People always seem to focus on the things science fiction writers include in the stories of the future.
Someone, I think it may have been Asimov, but it might have been Heinlein or one of the other big names of that era, said that these are the least important things that science fiction writers predict.
What is important, he said, was not the gadgets of the future, but how they change us. Predicting ubiquitous robots or personal jetpacks would be like a writer in 1880 predicting cars replacing horses.
Sure, cars replacing horses is interesting...but what is important is predicting what the increased speed and range of cars over horses would do to everyday life. What do cars do to teen and young adult dating habits, for instance? With a car it is much easier to arrange a quick hook up with someone away from the prying eyes of your parents. That could have big ramifications.
The future is more than just the present with nicer gadgets.
Great science fiction keeps the technology in the background and simply uses it to further the story.
But excellent science fiction makes the plot so believable that the tech just seems natural. My go-to example of such sci-fi is Solaris. I think it's much harder to achieve this in a single novel because it's typically less annoying to the reader when exposition is spread over multiple novels.
Examples of the former (in my opinion): Ender series, The Forever War, Xenogenesis series, Contact, Nexus.
Examples of the latter: Red Rising, Foundation, The Expanse, Three Body series, Ghost in the Shell (Japanese manga).
My favorite sci-fi and fantasy books are those that come up with a world different from ours and then take that difference and explore its effects on society. I'd like to offer some examples:
- "Hello Summer, Goodbye" by Michael Coney
- "Oryx and Crake" by Margaret Atwood (the first book in the Maddaddam trilogy)
- "The Fifth Season" by N. K. Jemisin (the first book in the Broken Earth trilogy)
- "The Mechanical" by Ian Tregillis (the first book in the Alchemy Wars trilogy)
- "Nexus" by Ramez Naam (the first book in the Nexus trilogy)
- "Snow Crash" by Neal Stephenson
- "Pandora's Star" by Peter F. Hamilton (part of the Commonwealth Saga)
- "Hyperion" and "Fall of Hyperion" by Dan Simmons
Hyperion was intriguing but Fall of Hyperion was too slow for my tastes.
Snowcrash was great. One of my favorite audiobook narrations too!
You might also like Malazan Book of the Fallen and Discworld. Malazan especially is a masterpiece of world and history building.
Oh, and the Ghost in the Shell series would definitely be a great fit for you. A good start would be the original animated film from the mid-90s. If you enjoy that, jump to the anime Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex.
I thought "Pandora's Star" did a poor job of exploring the effects on society. For a culture that is 350 or so years in the future, it felt remarkably like the 20th century, and in some cases 20th century suburbia.
Part of the reason is that several of the main characters are from the 20th century. I rolled my eyes when one of the characters, when starting up a plane, said something like "atomic batteries to power; turbines to speed. ... I've been waiting a long time to say that."
"Altered Carbon" is a great book and a mediocre TV show, precisely because the book explores the effect of its fictional technology on society, whereas the TV show mostly focuses on shiny visuals. I wholeheartedly recommend the book to anyone interested in exploring what our society might look like if we were to achieve our dreams of immortality.
I found E M Forster’s novella “The Machine Stops” in the same league as the above: it is about the human condition, and technology is just a setup to talk about that.
I first read Asimov's stories about robots when I was in elementary school. I loved them so much -- especially the ones with Dr. Susan Calvin -- but it took me years and years to realize that the whole point of the Three Laws of Robotics was to explore and even showcase how they can't possibly work. In my opinion, it takes a special kind of genius to write like that.
This has the feel of having been written by an impressionable 20-something. In 1988, predicting "One essential thing would be a screen on which you could display things, and another essential part would be a printing mechanism on which things could be printed for you. And you’ll have to have a keyboard on which you ask your questions’ although ideally I would like to see one that could be activated by voice," was if anything badly retro. Everything he mentions there except voice control was already a standard consumer product in 1988! And voice control was how the computers in Star Trek worked 20 years earlier.
