Another problem in science fiction is an old one, but it's becoming more pronounced with each passing moment. The problem is this: with as rapidly as things are changing in the real world, science fiction is in danger of becoming obsolete even before it's published. I'm not sure that anyone can keep up with the rapidity of change in our world. I don't think that even a polymath like Isaac Asimov could have done it. That presents a real challenge to the science fiction writer, whose story may be sound in one area and completely fall apart in another because he or she fails to make proper allowances for new developments in technology. I think of all of those science fiction stories from the 1950s in which people of the future light up a smoke or hand each other sheaves of paper to read. Another example of this perceived problem is in Neuromancer by William Gibson, from 1984, an extraordinary work of imagination and in many ways quite visionary, and yet the Japanese in Mr. Gibson's novel/romance stride over the world of the future (our present, or soon to be). To be fair to Mr. Gibson, many people in the 1980s thought that the Japanese would soon stride over the world. Some even thought that we would come to blows with them because of it. But if we call Neuromancer also a predictive work, then it fails miserably, as the Japanese are, in our current world, rapidly not-reproducing themselves out of existence. The seeds of Japanese decline had already been planted by the 1980s, yet few--if any--people saw it. And if the experts got it wrong, how could a science fiction writer get it right? Even more glaring is a total lack of cellphone technology in Neuromancer. In fact, no one that I know of in science fiction foresaw that we would even have cellphones, let alone described just how dominant and world-destroying cellphone culture would become. We are in effect enslaved by and addicted to this technology and by some perspectives have fallen into Dystopia as a result. And yet no one, as far as I know, foresaw it.*
There's a way around all of that, though, and that is to realize that the purpose of science fiction is not to predict the future but to make projections or extrapolations into it based on the writer's understanding of human nature and the possible effects of science and technology on human conduct and human society. The writers of the 1950s didn't do anything wrong by putting cigarettes between the yellowed fingers of guys in futuristic Kelly Freas-style duds. It might be kind of comical now for us to read these things, but they did nothing wrong. Likewise William Gibson. He got enough right in his projections that the things that he might have gotten wrong--what we might erroneously call predictions rather than properly see as projections--are negligible. Neuromancer, because it is so powerful, has not reached obsolescence. It may yet, but I doubt that it will because it is such a vivid and imaginative look at life in a fully realized future world. And though no one foresaw Cellphone or Smartphone World, many, many writers have successfully described Dystopia, probably none as well as the Big Three, Yevgeny Zamyatin, Aldous Huxley, and George Orwell. They didn't know about cellphones, but they knew human nature.
I have been thinking about these things because I'm currently working on my own science fiction story. Right now it's novella length. It will probably reach near novel length once I have finished it. I have set my story in the far future, after people have reached the stars. Here's the problem with that or any such story: interstellar travel in convenient periods of time is the last technological problem. If you have solved that problem, you have surely solved all others. All other things will already have been tried. So how do you get your people to the stars and only then have them respond to problems presented by new technology? This is a serious question. Maybe I'm flubbing it.
One possible solution is to do what science fiction has always done, that is, to assume certain conditions for the sake of your story and to proceed from there to isolate just one problem and to address only that problem. In writing a science fiction story, you're not in the business of making predictions. If you get your technological developments out of future-chronological order, or if you get the future just plain wrong, it doesn't matter or shouldn't matter as long as your story is strong and your characters are recognizably human. In other words, we get people into the petri dish of the stars so that we can test them with our material. I think Star Trek is an example of this kind of storytelling. Star Trek obviously got things wrong, but the show wasn't trying to predict the future. It did what science fiction in general does: it projected the people and culture of its own time into the future as a kind of experiment: What will the man or woman of today do under the pressures of future technological developments? The result is a television show that, in my opinion, is exciting, engaging, and entertaining even now, half a century after it reached its end.
In any case, I would like to hear what you have to say about these things, and I invite and welcome comments. I look forward to hearing from you.
There's a way around all of that, though, and that is to realize that the purpose of science fiction is not to predict the future but to make projections or extrapolations into it based on the writer's understanding of human nature and the possible effects of science and technology on human conduct and human society. The writers of the 1950s didn't do anything wrong by putting cigarettes between the yellowed fingers of guys in futuristic Kelly Freas-style duds. It might be kind of comical now for us to read these things, but they did nothing wrong. Likewise William Gibson. He got enough right in his projections that the things that he might have gotten wrong--what we might erroneously call predictions rather than properly see as projections--are negligible. Neuromancer, because it is so powerful, has not reached obsolescence. It may yet, but I doubt that it will because it is such a vivid and imaginative look at life in a fully realized future world. And though no one foresaw Cellphone or Smartphone World, many, many writers have successfully described Dystopia, probably none as well as the Big Three, Yevgeny Zamyatin, Aldous Huxley, and George Orwell. They didn't know about cellphones, but they knew human nature.
