The future isn’t what it used to be.
Science and science fiction used to promise a whiz-bang tomorrow of amazing technology and adventure in space. But “today is yesterday’s future,” as science-fiction novelist Paul Melko points out, “and it’s all pretty mundane for us.” We never got cars with coollooking bubble tops. We never got helicopters for everybody. We never got sleek new cities where everything works the way it should. We never got robots to gather up and wash the dishes. Disappointment could be one reason science fiction is tough to sell these days. The science fiction — or SF — label has become “something of a liability,” according to the trade magazine Publishers Weekly.
Science fiction writer and publisher Robert J. Sawyer tells why in the same report: “Today’s world is in no way related to the visions SF was peddling in the last century.” Heroics in space made for incredible covers on the reams of science-fiction magazines that crammed the newsstands in the 1930 s and ’ 40 s: Amazing Stories, Thrilling Wonder Stories — and Planet Stories, full of “strange adventure on other worlds.” The covers showed spacemen with ray guns on Venus.
But we never got ray guns — never went on space patrol — and never could have squeezed into those skintight spacesuits, anyway.
Not every science-fiction future is a wish. We didn’t get the future of Harry Harrison’s novel, Make Room ! Make Room ! (1966 ), either, and just as well. The movie version, Soylent Green (1973 ), it told what’s for dinner in a world of dangerous overcrowding: “Soylent Green is people !” And not every future is seriously foreseeable. James Blish’s stories of Cities in Flight (from the 1950 s ) count to lift-off in the year 2018. Goodbye, Arkansas; hello, Alpha Centauri. But, gee... we can’t even wake up in George Jetson’s bed that popped him out like a toaster. What happened ? “Prediction never has been science fiction’s actual role,” science fiction author Joe Haldeman says from his home in Florida. “If it were, we’d be in real trouble, because not one in a 1, 000 predictions from SF has come true.” Haldeman told how to think up alien worlds when he spoke last fall at Hendrix College in Conway for the Hendrix-Murphy Foundation — and why science fiction matters. “Science fiction is about the present,” he says, “and to some extent the past.” The Forever War (1974 ), is Haldeman’s novel about timetraveling soldiers. Actually, it’s “a metaphor for the experience of Vietnam,” according to John Clute’s Science Fiction: The Illustrated Encyclopedia. The book won science fiction’s big awards, the Hugo and the Nebula. The Accidental Time Machine (2007 ) is Haldeman’s latest. The time hasn’t come for real time machines, but such things aren’t meant to be guarantees, he says. Science fiction “sometimes does take the form of ‘wishing for wonders to come, ’” Haldeman says, “but more often, it’s warning about dangers that may come. “ I don’t think that’s because SF writers are more pessimistic than other people. I think it’s because writing about utopias is boring, and you can’t make a living writing about boring things. Fiction is about danger, trouble, conflict.” But more and more of science fiction seems to be a downer. Wah ! “Perhaps. We live in darker times,” says Melko, of Ohio. He is south-central regional director for the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America.
Among the signs: William Gibson’s novel, Neuromancer (1984 ), predicted a future of ever-streaming electronic data. He called it cyberspace. Gibson was so far ahead of the time, ahead of computers — ahead of the Internet — he wrote the book on a typewriter. But he ponders a different tomorrow in a recent issue of Locus: The Magazine of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Field. What if space travel never happens, after all ? he wonders. What’s going to happen, instead, if everybody stays put ? The big issues he sees coming: farming, grain storage, sewers. New on DVD is the 25 th anniversary, supposedly final cut of Blade Runner (1982 ), the visionary movie that director Ridley Scott has been revising ever since it opened. The director also made Alien (1979 ). His last movie, though, is strictly grounded — last year’s gritty American Gangster. Why no more science fiction ? “There’s nothing really original,” he says on the movie review Web site rottentomatoes. com. The towering TWA Moonliner rocket was the centerpiece and symbol of the Tomorrowland section of Disneyland in 1955, when the park opened. The ride depicted a round trip to the moon, and it promised people would be making similar jaunts for real in the next 30 years. Today, not only the original red-striped, white rocket is long gone, but so is TWA / Trans World Airlines. Tomorrowland’s goal of a glimpse into the possible future has given way to the retro look of old science fiction. “Tomorrowland,” Haldeman says, “is more about propaganda for consumerism than it is about the actual future.” PATHETIC EARTHLINGS ! The 1939 New York World’s Fair (“ The World of Tomorrow” ) showed off such great changes to come, it made a kid named Carl Sagan decide to be a scientist. Visitors left wearing pins that read, “I have seen the future.” They had seen television, for one thing. But the fair’s predictions also included fantastic highway systems that never came to be, skyscrapers with lush green parks on top that nobody ever built, rockets that never flew, and a robot dog that never really followed a kid home. Year 2001 came and went: still no moon base like the one that looked so real in 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968 ). New year 2008 is one step for man into the 21 st century, but George and Jane Jetson — The Jetsons of the TV cartoon series (1962-63 ) — still haven’t set up house on a pole high above the clouds. “Our home food dispenser broke, and I had to wait 20 seconds at the check-out counter,” Jane says, a play on how much better even the humdrum would have been if the future had followed the script. Instead, the very thing once celebrated for 15 cents in the pages of Dynamic Science Stories — science — has worked to take the fun and frisson out of tomorrow’s expectations.