From 1964: "Complete lunches and dinners, with the food semiprepared, will be stored in the freezer until ready for processing. I suspect, though, that even in 2014 it will still be advisable to have a small corner in the kitchen unit where the more individual meals can be prepared by hand, especially when company is coming." Frozen TV dinners were a decade old when he wrote that. And they don't even vaguely dominate the food market today in the way he suggests they will. (If anything the big differences between 1964 and today are much greater availability of fresh foods and eating out being much more common.)
EVERYONE predicted video-phones back in the 60s -- hell, the Jetsons cartoon beat him to the punch there by a couple of years! Generally, people predicted they would be common much earlier than they actually were, and no one predicted you'd carry them around in your pocket -- or be more likely to just text a message than to use them.
For my money the most interesting predictions here are the ones where he predicts things will go more slowly than most people at the time thought -- for instance, predicting man will have not walked on Mars in 2014 was surprisingly conservative for an SF writer in 1964, but it was also dead right.
It doesn't sound like the article is claiming he's Nostradamus, just paying some homage. Half of the people on this site, including myself, have likely been influenced by his writings. His ideas and claims weren't all "original", but, yes, he probably has helped shape technology given the number of people he's influenced and inspired.
>In 1988, predicting "One essential thing would be a screen on which you could display things, and another essential part would be a printing mechanism on which things could be printed for you. And you’ll have to have a keyboard on which you ask your questions’ although ideally I would like to see one that could be activated by voice," was if anything badly retro.
But to be fair, the idea/concept of the Multivac and of the "home" terminal" (at least for accredited scientists) was present in Asimov's stories long before 1988, this is 1959:
Now, to be a little conspirationist, it could be possible that he foresaw that the Internet (as we know it today) may become a very large government controlled computer ... ...accessible only by a selected minority ...
Murray Leinster's 1946 short story "A Logic Named Joe" (quoting Wikipedia) "is particularly noteworthy as a prediction of massively networked personal computers and their drawbacks, written at a time when computing was in its infancy. The story's narrator is a "logic repairman" nicknamed Ducky. A "logic" is a computer-like device described as looking "like a vision receiver used to, only it's got keys instead of dials and you punch the keys for what you wanna get"."
With respect to accessing information, the big "fail" in a lot of science fiction of that general era is this assumption that the information source would be this curated centralized repository--Encyclopedia Galactica in Asimov's case but also see Niven/Pournelle Oath of Fealty, etc. Instead we have Wikipedia, the web more broadly, etc. You see this assumption of centralization, world government, etc. in a lot of other SF contexts as well.
Virtually all big science/tech projects from early 20th century were state sponsored, so it was difficult for SF writers to imagine a future where important innovation might come from the private sector or emerge from large scale decentralized contributions. Frankly, this is still large true today if you consider that lots of modern stuff comes from tech companies that are becoming as rich and powerful as small nation states, so they can spare a few billions in basic research with long-term or uncertain ROI.
And to be fair with Asimov, he saw some of that for example with "U.S.Robotics", a fictitious private company that invented the positronic brain and had a monopoly on that business. Also, his Encyclopedia Galactica is the creation of a large group of "encyclopedists" who are basically academic elites, something we could see as a Wikipedia-like except that it wasn't produced by millions of joe schmoes but rather by a kind of priesthood of professional intellectuals. (Foundation makes these people work in a centralized organization, but that happens in a late period of the galactic empire, it's my impression that the origins of the Encyclopedia are way more descentralized.)
Oh. I'm not faulting him. When he wrote his books, organizational models were dominated by strict hierarchies whether government or assembly line-type manufacturing companies. Even more collaborative academic research tended to be dominated by big corporate labs and elite research universities. The average person never interacted with mainframe computers directly and information flow was largely mass market broadcast.
Absent any existing examples, the effects brought about by the modern Internet, smartphones, collaborative open source software development, generally less rigid organizational hierarchies, etc. would have been very difficult to visualize. Indeed it would have seemed almost alien.
That's the influence of modernism, which was big at that time. Very much into rule by experts who applied precise, rational judgments to help or manage society. SF is still the last bastion of modernism especially in hard SF, but I think the Vietnam war was the death knell for the idea of it in culture, and the New Wave in SF for it in SF.
> For my money the most interesting predictions here are the ones where he predicts things will go more slowly than most people at the time thought -- for instance, predicting man will have not walked on Mars in 2014 was surprisingly conservative for an SF writer in 1964, but it was also dead right.
