The Golden Age of Science Fiction is generally considered — though opinions differ — to include the three decades of the 1930s, ’40s, and ’50s. Writings from the Golden Age are characterized by a charming (to me at least) naivete about the pace of technological progress: we would soon live in a future of interplanetary rockets and robot servants, of gleaming cities and plentiful atomic power.
With few exceptions, Golden Age writers didn’t anticipate the revolution in microelectronics that would spawn portable computers and universal connectivity. (Nor did they foresee the women’s liberation movement or restrictions on smoking, two often jarringly anachronistic aspects of stories from that era. These authors were, in general, more imaginative than visionary.)
Golden Age writing tended to extrapolate contemporary trends, continuing the pace of rapid industrial and scientific development along existing lines. Making things go faster, making buildings and cities bigger, projecting enormous population growth: these were all obvious to the Golden Age writers. They lived in a world where increasing mechanization and industrial scale defined change, and seemed to promise to bring the stars themselves within our grasp.
In the past decade or two, the revolution in computing and consumer electronics has come to define technology for most of us, and today a single product — the iPhone — stands as the icon of our technological advancement. It is hardly surprising, therefore, that so much of modern science fiction concerns itself with computation, with virtual reality and the artificial augmentation of mind. (Interestingly, in the post-Golden Age science fiction of the late 1960s and early 1970s, that alternate reality and artificially enhanced cognition was achieved through drugs, rather than electronics. For many a lover of Golden Age science fiction, the decade following represents the nadir of the genre.)
Entertaining science fiction need not be prophetic, but it’s interesting to look at the mistakes the Golden Age writers made with their simple extrapolations, and to wonder what similar mistakes we’re making today as we imagine the future. What if virtual reality and the computer-augmented mind isn’t a conspicuous aspect of our technological future? What if something not yet trending, but still not preposterously fanciful, is just over the horizon, waiting to transform our world? What might that be?
Imagine writing a plausible, non-apocalyptic story of the day after tomorrow that didn’t feature connectivity, virtual reality, or artificial intelligence as a significant or necessary plot element. What would that look like?
