Epilogue: A New Default Future?

Abstract

For reasons I explained in the Introduction, the SF explored in this book was all published prior to 1985. Of course, the ten core themes I’ve been discussing continued to fascinate SF authors long after my self-imposed cut-off date. Asimov continued writing about robots¹ until his death in 1992; the SF community never lost interest in the possibilities of alien life²; and time travel stories³ are popular to this day. Stories about antigravity⁴ did lose some of their allure, but tales of immortality⁵ and invisibility⁶ appeared with pretty much the same frequency after 1985 as they did before, while topics such as transportation⁷ and the threat of the mad scientist⁸ remained obvious targets for the SF writer. Stories examining the nature of reality⁹ are even more popular now than they were when Phil Dick was writing: computing advances have made immersive VR a possibility while physicists have improved their understanding of the fundamentals of quantum theory—developments to which the antennae of SF writers are attuned. The situation with that other theme, space travel, is more nuanced: many SF stories continued to be set in space,¹⁰ but authors also began facing up to the realization that space travel is hard. Nevertheless, although these ten core themes remain part of the field’s DNA it’s clear that the ‘feel’ conjured up by Golden Age science fiction—the default future generated through the visionary work of writers such as Asimov, Heinlein, and Clarke—has not (yet) come to pass. The world in which we now live is not the world that SF envisaged. Why? The failure of SF to accurately foresee our world was, I believe, in large part due to the difficulty of identifying technologies that scale—and in understanding what happens when technology does scale.

The future starts today, not tomorrow.

Pope John Paul II