Too right. Hell, it's been nearly 50 years since the last Moon landing, and it's looking very unlikely we'll see that happen within the next few years.
I have read almost all of Asimov's Sci-Fi and I think this is article also is a little grandiose. We right now have better computer technology than most of what we find in Asimov's Foundations Series. Example, he thought books wouldn't be read as much because with computers you only could read words as they scroll across to the right. He thought displays would stay at one line of LCD display. The Kindle is much better than the books from a million years in the future.
Asimov also wrote the satire "The Holmes-Ginsbook Device" [1] about reading on screens in the future. I give that short story to all my friends that buy a kindle.
FYI: Asimov was in the news recently because SpaceX chose the first three books from his Foundation Trilogy to launch into trans-Mars orbit aboard the first Falcon Heavy.
As far as I'm concerned, there are only three books: the original trilogy that he wrote in the 1940s. The sequels he wrote in the 80s have no where near the charm or interest. They were written to capture the money from those who fondly remember the original. I started reading Foundation's Edge and quickly gave it up. I never bothered with the others.
The sequels are definitely weaker, but still worth reading. I enjoyed Prelude to Foundation. I disliked Foundation's Edge because I didn't agree with the fate of mankind as envisioned by Asimov :/
While the accuracy of the quoted prediction is uncanny, I would be interested in reading Asimov's other, less accurate predictions. Those are usually quite amusing - or sometimes sad, depending on how you feel about humanity putting focus on wrong things.
Afaik those predictions relate mostly to nuclear power (main source power in the Foundation trilogy), from the article linked in the post among others:
The appliances of 2014 will have no electric cords, of course, for they will be powered by long- lived batteries running on radioisotopes. The isotopes will not be expensive for they will be by- products of the fission-power plants which, by 2014, will be supplying well over half the power needs of humanity. But once the isotype batteries are used up they will be disposed of only through authorized agents of the manufacturer.
There are several other failures from the 50 years in the future piece for the World's Fair:
> Jets of compressed air will also lift land vehicles off the highways, which, among other things, will minimize paving problems. Smooth earth or level lawns will do as well as pavements. Bridges will also be of less importance, since cars will be capable of crossing water on their jets, though local ordinances will discourage the practice.
> you will be able to reach someone at the moon colonies
> Most surprising and, in some ways, heartening, 2014 will see a good beginning made in the colonization of the continental shelves. Underwater housing will have its attractions to those who like water sports, and will undoubtedly encourage the more efficient exploitation of ocean resources, both food and mineral. General Motors shows, in its 1964 exhibit, the model of an underwater hotel of what might be called mouth-watering luxury. The 2014 World's Fair will have exhibits showing cities in the deep sea with bathyscaphe liners carrying men and supplies across and into the abyss.
Hah. Interesting that he predicted large scale solar PV deployments too. (In my mind, that's an even more impressive prediction given the state/cost of PV tech in the 60's).
Even more interesting, I would say (though who knows) this power mix he predicted (nuclear + solar) will be much closer to what we end up with on Mars, which he also made predictions about.
No, he didn't. You are reading too much into his prediction because you know the outcome. He wrote:
"Large solar-power stations will also be in operation in a number of desert and semi-desert areas -- Arizona, the Negev, Kazakhstan."
There's nothing in the prediction which implies that the solar power would be based on PV. I think there's a higher likelihood he was thinking of heliostats.
Solar One, a solar thermal power plant built in Mojave Desert, produced 10MW of electricity back in the 1980s.
> I think there's a higher likelihood he was thinking of heliostats.
You mean CSP? Why do you think that? Silicon PV was available in the 1960's and widely used in the space program. It's been around for longer than the first CSP plant that was built 4 years after Asimov made his predictions in 1964. [1]
Because solar power is older than that CSP. For example, Mouchot's work on solar power in the the 1870s - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Augustin_Mouchot#Solar_researc... . His machine generated steam that could be used for mechanical power. At that point it's trivial to produce electricity. It just won't be cheap electricity.
