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Sci-Fi Writers of the Past Predict Life In 2012
cylonlover writes "As part of the L, Ron Hubbard Writers of the Future award in 1987, a group of science fiction luminaries put together a text 'time capsule' of their predictions about life in the far off year of 2012. Including such names as Orson Scott Card, Robert Silverberg, Jack Williamson, Algis Budrys and Frederik Pohl, it gives us an interesting glimpse into how those living in the age before smartphones, tablets, Wi-Fi and on-demand streaming episodes of Community thought the future might turn out."
I wonder if this is any more accurate than their predictions of the years 1999, 2000, 2001, 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010, or 2010
In three years we will all have hoverboards!
They all missed that scientists would build a worldwide, high speed network for the reliable transmission of pornography to all corners of the planet, from Communist China, to the Soviet Union to the Arab world.
So what does Gregory Benford like to drink then?
Oh arse
They probably didn't expect that people could entertain themselves with posting:
FIRST POST !
This is vaguely interesting, but imo, near-term predictions of technological development aren't really what you go to sci-fi for. If you really want an accurate prediction 15 years out, there are more qualified but generally less exciting people to get it from than sci-fi authors: that's near enough that you really just need people with a good amount of historical knowledge, extensive information about current developments, and perhaps especially, accurate knowledge of current research progress, prospects, and bottlenecks. And a decent ability to synthesize and evaluate all those variables.
Sci-fi's strengths are, instead, more about what-if than what-is-likely. One kind is technological what-ifs, imagining (at least in hard sci-fi) conceptually plausible but not anywhere near buildable technologies and their results and implications; and ethical/political/etc. what-ifs, analyzing how future societies might operate (often in either dystopian or utopian visions).
At least, that's what I go to sci-fi for.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
No serious science fiction writer in their right mind seriously thinks they can accurately predict the future. The good science fiction writers merely use the future to explore the issues of the present and their implications (and perhaps offer admonishment, with a glimpse of what could go wrong if a particular path is followed).
What political party do you join when you don't like Bible-thumpers *or* hippies?
No serious science fiction writer in their right mind seriously thinks they can accurately predict the future. The good science fiction writers merely use the future to explore the issues of the present and their implications (and perhaps offer admonishment, with a glimpse of what could go wrong if a particular path is followed).
I didn't get the impression that any of them seriously thought their predictions might be correct, but it's still an interesting read.
Curiously, in an article containing L. Ron Hubbard, your sig was the first mention of scientology!
Counting through the predictions I'd say 10-20% of those accurate with maybe 50% pointing to trends that may happen (and probably where started before 1987 anyway like credit cards leading the way for cashless society).
Pretty crappy performance really - and generally over-estimating the rate of progress. But I think that is well known phenomenon where people over-estimate progress over 10-30 years but substantially fall short on predictions for 50-100 years. Interesting paradox !!!
With a straight face?
Money trying to buy a reputation does not turn a crappy SF writer into a good one.
Hubbard likely never thought he could predict the future, but his followers certainly thought he could do that and more. Of course, they believe that Scientology can make the gay go away too.
What political party do you join when you don't like Bible-thumpers *or* hippies?
Arthur C. Clark's 2001 A Space Odyssey predicted the iPad in 1968. He called it a "Newspad" and it connected to all major newspapers over the "ether". In the book, Heywood Floyd reads it on his way to the space station. In the movie, you can see Bowman and Poole watching the news on them during the first scenes on Discovery.
:wq
some do, but they just don't predict stupid things if they want to sound like they're predicting actual future.
for example, shouldn't it be obvious that it's easier to build a machine to win in chess than to write good books? yet that's what one of the guys(neverheard of him) predicted.
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
...but could he have predicted Tom Cruise?
L, Ron Hubbard Writers of the Future award
Uh yeah. So this is a scientology press release? I mean a Hugo or a Nebula I can understand, but who the fuck cares about the "L. Ron Hubbard award"? Never heard of it until today.
Whatever happens, I can predict one thing: the world tomorrow will be uglier, more crowded and less educated that the world today.
The days when young people looked forward to a brighter future are long gone. Everybody knows we're living the last of the golden days brought about by cheap energy. Whatever is coming next won't be pretty.
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
While nobody can accurately predict the future, it's sometimes fun to try extrapolating where society will go based on our past/present and then see just how wrong we were.
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
Come on, Battlefield Earth was pretty good (though the movie was a lot better than the book).
