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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
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?
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.
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
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?
I predict more of the same. I also predict that people 25 years from now will still be making inaccurate predictions.
What political party do you join when you don't like Bible-thumpers *or* hippies?
you sure you don't life in the fifties? or sixties? or seventies? or eighties? or nineties? or 00's?
that's exactly the prediction all those guys got wrong pretty much.
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
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.
L Ron Hubbard was a popular SF writer before he went nuts. (Or more (or less?) charitably speaking, before he figured he could accumulate wealth and power by inventing a religion.) A lot of writers go a bit weird in their old age (more specifically a lot of people go weird in their old age, but authors are in a pretty good position to publicize their own weirdness) but very few manage to go so far as to taint everything they've done before. Heinlein, James P Hogan, Terry Goodkind, Orson Scott Card, they all went a bit off the deep end later, but you can still admit to liking their earlier stuff and recommend that other people check it out without shame. (Well, except maybe for Orson Scott Card. I'll admit to liking his old stuff, but i'd be hesitant to suggest anyone actually support him by paying money for any of his books, even the older ones.)
For L Ron Hubbard though, Scientology has overshadowed everything else he ever did.
This Space Intentionally Left Blank
Nonsense everyone is an agreement about what's good and what's bad about energy:
1) Cheap
2) Safe / Clean
3) Reliably priced / reliable availability
4) Domestic
Where there is disagreement is what to do about the tradeoffs between those 4 objectives. Not addressing legitimate concerns about safe / clean has created mistrust. The way to handle that is an effective outside audit i.e. regulation.
Sometimes we scare the crap out of ourselves.
The louder he talked of his honour, the faster we counted our spoons. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
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.
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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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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Fracking for natural gas -- one of the cheapest, cleanest, safest, and most reliable domestic energy sources -- has been made illegal in some states. Environmentalists oppose fracking for natural gas because they don't want us to have cheap energy.
The only state in which fracking is illegal to the best of my knowledge is Vermont and they don't have any natural gas, so it is symbolic. If someone discovered natural gas reserves in Vermont symbolism be damned they'd be fracking. Now the real issue with fracking is:
1) It looks to be an incredible source of cheap energy
2) Fracking fluids are not be subject to regulation because they are considered trade secrets. And that's a problem for environmentalists.
3) Nobody has any idea of what happens when you push millions of billions of tons of pressurized liquids into rock. No one knows. There is a lot of risk there potentially.
4) There have been some problems.
That being said, the US and Canada are aggressively expanding fracking. So its just not true its not happening.
As far as oil of east, west and Alaska. That's not enough oil to do much of anything. East and West coastal drilling has more to do with the tremendous value of US coastal vacation areas and the rather low value of those oil reserves. That's a business choice between competing interests. I know when I lived in LA the Long Beach oil / tar would leak up and ruin the beach experience. As far as Alaska... most of Alaska is producing except wilderness reserve and mainly because no one has been able to answer basic questions about pipe safety.
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...".
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.
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