![]() Leinster’s story is often cited, but there is another that can stand right alongside it and that in many ways goes even deeper - Ray Bradbury’s “The Murderer,” which first appeared in his 1953 collection, The Golden Apples of the Sun. ![]() ![]() The technology itself isn’t the point of the story - the question of how you live with such a change is. Though producing uncannily accurate prophecy isn’t the main intention of most science fiction writers – too many things work against it – every now and then, in using invented technologies to speculate about change and its social effects, someone hits a bull’s eye.Ī case in point: the internet - or at least, a technology that provides instantaneous (and often intrusive) information and advice - was predicted by Murray Leinster in his 1945 story “A Logic Named Joe.” And Leinster doesn’t just imagine the tool he shows the disruptive effects such a technology has on the daily lives of those who use it. His world is full of empty people traveling endlessly through the night, on trips to everywhere and nowhere. (In Roger Zelazny’s 1966 novel The Dream Master, the people of his future world are so bored and purposeless that they use their automated cars in a kind of game to stave off the deadly ennui that envelops them - they program the vehicles to take them to random destinations, over and over. The harder part is imagining just what effects a particular technology will have on people’s lives, the ways that it will change how they live and who they are, especially because so many of those changes will be unforeseen and unintended. Over the past few years, it’s become clear that we’re well on the way to self-driving cars, but those have been a staple of science fiction for a very long time. It’s not that hard to come up with plausible new technologies. (How quaint the old far future Gernsbackian stories now seem to us, the ones where vast machines have physically transformed the world but where the hero and heroine go out on a date and act like it’s still 1912.) One way to define science fiction is to say that instead of being a bet-your-life-on-it prediction generator, it is a way of thinking about social change in a technological age, and we feel those stories lacking where technological change is imagined without a corresponding change in the society which produced it. His books were really comments on the present in the form of visions of the future, and the technologies he invented were tools that enabled him to bring his own society and its potentialities into sharper focus. Wells didn’t really think that we were going to be invaded by Martians or believe that it was possible to concoct a formula that would make us invisible, nor was he convinced that vivisection could make the family dog into something that was virtually human. Such people gleefully point out SF’s failure to predict the internet (even though… well, we’ll get to that), or they “prove” the shallowness or silliness of the entire genre with the help of tales from the yellowing pages of Amazing Stories, yarns that depict a 21st century where everyone enjoys lives of anti-gravity-belt enhanced leisure with every want met by humanoid robot laborers (which hasn’t quite happened, in case you haven’t noticed).īut of course H.G. For example, one widespread misconception holds that the main purpose of science fiction is to predict the future! This notion is most rigidly held by those who have almost no familiarity with any actual science fiction. Such wrong ideas can attach themselves to almost everything in our lives, even including the books that we read. Everyone knows themselves to be quite different from what other people assume them to be. Everyone would have a chapter - men, women, LBGTQ folks, atheists, evangelicals, millennials, seniors, Democrats, Republicans, police officers, bus drivers, food service workers, Fortune 500 CEO’s, any racial or sexual or religious or social or political or generational or economic group that you can name, in fact - everyone feels misunderstood. I am unswervingly committed to traditional paper books, but this is one that I would have to read electronically a physical book would just be too damn big. ![]() High on the list of unwritten books that I’d like to read is An Encyclopedia of Misconceptions.
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