What political party do you join when you don't like Bible-thumpers *or* hippies?
Wi-Fi Users of The Past - Get A Life In 2102
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S0zt4opqL18
So, why read Sci-Fi when real-life in early 21st Century nearly beats the fiction?
Nah, I still like Sci-Fi, but these authors, Orson Scott Card, Robert Silverberg, Jack Williamson, Algis Budrys or Frederik Pohl did NOT predict the clueless.
Well, he is pretty popular -- his sci fi series has a devoted fan base who keep trying to introduce others to his prose...
Palm trees and 8
"Where do you see yourself in 5 years?"
My usual answer is "I used to have a great answer for this, and then five years went by."
William of Ockham had no beard. The most likely explanation is that it was chewed off by squirrels every morning.
How in Azimov's name is this rated +4 Interesting? +4 Funny, sure, but Interesting?!
Those mods need to be strapped down and forced to endure Battlefield Earth, the movie. I suppose in some alternate universe it is possible that it was better than the book -- assuming the book in question was a summary of an insurance conference and the benefits of whole vs universal life policies for pets...
Forest Whitaker's finest film, if you ask me.
What political party do you join when you don't like Bible-thumpers *or* hippies?
Please, please, please tell me you are joking... I am an avid reader of science fiction from William Gibson/Neal Stephenson to Robert Heinlein/Isaac Asimov and around to John Varley and Spider Robinson. In my much younger years (call it late teens), I tried to read Battlefield Earth and then the Mission Earth series (I had the first 5 volumes in hard cover for some reason). I quit reading Battlefield after 60 or so pages. I quit reading the first book in the Mission Earth after 20 pages or so. I do not mind technical detail in my books but gah!, those books bored me to tears with their writing style and the details included. I love some good pulp fiction but those don't cut it. I was hoping for fantastic considering the series was 10 books. What I received instead was drivel and 4.9 unread volumes (5+ if you count Battlefield).
Oh, yeah, the movie was such a large pile of shit that we could fertilize the mid-west with it for 20 years or so. To be fair, I might give the books another go. It has been a while.
Dream as if you'll live forever.
Live as if you'll die tomorrow.
~Anonymous~
One has to admit that going by the fanaticism of his fandom, he beats out every modern writer.
...is where is my motherfucking flying car?
I've only read Ender's Game, so I'm not working from a big sample size, but as far as that one goes I thought it was superb, intelligent, insightful and subtle. He compares favourably with Asimov and Baxter as far as I'm concerned (although a bit soft to draw comparisons with Clarke).
Please consider this account deleted, I just can't be bothered with the spam anymore.
I knew someone was gonna say that.
Karma: NaN
and anything he touched.
I've only read Ender's Game, so I'm not working from a big sample size, but as far as that one goes I thought it was superb, intelligent, insightful and subtle. He compares favourably with Asimov and Baxter as far as I'm concerned (although a bit soft to draw comparisons with Clarke).
Ender's Game was originally written as a short story, and the full length novel was basically the short story with some biolerplate sci-fi elements tacked onto it. The sequels were mostly garbage, at least imho.
What about this one? http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0165798/
"While nobody can accurately predict the future,..."
When I read the news I even doubt that most people can predict the past.
Can we invalidate some patents with prior art now?
As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a reference to Godwin's Law approaches 1
NOBODY in their right mind seriously thinks they can accurately predict the future. That said, it should be possible to extrapolate the future from present trends. A good sci-fi writer wouldn't have predicted flying cars because they're either so damn impractical or if possible engineering-wise indistinguishable from airplanes.
Reading near-future hard sci-fi, it's also important to keep in mind cultural and political differences. Heinlein's Libertarian vision of robber barons on the Moon differs markedly from Clarke's vision of continued government-sponsored space exploration, influenced no doubt by the British Empire's own exploratory conquests of the New World and Australia. Each is as likely or unlikely as the other. The decisive factor isn't technology but future political developments.
Interesting....
I wonder if this could be used in patent law suits?
You have read what I consider to be the best of his books. "Speaker for the Dead" is ok too.
Forget Xenocide etc., they are just milking the franchise.
That prediction was of course WAY off the mark...
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-16409664
Seriously, sometimes you Americans do scare the living crap out of us rest-of-the-worlders..
To be, or not to be: isn't that quite logical, Slashdot Beta?
