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> But they didn’t anticipate the inertia in infrastructure development On a related note, I think one reason that SF was so uniformly positive about space flig
by KineticLensman 2y ago
> But they didn’t anticipate the inertia in infrastructure development
On a related note, I think one reason that SF was so uniformly positive about space flight was that if you were writing in the 60s and 70s you would have been looking at almost a century of dramatic improvements in travel including steam trains, submarines, cars, prop planes, jets, and then rockets to the moon. With space shuttles and similar on the drawing board. People just assumed this would continue.
What very few SF writers understood was that all of these exploited chemical energy which is very limited in terms of how much can be lifted out of the Earth's gravity well and how fast you can go once you are up there. Many SF authors arm-waved atomics or nuclear propulsion but these, in the real world, never took off, as it were. Not in any mass transit to the stars sense, at least.
Edit: In reality space travel hit a hard brick wall due to the laws of physics. Most other forms of travel have experienced massive incremental improvements in reliability, efficiency, affordability, etc, but very few cars and and planes and ships actually now go much faster than they did 50 years ago.
- gmfawcett 2y ago> What very few SF writers understood "Understood?" They were writing fiction, not instruction manuals.
- KineticLensman 2y agoWell yes, of course, but I was trying to point out one of the reasons for their blind-spots with such predictions. Of course, some hard-SF authors (e.g. Arthur C Clarke) did try to make their stories technically plausible, which gives to some superb anachronisms nowadays, e.g. the classic combination of rocket ships whose crew used slide rules for astronavigation.
- Sakos 2y agoScience fiction that took place in space weren't necessarily predictions. They were imagining what life in space could be like, whether human or not. I don't see how any of us would benefit if every SF author had "realized" that it was unfeasible and just wrote about earth. There was no blind spot, just it did nobody any good to hamper themselves by things like "well, it'll never happen, no point in imagining it". Fiction would be boring if we always only limited ourselves to being completely realistic and true to our current state of knowledge.
- saghm 2y agoThey were writing _science_ fiction. Not all of it has to be realistic, but presumably there's at least attempt to ground things in what would be recognizable to readers as science.
- ants_everywhere 2y agoWriters in the 60s and 70s were also promoting a space utopia because the space race was a critical Cold War military goal. We needed scientists to build equipment to spy on the Russians harder than they were spying on us. That meant, among other things, winning the hearts and minds of the kinds of people who would grow up to be scientists.