Category: futurism

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?

In 1914, in his novel The World Set Free, H.G. Wells wrote of a future featuring “atomic bombs,” in which “it was a matter of common knowledge that a man could carry about in a handbag an amount of latent energy sufficient to wreck half a city.” That was thirty-one years before Trinity — before the detonation of the first atomic weapon in the sands of southern New Mexico.

Ray Bradbury’s dystopian novel Fahrentheit 451, written in 1953, described ear-buds, those ubiquitous little earphones everyone wears today. He called them “seashells,” but we’d recognize them today — as we would the insular cocoon they created for the perpetually distracted wife of that novel’s protagonist.

Arthur C. Clarke predicted the geostationary orbit, that distance from the Earth — about 22,236 miles — at which a satellite will circle the planet precisely once each day, and so appear fixed in the sky above the same point on the Earth’s equator. He introduced this idea in 1945, more than a decade before the Russians shocked the world by placing the first artificial satellite, the short-lived Sputnik, in a far lower orbit. (In 1960, Clarke would feature the still-nonexistent geosynchronous communication satellite in his short story I Remember Babylon, which presaged, among other things, satellite television and broadband pornography.)

Science fiction writers predict the future. That’s their job. They get it wrong more often than right (a good thing, considering the prominent role of alien invasions and global catastrophes in the genre) but they do sometimes get it right — or get it wrong, but in ways that foreshadow our evolving reality.

H.G. Wells, Ray Bradbury, and Arthur C. Clarke are acknowledged giants of science fiction. Not so Albert Teichner, a World War II veteran who most likely passed away in 1989, though biographical information is scarce. But the handful of stories Teichner wrote includes Cerebrum, a fanciful account of Facebook and Snapchat which he penned in 1963.

No, of course it isn’t really about modern social media, nor even the internet. But it does imagine a future in which everyone is networked with everyone else, their instant messaging coordinated by a central switching authority called, prosaically enough, “Central Switching.” It’s a world in which people are constantly connected, are distracted from the world around them by their non-stop mental messaging, and, having instantaneous access to every fact, know less and less, and grow lazier with each passing year.

Most interestingly, it’s a world in which one can be cut off from the great switching center, isolated from the perpetual stream of information and communication, and, so disconnected, become a social outcast and pariah.

That, at least, is nonsense. After all, it’s unimaginable, isn’t it, that the powers behind the internet could ever flex their digital muscles to reward and punish the consumers of their virtual wares?

I mean, Google, for instance. They wouldn’t do something like that.

Or would they?