Unfortunately, the series goes off a cliff not too long after that. Speaker for the Dead is also good, as is most of Xenocide. He completely failed at coming up with a solution to the story in Xenocide, though, and the ending made me refuse to read any more of his books. It ranks only slightly above the last episode of Voyager.
I suspect the article is wrong about hunger. Compared to the 80's, the world has fewer famines. The absolute number of hungry people may be up, but as a percentage of the global population, it's probably lower than in the 80's.
Beetle B.
Ender's Game is like a third grade reading level, and Orson Scott Card went on a tirade against all his critics claiming that writing prose isn't really important. In his book about Characters and Viewpoint, he even makes a different argument: if you don't write well, nobody is going to figure out what the hell story you're trying to tell.
Ender's Game had a well-developed story, but it was poorly executed. It was like reading a kid's story.
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Stupid of them not to include the lyrics of "Living In The Future" by John Prine. Much more accurate!
All of Card's books, from what I understand, have no real solution. Ender's Game was terrible: there was no sane way to approach the problem at hand, and the books further down the line play on the whole mess. For example, Ender is immortalized as a horrible genocidal maniac who exterminates an entire alien culture... after being tricked into thinking he's playing a computer game, by a race of people who believe the aliens are coming to destroy them, and of course immediately take over all the planets these now-dead aliens had inhabited once they've tricked a small boy into murdering the lot of them. Speaker for the Dead has a lot of strangeness in it but nothing quite so complex, although due to an unstoppable disease they have to cripple a burgeoning culture that they've interfered with. Due to the volatile nature of all this, wouldn't it make sense to nuke the whole planet anyway a la the ending of Ender's Game? Is murder still an option?
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I've never read much by Hubbard but I did like Fear. Sure it was light but it was still good.
Yes, believe it or not, L.Ron Hubbard could write science fiction, or at least fiction. Just look at all of the $cientologists that have bought into his sceme.
Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. Albert Einstein
No credit to the original paranoic who foresaw living in a police state where corporations control everything and all aspects of our lives are monitored constantly for signs of deviancy?
We can't even predict the stock market a year in advance, or the results of political forces, so we can't possibility predict rates and the timing of endpoints that are based on such factors...
There, fixed that for you.
Science fiction keeps getting put up on some kind of pedestal, and people keep forgetting that it's primary goal is to be entertaining enough to induce people to part with their hard earned cash. Science fiction authors are neither mystics nor prophets, they're entertainers.
Not to mention, they've missed far more often than they hit.
I think I got maybe a quarter through the first Mission Earth book before dropping it. All I can remember was a desperate and dishonest main character doing increasingly desperate and dishonest things and digging himself deeper into a hole while trying and failing to get the better of the "good guy". The only thing I found vaguely interesting was wondering whether the good guy was completely dumb and oblivious as he foiled the MC's plots, or just played dumb and oblivious while being superior to the plots. In the end I decided I didn't care.
Mostly it reminded me of the Looney Tunes adaptation of the Tortoise and the Hare story, where if the hare just ran he'd win easily, but the hare irrationally spends all his time trying to cheat instead, botches everything repeatedly, and through his own idiocy eventually loses the race to the oblivious, plodding tortoise.
The Quirkz Handbook of Self-Improvement for People Who Are Already Pretty Okay
In Heinlein's Future History series from the 1950s, there is a time line chart. This chart shows a "false dawn" in space travel - initial success around 1970, then a long hiatus.
In Heinlein's "The Man who Sold The Moon", the problem is made clear - fuel. A chemically powered rocket can just barely make it to the moon, with severe weight restrictions. Nuclear rockets are too dangerous. And so, the first lunar landing is a publicity stunt.
Heinlein could do the math. Space travel with chemical rockets is just barely feasible and hugely expensive. Nuclear rocket engines were built and successfully tested in the 1950s, but are too dangerous to use. Fusion isn't even close to working. So we're stuck.
David Brin is not included in these predictions, but he started writing a book called "Earth" in 1987 that had some interesting predictions of its own for the near future (2038, in his case).
-Networked computing connects all the people on the globe, and becomes the dominant way people access news and information.
-Computers shrink to the point where they become wearable, and people carry them around with them at all time.
-It becomes common for people to carry around small personal video cameras so they can record every moment of their lives. They then go home and upload portions of the video onto this computer network, sharing the videos for people around the world to see.
He later said of those predictions in particular. "... but I think the ideas were already latent -- almost obvious -- when I started writing the book...".
I'm not ashamed to admit I liked Battlefield Earth, the book.
