaphor. In fiction and cinema beam weapons are almost always depicted as less deadly than actual firearms; a gun is a potent symbol of deadly power while a ray-gun can zap people harmlessly.
• Powered Armor: This began as a plot device, to allow human soldiers to survive more than a few nanoseconds on a high-tech battlefield. Generations of engineers who read Heinlein's Starship Troopers and Iron Man comics are trying to make it real.
• The Electronic Brain: Thinking machines are a perfect metaphor for intellect divorced from humanity. They can also function as a plot device straight out of the Oracle at Delphi in Greek myth, making appropriately vague or self-fulfilling prophecies for story purposes. As computers became common technology, the Electronic Brain morphed into the Godlike AI hiding in the Internet instead of a big box of blinky lights and tape drives, but it still does the same job.
• The Net: The global computer network was inspired pretty directly by the fiction of "cyberpunk" writers like William Gibson and Bruce Sterling. It began as a metaphor for the increased "connectivity" of the world and the growing dominance of media and information. They hit the perfect moment, as a generation of Internet pioneers went straight from reading cyberpunk to building the real-world information economy, so a lot of cool jargon (like "the Net") got transferred from fiction to fact.
• The Atom: Nuclear energy has always been a metaphor. At first, in works by Wells and others of his era, it was a potent symbol of transcendence and the Liberating Power of Science. After August 1945 it abruptly turned into a metaphor for hubris and Science Out of Control.
I find it particularly interesting (and a little alarming) that The Atom has remained a pure metaphor in fiction even as it became the main driver of geopolitics for half a century. The reality of nuclear conflict described in technical works like Herman Kahn's On Thermonuclear War or Pentagon planning sessions are very different from the popular notion of "blowing up the world." You see this in the sheer blank incomprehension and mockery in works like Stanley Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove, where the very concepts and vocabulary of real-world nuclear strategy are so at odds with the metaphorical idea of "blowing up the world" that Kubrick can only treat them as grimly absurd. Ultimately that metaphorical interpretation is the one driving policy about both nuclear weapons and nuclear power. Not an ideal state of affairs.
Those examples are all metaphors or plot devices that anticipated or even inspired real tech. But it's important to remember that science fiction writers are "Texas Sharpshooters" — we empty our pistol at the barn wall and then paint a target around the hits.
In the process we ignore our many misses. There are many SF Hieroglyphs that didn't come true and will probably never come true. Let me bring up some examples that don't get trotted out as evidence of science fiction's predictive power.
• Antigravity: As I'm sure everyone is sick of hearing, the big question since the year 2000 has been "Where's my flying car?" The simplest way to show that something takes place in a futuristic setting is to have people flying around using lift-belts, air-cars, or whatever. It's so common that it would be easier to list the works of science fiction over the past century that don't use antigravity. Sadly, antigravity is flat-out impossible, unless you're willing to do weird things like suspend masses of neutronium overhead to cancel out the Earth's gravitational field locally. Not exactly Buck Rogers.
• Hyperspace/Warp Drive: Faster-than-light travel is probably the central plot device of science fiction for the past century and still going strong. Call it Warp Drive, Hyperspace, Jumpgates, or whatever, it's the only way to have reasonably contemporary-seeming humans interacting with alien beings beyond our Solar System. And it's almost certainly impossible. All the scientific basis for FTL travel boils down to "here's one way it might not be impossible" which is very different from saying something is really possible. The sheer value of it means that NASA is willing to spend a few thousand dollars a year on "advanced propulsion concepts" in the hope of finding a way to break the rules, but so far Einstein has kept his title belt.
• Psionics: This is one of the best examples of a genuine Stephensonian Hieroglyph that’s totally bogus. From the 1940s through the 1970s this was a major trope in SF, thanks to the personal interest of legendary editor John W. Campbell in psychic phenomena. Even now it's a staple of media SF: Star Trek, Babylon 5, Firefly, and so on. Every spaceship crew has a person who can read minds, because that's just part of the standard furniture of science fiction. But as James Randi will happily point out, psychic powers don't exist.
• Force Fields and Tractor Beams: These were a convenient plot device, plus a way to make hooking a rope onto something into "space rope" or locking someone in a room into a "space room." Force fields in particular have lodged very firmly into public consciousness even though nobody has ever been able to build anything that works even remotely the way they're depicted in fiction. It's always amusing to me how every new military defense system gets compared to a force field. Both the Israeli Iron Dome and a new Boeing plasma defense system to counteract shockwaves were called "force fields" in news headlines. The Iron Dome shoots things with bullets, for God's sake.
So this is why I call science fiction writers Texas Sharpshooters. We make plenty of predictions, but we can't know which predictions will be hits! Or which fictional elements will inspire someone. We're just tossing out ideas. Sometimes reality tosses out something that matches. More often it doesn't.
However, it gets worse when science fiction writers aren't using future technology as a metaphor or plot device. When we genuinely try to predict the future, or worse yet, to actually influence it, we fail very badly indeed.
We fail at prediction because when you get right down to it, we're little more than well-informed laymen. There's a standard Sci-Fi convention panel topic, usually entitled something like "Things We Got Wrong," about failures of prediction in SF: starships with computers weighing ten or twenty tons, far-future societies with gender politics just like 1957 or 1975, discrimination or oppression of people born via in-vitro fertilization ("test-tube babies"). To predict the future you need a very comprehensive understanding of the present, and most writers don't want to put in the time to get that. It's too much like working.
And when we actually get mixed up in politics, run away as fast as you can!
SF writers have a long, sordid history of getting involved in crackpot politics —H.G. Wells wanted a world run by what he described as a "scientific Samurai class." Heinlein worked for Upton Sinclair, Frederick Pohl was a Marxist in the 1930s, China Mieville is still a Trotskyite. When SF and fantasy writers try to advocate real-world policies they're about as prescient and perceptive as any other "creative" professionals, which is to say, awful. Our professional organization, SFWA, can't even govern itself!
The only good political science fiction is the "dreadful warning" school, showing the dystopian results of some system the author disapproves of. Orwell warned about totalitarianism, Heinlein depicted the dangers of theocracy, and everyone warns about what happens when Evil Corporations Take Over. We're good at spotting the failure modes of systems we don't agree with, but like most people, science fictioneers are regrettably blind to the failings of causes we support.
(Next time: how science fiction actually can shape the future.)
One very slight niggle: The “Working Girl” robots from Heinlein’s _The Door Into Summer_ are very similar in function & capability to iRobot’s Roombas. On the other hand, the story isn’t about the robots, so your point still holds. On the gripping hand, how do you tell a story about robots like that, that lack the sentience to be actual characters?
Posted by: Joel C. Salomon | 05/29/2015 at 09:12 AM