In 1941 Asimov wrote the short story "Reason", which took place in a solar power satellite which beamed power down to Earth. He at this time wasn't thinking about PV, because it didn't meaningfully exist, and the story only talks about a "converter". (The station is also a mile across, and in solar orbit.)
There's another SF book I read, probably written in the 1950s, about building such a power plant in Earth orbit. It used a mirror to heat up material in its focus to generate power. (One of the side plots of the story was that some TV show was being filmed on the construction site, and the lead actor, in a space suit, almost drifted through the invisible focus.) This is why I'm sure that SF at the time didn't say that solar power stations had to be PV.
That booklet predicts PV use for the future. (It's also where I learned specifically about Mouchot's work.) In the 1980s he know the cost of PV power was growing ever cheaper.
What it doesn't answer is what Asimov thought in the 1960s.
He might simply have left it open, as he did in "Reason".
So, I could be wrong about my belief. But it's surely not obvious that Asimov is specifically predicting PV over other possibilities that he reasonably know about.
I don't think that argument holds water. There are no radioisotopes which fit that requirement.
The closest is 238Pu, which is most commonly used in RTGs, but also in a few pacemakers.
A fridge pulls about 60W, so let's say the battery needs to supply 80W on average (assume some heavy-duty capacitors to smooth things out). Wikipedia says that the power density of 238Pu is 0.54 watts per gram.
That's about 150 grams of 238Pu per household. http://ne.oregonstate.edu/rebuilding-supply-pu-238 says 238Pu costs roughly $8 million per kilogram. If we can reduce that by 100x then that's still $12,000.
It seems like it's cheaper to have things hooked up to a power grid, with batteries for those short times that grid power doesn't work, than to use radioisotopes.
My response was that there are two options: 1) discover a radioisotope we don't know about, or 2) find some way to reduce the price by a factor of 1,000.
The thing is, we know all of the radioisotopes now, at least, all with a lifespan measured in years and which can be made on macroscopic scales.
Thus, it can't be #1. (Or, which alternative do you think is better?)
Are you proposing that it's #2? If so, why do you think a factor of 1,000 in cost savings is possible?
One way to make 238Pu is to start with spent nuclear fuel. If we had enough spent nuclear fuel to make batteries for every household, we would have had far more nuclear power in the first place.
Yes, certainly it's possible that we would have had something like a Mr. Fusion by now if there hadn't been the public resistance towards nuclear power. But it's much more likely that it's only a fantasy.
And if it is a fantasy then your argument falsely maligns anti-nuclear advocates by making them responsible for something which was never going to happen.
The best that you can argue is that it's been slowed down. However, there is a strong need for 238Pu in RTGs, and the US, Russia (and the Soviet Union before it) and other countries produce 238Pu. Hundreds of millions of dollars are available for RTG development.
(Why? Because the Navy, CIA, NSA, and no doubt others need dense power sources, have used RTGs, including in top-secret surveillance like tapping undersea cables.)
We know that there are no other possibilities than the handful of radioisotopes that might be an RTG. We also know that the production levels needed to put RTGs in every household would be much more expensive than using the same production methods (mostly nuclear reactors) to generate electricity and deliver it directly to the home.
If you continue to blame anti-nuclear activists for something which is not their fault, then people are going to disregard your viewpoints.
I am not blaming anyone for anything I am saying that it could be argued that because of the anti nuclear protests which lead to much lest investments in this field which can be a reason why we don't see these things. Even if we take out that part the point still stands. There is a whole world of things we didn't get to explore because of the strong anti-sentiment towards nuclear.
Whether we would get a 1000 cost saving we don't know who know how other things would have developed if we had abundant and clean nuclear.
I will let people decide if they want to do disregard my view or not, don't need you to be the judge of that.
With the same "it could be argued" logic, it could be argued that the anti-nuclear protests mean we don't have more cures for cancer, that we don't have colonies on the Moon, that we wouldn't have global warming, that we haven't landed people on Mars, and that we don't have flying cars.
Basically, it posits a fantastic alternative to reality then places the blame for not achieving them on the anti-nuclear protestors, even though in reality there are many better arguments for why those would not have been achieved by now even had there been no reduction in nuclear research.