For one thing, it is a masterpiece of plotting. Before the end of the over 1,000 pages there are dozens and dozens of loose plot threads, and yet by the end every single one is neatly tied up.
I'm surprised the winner isn't predicting a world in which we all willingly submit to the CoS to have our thetans removed....
However, the collapse of the Soviet Union, which even the CIA missed predicting, made the whole U.N. running the world to avoid nuclear war thing moot. Meanwhile, the current situation in Syria and the ineffectiveness of the U.N. in dealing with it only illustrates how far off the mark he was in predicting a world at peace.
Au contraire, with India and Pakistan in possession of nukes, and the technology in increasing danger of falling into the wrong hands, I would say that international bodies like the UN are needed more than ever. The UN was never intended to "run the world" anyway, that's just redneck paranoia. The UN is about providing a forum and framework in which nations can discuss their concerns and make them known without resorting to conflict as the first option. There's nothing "moot" about the threat of nuclear annihilation.
Drill baby drill - on Mars
Scientology. BUTU was making a joke at L.Ron Hubbard's expense, since L.Ron was the creator of both the time capsule and the dangerous, violent cult in question.
<\explaining-the-joke>
people keep forgetting that it's primary goal is to be entertaining enough to induce people to part with their hard earned cash.
So, you are saying that Picasso only ever painted pictures to make cash?
That Michael Jackson only danced to make money?
That Mary Shelly only wrote Frankenstein to make a few extra notes?
I can assure you many people are driven by more than money......
I mean, have you ever wondered why kids climb trees?
Hmmmmm
I don't suppose by any chance, you vote republican?
Anyone quoted by a reporter knows how little they understand
Don't believe what you read is the truth.
Space Cadet, written in 1948, had a throw-away line about cell phones as well. The protagonist is standing in a line and gets a call from his father. Someone else in the same line notices and asks if it was family calling. When confirmed, the second person claims that he stowed his phone in his luggage to prevent such calls.
When I first read this story as a child, I wondered about how long the phone cord would have to be. It wasn't until several years later, when cell phones did arrive, that I realized how limiting my view was. I assumed that because he used the word "phone" that it was like the old AT&T desk phones that I knew about. Later, when I talked to my brother about this, he claimed that he always pictured a walkie-talkie type of device that happened to be called a "phone."
Heinlein always had some good predictions as well as some strange blind spots about the future. In one book he talks about mag-lev type trains, food dispensers, and space travel, but at the same time, the protagonist cooks on a wood-fire stove, and computers are programmed from a set of paper books by flipping switches.
Great civilizations have lived and died on false theories. Don't mess up mine with a few facts.
No that would be the year 0102.
I only look human.
My mother is a halfling and my dad is an ogre, so that makes me an Ogreling
And then one day you find
Ten years have got behind you
No one told you when to run
You missed the starting gun
To be fair, I might give the books another go. It has been a while.
Don't. They get worse, not better.
WALSTIB!
Hubbard likely never thought he could predict the future, but his followers certainly thought he could do that and more. Of course, they believe that Scientology can make the gay go away too.
Maybe. He wouldn't be the first spiritual leader to start believing his own lies though.
From his pocket he brought a small black case. A window glowed to reveal an index; Waldo set dials. "here's an example of Vaakstras, it's not obvious music.'"
Read *all of them* back in the day when still on the cool aid. Had to take *time out of my life* for Mission Earth. It is seriously mental. I often wonder if the stories were drawn from incidents in his own life, or if there are cool aid drinkers all around the world who blush a little when they see the dirties from their "Confidential" folders published in an "International Best Seller". Unfortunately, it suffers from a painful logic flaw in the "twist" at the end. It's like the automatic writing just stopped and he did not know how to write the next 11 books.
It occurs to me that they are st. elron's equivalent to t3H great beast's confessions, and that the sci fi ribbon tying it all together is just wrapping because he did not have the balls Crowley had. OTOH the beast was a bit of a tame kitty in comparison to our founder.
Anyway! The movie, Battle Field Earth was terrible. When I saw other cool aid drinkers saying oh boy this movie is proof of how good the cool aid is, it was then that I realised: the cool aid has no clothes! Or something to that effect. The book was okay, but I think you have to kind of like the guy to put up with the whole thing. If you haven't read it. Imagine Clan of the Cave Bear in a mashup with V and you don't have to read the book. Myself, I think I will probably get around to reading War and Peace before any of those again.