MARS ATTACKS Mars used to keep people up in the air — not just science fiction readers, everybody. The planet’s so-called canals (an illusion, it turns out ) led to speculation about Martian engineers, backed by astronomer Percival Lowell’s claim to have counted hundreds of intelligently designed waterways. “Martians Build Two Immense Canals in Two Years” was headline news in The New York Times, 1911. Why canals ? The Martians were thirsty. Why thirsty ? Their planet had gone dry. What else were they going to do about it ? “The bells you hear are ringing to warn people to evacuate the city as the Martians approach,” came the supposed news in Orson Welles’ radio version of H. G. Wells’ The War of the Worlds. Welles’ broadcast panicked the East Coast the night before Halloween, 1938. NASA’s space probes and landers finally showed what’s really up there, fourth rock from the sun. Not much. Rocks. Tiny traces of ancient bacteria, maybe. And a question: If the real Mars doesn’t have any Roman soldiers, green guys, Martian princesses, canals, tripod war machines or Uranium PU-36 Explosive Space Modulators... what’s to become of all that Martian make-believe ? Stephen Spielberg fudged the issue in his movie version of War of the Worlds (2005 ). The movie never claims the invaders are from Mars; they’re just — nasty. Bill Jones of Little Rock wrote the introduction to 2005 ’s reissue of Wells’ novel as a Classics Illustrated comic book. “Given the hold that the Mars of The War of the Worlds has had on us for more than a century,” he says, “I’d be willing to bet that the red planet has some metaphorical life in it yet.” The story never was much about the realities of Mars, he says. In Wells’ time, it was an allegory that “addressed public uneasiness about mounting German militarism, recent discoveries about the planet Mars, and the author’s own concerns about British colonialism.” Even now, it packs “the urgency of the stakes at issue — human survival — as well as the momentum of the narrative,” Jones says. “Who cares whether Mars can or cannot produce Martians with their tripods ? That’s not the point.” ROCKET SCIENCE In 1936, the movie Things to Come (also from a Wells novel ) predicted a “space gun” that would fire the first manned rocket. The story wound up with a challenge to the audience: “The universe or nothing — which shall it be ?” The space gun went pffft ! The question hasn’t changed. The future is out there.
“Several generations grew up with the notion that the future would be truly futuristic,” Jones says, “as if everyone by now would be driving flying cars and living in floating houses. But the future has always arrived incrementally, with powdered wigs and natural hair co-existing at the dawn of the 19 th century, and iPods and frozen pipes 200 years later.” And writers keep guessing.
Among them, Melko; his first novel, Singularity’s Ring, is due out in February. The book imagines a future in which 95 percent of humanity has left the earth.
“Science fiction rarely gets the future right,” he says, “and why would we want it to ? Science fiction is a thought experiment that builds a possible future and plays the ideas out to see what happens.” He expects “always some fantastical element to science fiction,” often a dash of wish fulfillment, and seldom any dead-on right predictions. “Heck, yes, I want to go to the moon,” he says. “And it’s fun to write those stories and pretend for a while. If they never happen, well, the next best thing is to pretend. And that is a valid role for science fiction.” GLASS SLIPPERS The science-fiction aisles of bookstores like Barnes & Noble and Books-A-Million in North Little Rock show a drift from future to fantasy, hard science to fairy tales. Fantasy novels top Locus ’ best-seller lists. Hard-science guy Haldeman tells the difference. “The main thing that separates science fiction from fantasy, and from most fiction in general, is that it values rationalism,” he says. “If that bores some people, well, there’s always the rest of the bookstore. “ A pessimist says the glass is half empty. “ An optimist says the glass is half full. “ A rationalist says the glass is the wrong size.”
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