Moreover, it ignores the problems that might have arisen had, say, Project Orion been green-lighted to launch Mars Probe One.
If you check the original article, the vast majority of his predictions is widely off the mark. This article is rather dishonest in trying to single out a few excerpts, even out of context, to paint a different picture.
I love Asimov, but he predicted so many things that some ended true, some didn't. It feels like people only see the bright side, and I understand why, but come on, he said unrealistic things too, that were an extrapolation from life in the 60s rather than an accurate prediction.
That being said, long live Isaac Asimov work, your books are amazing!
No one ever mentions the 0th law, which was probably the most important, at least in the books.
Almost finished reading the entire Robot/Empire/Foundation series. That “I, Robot” movie was garbage; absolutely nothing to do with the Robot series.
Just finished The Currents of Space. Pretty depressing, that (probably) 10k years in the future, humans are still exploiting each other. Asimov probably has it spot on.
> That “I, Robot” movie was garbage; absolutely nothing to do with the Robot series
Indeed. Wasn't the rumor that "I, Robot" was originally a script called "Hardwired" (or something like that), and that the Asimov-specific elements were pasted on top of it at the last minute? Regardless, the movie is trash and goes pretty much against the spirit of all Asimov ever wrote :/
I started binge reading Asimov's books in that order as well and I share you sentiments. I guess that I liked the robot series more than Foundation since the characters were more relatable.
Reminds me of ["The Machine Stops"][1] by E.M. Forster from 1909 that, from what I remember, was even more uncanny in how it predicted social media and whatnot.
The predictions of the internet in 1988 were hardly prophetic, since there were already global computer networks in place at the time. Clarke predicted the iphone in 1976 with the 'minisec' in "Imperial Earth". Hogan predicted the internet in "The Genesis Machine" in 1978.
His influence on robotics has been mostly negative, although the mechanism has been mostly journalistic stupidity. The "three laws" could never be implemented in hardware, they were just rules about how to make stories. "Suppose robots followed these. What would happen?" His answer was that they would quietly take over the world and keep us as pets. Because nothing like them could be implemented, there was no predictive value.
The actual outcome, without laws and with corporations standing in for the robots, is that we are livestock and vermin, according to individual usefulness and accidents of birth.
> His answer was that they would quietly take over the world and keep us as pets
That wasn't Asimov's answer, outside a few atypical robots-as-a-menace stories. Even the Zeroth Law cannot be misconstrued as "keeping humans as pets" :)
Why couldn't they be implemented in hardware? Through the whole Robot series he describes them as "potentials" summing to force a decision, and even the self-conceived 0th law takes precedence, though not for G.R. It's obvious the positronic brain isn't based on logic, rather an analog brain with trillions of "pathways" that can be "frozen" and never re-started (as you would a program). There isn't even a concept of finite data storage. D.O. doesn't know how long it will take to fill up his brain, though he records everything and can't forget it. SPOILER: Though in the end of the Foundation series, we have some clues.
The laws don't have any objective interpretation. What exactly is "harm" from a mathematical point of view? This is good for storytelling, because it let Asimov write stories about robots behaving in strange ways, and the protagonists struggling to figure out how it made sense as a possible interpretation of the laws, but it's no good for actually building robots.
A few of his stories were explicitly exploring how these three laws were simplifications used to explain the system to a layperson, and exploring the cases where this difference was important.
He didn't shape much at all. Asimov was the literal definition of a hack; he churned out writings more or less nonstop, and most of his work is nonfiction and forgotten in time. His science fiction in general wasn't particularly that good, and he's more of a prototype of Michael Crichton when you consider his fiction; both managed to seize on a single idea that was striking, but were unable to go beyond that idea with the rest of their output.
I read him growing up, too, even his David Starr and Norby books, and he never really caught my attention. Gordon R. Dickson's Dorsai Saga is a much better version of the Foundation books, and for all of the love of the Three Laws of Robotics, they really just were devices for science fiction versions of locked room mysteries.
How is his stuff hard science? He made up the positronic brain, and his whole psychohistory was just absurd; if anything, the idea of a brilliant cabal of scientists and technicians using psychohistory to predict the future is just dressed up witchcraft than real science. Stuff like Nightfall is just embarrassing.
