Retro Futures

Watching the first few episodes of STAR TREK: STRANGE NEW WORLDS, which takes place during Captain Christopher Pike's command of the Enterprise, started me thinking about the phenomenon of science fiction set in the near future with technology that gets overtaken and surpassed by real-life inventions. "Retrofuturism" brings to mind elevator operators in Huxley's BRAVE NEW WORLD (a world that relies on reproductive tech far beyond our present capacity) or slide rules coexisting with a lunar settlement in Heinlein's HAVE SPACESUIT, WILL TRAVEL. It's an inescapable hazard of writing about the near future that "cutting edge" can quickly become dated. The TV Tropes site has a page about retrofuturism under the term "Zeerust":

Zeerust

The page includes examples from the Star Trek universe under "Live-Action TV." The best-known one from the original series, of course, is the communicator. To avoid having its communicators look outdated in comparison to real-life cell phones, the prequel series ENTERPRISE had to feature devices more "modern" than those shown chronologically later in-universe.

In the original series, Captain Pike appears after the accident that made him a quadriplegic. According to Wikipedia, he operates his whole-body automated chair by brain waves, a not-implausible distant-future invention, in view of the brain-computer interface devices currently in development. Captain Pike, however, can communicate only by activating Yes or No lights on his wheelchair. In our own time, the late Stephen Hawking used a computer program that allowed him to speak through an artificial voice -- although, toward the end of his life, at the rate of only about one word per minute. Thereafter, as explained on Wikipedia, an "adaptive word predictor" enhanced his ability to communicate. The system developed for him used "predictive software similar to other smartphone keyboards." Therefore, surely by two or three centuries in the future, Captain Pike could have equipment that would enable him to produce full sentences in a completely natural-sounding manner.

As the opposite of retrofuturism or Zeerust, much science fiction displays exaggerated optimism about the futuristic features of the near future. Heinlein, in THE DOOR INTO SUMMER, predicted that advanced household robots and commercially available cryogenic "long sleep" would exist in 1970. In the same year, he has the protagonist invent what amounts to an engineering drafting program, something we've had for decades although Heinlein's versions of robotic servants haven't materialized yet. TV Tropes references this phenomenon here:

I Want My Jet Pack

As Yogi Berra is alleged to have said, "It's tough to make predictions, especially about the future."

Margaret L. Carter

Please explore love among the monsters at Carter's Crypt.

Predicting versus Contesting

Few, if any, readers and writers of science fiction believe it exists to predict the future. Strikingly on-target foretellings of future events and technology are occasional, serendipitous accidents. Rather, it speculates on the questions "What if...." and "If this goes on...." Cory Doctorow's latest LOCUS essay delivers a slightly different, more radical perspective on what science fiction does:

SF Doesn't Predict

This article consists of the text of a speech he gave in June 2023, when receiving an Honourary Doctor of Laws from York University’s Faculty of Liberal Arts and Professional Studies in Toronto. He begins with an anecdote from his educational career. At the age of seventeen, already professionally selling short science fiction, he inquired at York University's humanities department about getting into the creative writing program. He was turned down because, as he was told, "they only teach literature." I had a similar, although less blunt and final experience, as an undergraduate. After taking the introductory course in creative writing, I enrolled in an advanced, workshop-type fiction writing course. At the end of the first semester, the professor hesitated to let me into the second semester because I'd submitted only fantasy and horror. He reluctantly let me continue, and I dutifully wrote a slice-of-life story about a military wife coping with a toddler and a baby while her husband was deployed. Nobody could have asked for a more spot-on "write what you know" work. As far as I can recall, it was an okay story and certainly didn't lack vividness or realism. But that wasn't the path I wanted to follow; the marketplace abounds in writers of realistic fiction, and I knew I'd never measure up to most of them. While I sometimes enjoy reading about contemporary settings and characters with no trace of the fantastic, I have no interest in trying to write that genre. (Yes, even though it claims the status of "mainstream," it's a genre.)

Doctorow later rejoiced in belonging to a community, the tech realm, whose members didn't view his science-fiction output with disdain. Rather, he "was surrounded by people who thought that SF writing was literally the coolest thing in the world." The rest of this blog explains why he agrees.

He defines optimism and pessimism as "just fatalism in respectable suits. . . .Both deny human agency, that we can intervene to change things." He subsumes both under the category of "inevitabilism, the belief that nothing can change." This attitude, according to Doctorow, is "the opposite of SF," whose purpose is to imagine alternatives. What it contests is the assumption that there's no alternative to the status quo or the predicted future, that "resistance is futile." He lays out several examples, climaxing with his metaphor of a bus speeding toward the brink of a canyon--unless we take the risk of swerving. The essay concludes, "Hope begins with the ability to imagine alternatives. And there is always an alternative."

That affirmation reminds me of something that irritates me about the fantasy and SF shows I watch on the CW network. A continually recurring line of cliched dialogue laments, "We haven't got a choice!" (I've often wondered whether the same writers compose the scripts for all of those series.) I keep wanting to yell at the screen, "Yes, you featherbrain, you always have a choice."

Margaret L. Carter

Carter's Crypt

Writing to the Future

Cory Doctorow's latest LOCUS column, on writing nonfiction pieces that will still be relevant by the time they're published:

Six Weeks Is a Long Time

The time lag that may undercut the applicability of a written work, according to him, seems to be getting shorter. Circumstances can always truly change overnight or in an instant, of course. Consider the difference between September 10, 2001, and September 11 of that year. Yet it may seem odd to define an essay meant to be read a month and a half after it's written as "futuristic thinking." The near future, however, is still the future. As C. S. Lewis's senior demon says in THE SCREWTAPE LETTERS, all human beings constantly travel into the future at the rate of sixty minutes per hour.

I once read a story about a time-viewing machine that allows the user to look into the future. The culture-transformative feature of this device is that it has no lower limit on how short a time span it can look ahead. And apparently (if I remember correctly) one can view events in other places, not just where one happens to be personally located. Suppose you peer ten seconds into the future? You're effectively spying on people's actions in the present, in real time. (On second thought, it may have been a past-viewing device. Same principle applies.)

Doctorow wrote this month's article in the midst of a new, highly contagious COVID variant and the imminent invasion of Ukraine, addressing us "in the distant, six-week future" from his moment in the past when "the odds of nuclear Armageddon [seemed] higher than they’ve been for decades." He greets his future audience thus: "I bear glad tidings. Only six weeks ago, you, me and most everyone else we knew couldn’t imagine getting through these next six weeks. If you’re reading these words, you did the unimaginable. Six weeks and six weeks and six weeks, we eat the elephant of the unimaginable one bite at a time."

We're familiar with the question of what message we'd like to send to our past selves. There's a country song about writing a letter to "me at seventeen." But what message might you want to send to your future self? Unlike speaking to one's past self, this we can actually do. Are there important events or thoughts you might want to write down as reminders in case you've forgotten them a month, a year, or decades from now? What would you like to record as an important reminder for the citizens of your city, your country, or the world next month, next year, a decade from now, or generations later? People often do the latter with physical "time capsules." Would the things you choose to highlight turn out to be important to those future audiences or not?

Isaac Asimov wrote at least one essay predicting future technological and social advances, and surely he wasn't the only SF author to do that. Some of his predictions have come true; many haven't. An essay like that could be considered a message to future generations.

Margaret L. Carter

Carter's Crypt