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This is actually something I was thinking about lately: How science fiction (and future-predictors) mostly only extrapolates from our current ways of doing thin
by Razengan 1y ago
This is actually something I was thinking about lately: How science fiction (and future-predictors) mostly only extrapolates from our current ways of doing things.
Like those Victorian era drawings of people in posh dresses walking across lakes by having hot-air balloons tied to their bodies..
Even sci-fi games involving space ships and aliens have people using floppy disks, printouts, and faxes.. in years long after those things went out of common use.
Before the iPhone very little sci-fi predicted something like smartphones being so prevalent throughout global society. Today even some of the poorest people in the poorest countries have some form of personal mobile phone.
And even now, the best we can imagine is that people will still be using phones and laptops in 2060.
- ghaff 1y agoThere are tons of examples of course, but one that jumps to mind is Oath of Fealty by Jerry Pournelle where one of the plot points is an implant that gives the chosen few access to an encyclopedic database. Of course, today, a smartphone with cell access provides that (or at least a more chaotic version of same) to more or less everyone. You could also reasonably argue that the encyclopedia in Asimov's Foundation trilogy makes somewhat similar assumptions. I do think some sort of AR interface is somewhere in the future but it's almost certainly a long way off for mainstream adoption.
- PopAlongKid 1y ago>Oath of Fealty by Jerry Pournelle and Larry Niven!
- ghaff 1y agoForgot Larry Niven was a co-author of that one. They tended to be a good pair on novel-length works. Niven's novels tended to end up as travelogues and Pournelle's ended up as military SF.
- gampleman 1y agoConversely though, there is plenty of older sci-fi that assumes by the 2000s we'd all be zooming around in flying cars rather than in cars that are basically the same sort of thing they had in the fifties.
- Razengan 1y agoOh yes! That is the exact same extrapolation: Just a better, more-exaggerated version of how we already do things!! Faster horses!
- cruffle_duffle 1y agoFunny I was watching this dude talk about this exact concept just the other night: https://youtu.be/C6D_WuLWVrQ https://youtu.be/C6D_WuLWVrQ
- GolfPopper 1y agoE.E. "Doc" Smith's Lensmen series, a sweeping, galaxy-scale space opera (arguably the type-example of the genre), first published in 1937 had some memorable examples of this - punch card computers and one diesel-powered space ship. But along with such anachronisms (and more SF tropes than I can readily list), Smith also described video calls, stealth vehicles, and may have invented the Combat Information Center. https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5621/sciefictstud.38.3.0558 https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5621/sciefictstud.38.3.0558