I have been thinking about these things because I'm currently working on my own science fiction story. Right now it's novella length. It will probably reach near novel length once I have finished it. I have set my story in the far future, after people have reached the stars. Here's the problem with that or any such story: interstellar travel in convenient periods of time is the last technological problem. If you have solved that problem, you have surely solved all others. All other things will already have been tried. So how do you get your people to the stars and only then have them respond to problems presented by new technology? This is a serious question. Maybe I'm flubbing it.
One possible solution is to do what science fiction has always done, that is, to assume certain conditions for the sake of your story and to proceed from there to isolate just one problem and to address only that problem. In writing a science fiction story, you're not in the business of making predictions. If you get your technological developments out of future-chronological order, or if you get the future just plain wrong, it doesn't matter or shouldn't matter as long as your story is strong and your characters are recognizably human. In other words, we get people into the petri dish of the stars so that we can test them with our material. I think Star Trek is an example of this kind of storytelling. Star Trek obviously got things wrong, but the show wasn't trying to predict the future. It did what science fiction in general does: it projected the people and culture of its own time into the future as a kind of experiment: What will the man or woman of today do under the pressures of future technological developments? The result is a television show that, in my opinion, is exciting, engaging, and entertaining even now, half a century after it reached its end.
In any case, I would like to hear what you have to say about these things, and I invite and welcome comments. I look forward to hearing from you.
*The lowly comic strip has actually been pretty good in the department of predictions. For example, long before cellphones and even before Star Trek communicators, Dick Tracy had his two-way wrist radio. For another, the first depiction of a televised moon landing was not in science fiction but in the comic strip Alley Oop.
Copyright 2019, 2023 Terence E. Hanley
Actually, Heinlein mentions portable Phones way back in Space Cadet (1948). The hero gets the phone out of his duffel bag, answers it, puts it away, and we never see it again. To be fair, most of the action is SP takes place where we might expectt cell phones to be forbidden (military academy) or have no service (outer space).
ReplyDeleteHi, Carrington,
DeleteI was thinking about this a few days ago:
I graduated from college the second time around in 1998. By then there was of course an Internet, and we as students used email. Some people had cellphones, but I don't think I knew of anyone who did. Even those who had cellphones had the old-fashioned kind. You know, a kind of miniature brick, not even a flip phone. It doesn't seem to me that those times were radically different from the decades before them--before there was an Internet or email or cellphones. Just yesterday I was going through some letters my friends sent to me--real letters written by hand, on paper, sent through the mail! In the late 1990s and early 2000s! In other words, I'm not sure that things really changed until we had the lethal combination of: a) Smartphones; and b) Social media.
So when I say "cellphone," what I actually mean is "smartphone": a phone that you *look* at rather than listen to. And the reason you look at it is that there is something to see there: not something boring like what is going on in the world--that would make it a newspaper--but the one thing that is more important than anything else in the universe: the smartphone, coupled with social media, lets us look at ourselves, all day, every day, for our whole lives. So Robert Heinlein may have had his protagonist use a portable phone in Space Cadet, but that protagonist only talks on it (I presume) and then puts it away. In order for him to have an adventure, he has to turn outside himself. His having a smartphone would have strangled the adventure in its crib because once people disappear beyond the event horizon of their own black-hole-selves, they don't have adventures. Likewise, Heinlein, despite all of his understanding of technology, human nature, and human society, did not foresee that we would go down the rabbit hole of our own selves in pursuit of our own selves. If anyone foresaw that we would turn out this way, I suspect it would have been conservative thinkers and artists--and maybe especially conservative religions.
Thanks for writing. I think we have a candidate for the first cellphone in science fiction from your comment.
Terence Hanley
"...In fact, no one that I know of in science fiction foresaw that we would even have cellphones..."
ReplyDeleteWell, Blish had the Dirac Communicator, which provided instant voice messages with no time lag to any point in the Universe - and that also had a massive social problem as well, in that ALL messages ever sent on it - past, present and future - were contained in a single atmospheric beep at the start of each communication....