Most of his science output was in a bunch of nonfiction books that I'm not even sure are still in print, and he had a rep for churning out books on every subject at lightning speed, rather than for great insight.
Dorsai and Dickson's stuff had issues too, but he was much better at writing people as well as ideas, and he's had a longer, better overall career at writing science fiction and fantasy. Asimov was probably the first household name writer, but really needs to be viewed a lot more critically then the fandom does.
"Most of his science output was in a bunch of nonfiction books that I'm not even sure are still in print, and he had a rep for churning out books on every subject at lightning speed, rather than for great insight."
The Intelligent Man's Guide to Science (now called Asimov's New Guide To Science) was and is still very highly regarded.
"His science fiction in general wasn't particularly that good"
I think you have to consider it in context, and compare it to other SF at the time.
There's a reason why he was one of the "Big Three" of that time, and why Foundation series and his Nightfall novelette were acclaimed so highly.
I can't stand reading Edgar Rice Burroughs, but I can tell that SF fans in the early to mid-20th century thought he was great. I think Dune is simplistic in how it portrays ecosystems and economies, but I recognize that it was the book which really got people to start taking those ideas serious when writing SF.
You'll note that both have been turned into movies, as have several of Asimov's works, so it's not like he's mediocre.
But yes, Asimov wrote with a mid-20th century viewpoint, which dates the material. (Just like early Niven has such a 1970s/Los Angeles viewpoint.[0]) And here we are, post-New Wave, post-cyperpunk, even post-space-opera-revival. Our views have changed, and we now have different expectations and higher standards.
In his non-fiction works, I quite enjoyed the broad coverage in "Asimov's Guide to Science".
[0] Consider that "Puppeteers" comes because on the human ship which met them there was "a camp revival of the ancient Time for Beany TV show featuring Cecil the Sea-Sick Sea Serpent." Compare to Cordwainer Smith, whose works, I think, are not so easily dated.
Interesting. You seem quite well-read in science fiction. Could I ask you (or anyone) for some recommendations, as someone who rates the Dune and Foundation series highly?
My SF knowledge is quite dated. I've read little in the last 20 years, and SF has changed yet again during that time. Moreover, I've changed, and realized that too much of the SF I read was white male nerd escapism.
(As a Heinlein fan, I really enjoyed Varley's "Red Thunder", written as an homage to Heinlein's juvenile series. There's a scene where the disgraced former astronaut is talking with the family of one of the teens, to convince them that it's okay for him to be on the experimental rocket. The teen's mother is a single parent, and the grandmother is was a Cuban refugee who crossed the Florida Straight in a makeshift boat. It's the grandmother who used her history to convince the mother that it was okay.
This scene mirrors one from Heinlein's "Rocketship Galileo", where the esteemed nuclear physicist visits the mother and father of one of the teens, and the mother draws on the family history where her great-grandparents as teenagers crossed the country on a Conestoga wagon.
The Heinlein one draws on standard American patriotism. I read the Varley version as a commentary that that courage isn't limited to the (primarily white European) people who colonized the American west.)
Okay, that long parenthetical note aside, perhaps you would like David Brin's Uplift Saga series. I didn't like Sundiver that much, but "Startide Rising" and "The Uplift War" have elements which feel like Dune and the Foundation series.
For more modern SF, you may be interested in Ian M. Banks' Culture series. That isn't much like Dune or Foundation, but it is well-written, complex, thoughtful, and full of interesting ideas. (Edit: I see cde-v mentioned Banks an hour ago.)
Someone, I think it may have been Asimov, but it might have been Heinlein or one of the other big names of that era, said that these are the least important things that science fiction writers predict.
What is important, he said, was not the gadgets of the future, but how they change us. Predicting ubiquitous robots or personal jetpacks would be like a writer in 1880 predicting cars replacing horses.
Sure, cars replacing horses is interesting...but what is important is predicting what the increased speed and range of cars over horses would do to everyday life. What do cars do to teen and young adult dating habits, for instance? With a car it is much easier to arrange a quick hook up with someone away from the prying eyes of your parents. That could have big ramifications.
The future is more than just the present with nicer gadgets.