Days of Future Past

Yesterday's SF becomes today's reality, not just because of the predictive powers of the original SF dream, but because the expression of these ideas plants a seed in someone's head that eventually gets built...

If I ever (ha!) get my reference clippings straightened out I could say I know that I know that I know -- but, once again -- Mr. Disorganized will shoot from the hip...

I'm pretty sure that many of the original pioneers of rocketry (Van Braun, etc.) were fans of Jules Verne and H.G. Wells; many of the original Mercury/Apollo NASA engineers were fans of 30s 40s hard SF writers -- including Asimov, natch -- I recall seeing a thing on the tube as to how plenty of the current NASA engineers were originally inspired by Star Trek -- which is probably a good thing as compared to Star Wars. We don't want any astronauts shutting off the guidance system and "using the force" after all...

Aside from cyberfunk, what the next wave will be depends on where technology/society goes. This is part of the ongoing feedback loop between predicted change and actual change -- the simplest example being the display systems on Star Trek (which had to change as the PC revolution made the original displays look dorky) or the working-in of movements of social change -- like the women's movement, or technological change -- like the PC revolution, which, as far as I know, no hard SF writer quite predicted. There's even shit that nobody would have predicted -- like society's general rejection of smoking in public places. The original "Lost in Space" pilot had a mission control center (set, I think, in 1998) where almost everybody -- including a TV anchor -- was smoking like fiends...

My hunch (I wrote an essay on this awhile back, this'll be a compressed for of that essay) is that technological change occurs in waves, the fictional adaptation to that change occuring in concurrent waves, just slightly out of sync and lagging behind.

One reason is writers are lazy. Almost any genre starts out as the exploration of new territory -- and ends as the rearrangement of old furniture. 

What happens with SF is that the furniture of the future gets too nicely cut and dried -- even if we're not talking about a show with its own "future history" like Star Trek, a general consensus congeals about what the future looks like -- as in the warp drive, galactic federation, flying cars future of the Gernsback era -- or the consensual hallucination of cyberspace and a sweaty underground cyber economy of outlaws and cowboys swapping spare parts, dirty deeds and dirty data while jacking themselves up and in -- or, for that matter, the teams of big-eyed warriors in anthropomorphic robot suits fighting aliens or other weirdos that you'll find in anime...

The consensus congeals. The writers and/or screenwriters are free to be lazy -- and move away from working out the details of a speculative world (or speculating in the first place about the present day world). They're free to write soap operas or shoot 'em ups in an agreed upon fictional reality with details as worked out as the town in "Gunsmoke"...

While they're busy doing that something changes out there in the real world. Something that they don't notice. Something that they can get away with not noticing for awhile...

Like, say, the PC revolution.

Or the possibilities inherent in the internet...

This blindness is very often, but not always, an age thing. The old guys get stuck in a rut.

Some young turk comes around -- like William Gibson who, I think, was still in his early 20s when he wrote Neuromancer -- and says "What about this stuff? Hell, all you zombies seem to be unaware -- so I might as well write about it."

The young turk writes something that shakes everything and everybody up...

And -- blink, blink -- before you know it, the young turk's radical new ideas become a cliche convention again. And so it was that Neuromancer begat Tek Wars. And it was bad.

So...

Unfortunately....

I guess it's a question of some radical change happening out there in the big bad world first. SF, as much as it deals with imagination ain't pure imagination, which is why it ain't fantasy. Even if the writer isn't interested in being predictive per se, there has to be some tether to the real world. A new speculation implies a new reality to speculate about...

For a new SF direction to happen, there has to be a zig or zag in society or technology that nobody quite predicted. Something that a writer with eyes to see will notice when it's just starting out.

So, before Frankenstein you have to have Galvin's experiments with electricity...

Before Neuromancer there has to be at least the beginnings of a global computer network. 

Mary Shelley noticed. William Gibson noticed. But life kept going on.

What the hell am I missing?