Arthur C Clarke discussed the concept of mass communication to everyone in the world, but decided that it would never happen because the required number of phone digits to address everybody would be too long to input without mistake!
Dear Dodgy Geezer,
DeleteI haven't read either of those sources, but they both sound the same: Both James Blish and Arthur C. Clarke approached or reached the concept of the cellphone but never made the leap to the smartphone. (See my reply to the comment previous to yours.) We can't fault them for that. Like I said, nobody foresaw this as far as I can tell, maybe because it's not a technological problem so much as a spiritual problem, and few science fiction writers treat spiritual problems or issues in their work with any great depth or seriousness.
Clarke seems to have been tripped up by what he perceived as a weakness in the human/technology interface: How can anyone remember so many numbers?! The problem of the human/spiritual interface may not have occurred to him. But then he was an atheist and possessed a truncated personality.
Blish's solution seems to have been a practical one for purposes of storytelling. But again, it looks like science fiction writers have looked at the cellphone as a means of *communication*, stopping short of the concept of the smartphone as *an instrument of the self*, as a means towards some psychological, emotional, and--most importantly--spiritual end.
So maybe science fiction writers foresaw some kind of instant and portable means of communication (like the communicators in Star Trek). Even so, they didn't go very far with it, it seems to me, and they definitely didn't get anywhere near the concept of the smartphone. Maybe Steve Jobs and Mark Zuckerberg are the greatest science fiction visionaries of all time: only they foresaw it--and maybe not even Mr. Zuckerberg, who still talks about Facebook as a way for people to be connected to each other.
Thanks for writing.
TH
Dear Carrington and Dodgy,
ReplyDeleteI have been thinking more about this whole issue and I think I need a little precision here. There are actually two separate issues:
First, I should have made a distinction between the radio- or walkie-talkie-like communications device and the cellphone. The radio- or walkie-talkie-like device is used only when needed and the communications themselves are brief, concise, and direct. The device is used and then put away so that we can get on with the real action. The cellphone on the other hand is used to pass the time, shoot the breeze, catch up, talk about relationships (or sex), order a pizza, find out what's playing at the movies tonight, etc. We might talk on our phones for endless hours without much result at all. That might be fun but it doesn't make for a very interesting story. It may actually head off certain storytelling possibilities, for it can easily take away elements of surprise, suspense, mystery, etc., if your characters are always in touch with each other. That's why moviemakers always figure out a way to deprive their characters of cellphones, or ignore altogether the existence of cellphones.
Second, I should have made a distinction between the cellphone and the smartphone. With a cellphone--the old-fashioned kind--you only talk and listen. There is no looking or texting or posting or checking. A cellphone is still a device for communicating with other people. A smartphone, however, has a different purpose, and it's not chiefly for communicating with others. The smartphone is actually used in service of the shrunken self: so that the self might assert itself, affirm itself, seek the recognition of itself, earn the esteem of others for itself, promote, sell, and aggrandize itself, and so on. The smartphone in my view is used ultimately to meet emotional, psychological, and spiritual needs rather than technological needs. It will always fall short in that, but the promise is that you will be happy if only enough people follow you or give you enough likes or thumbs up.
So, it seems to me that there is a progression:
1. The radio- or walkie-talkie-like communications device, exemplified by the portable, handheld communicator in Star Trek, which is used only when needed to convey direct, concise, and brief messages. This device is readily found in science fiction.
2. The cellphone, also portable and handheld but used at any time and all the time for any reason at all, the way we have used telephones for decades. It seems to me that no one in science fiction anticipated the development of such a device.
3. The smartphone, also portable and handheld but chiefly used to *look* at rather than for talking and listening. The smartphone is also not chiefly used for communicating but to serve the shrunken self. It is a black, reflective surface into which we can sink like Narcissus into ourselves. I don't think anyone in science fiction anticipated the smartphone as a device, although the concept of the narcissistic, self-centered, self-absorbed self is as old as time. Maybe the spinning circle in the center of the screen should remind us of Ouroboros in Camille Paglia's construction: the worm that swallows its own tail. That's what smartphones offer, and it's the offer that far too many have accepted.
In short, radio- and walkie-talkie-like communications devices were anticipated in science fiction. Cellphones seem not to have been anticipated. And smartphones were not at all as far as I can tell.
Those are my two cents.
TH