NOTHING DATES LIKE THE FUTURE
The curse of science fiction writers is their lack of a functioning crystal ball, and the knowledge that predictions for the technology of the future will sound totally out of touch in the decades that follow. As a child growing up in the sixties I was led to believe we'd all have our own jetpacks by now....
I recently reread Isaac Asimov's Foundation trilogy, widely regarded as a seminal sci-fi work. Set several millennia into the future, when human beings have colonised the galaxy, and written in the early fifties, I first read it about twenty years after publication. I don't recall at the time thinking that any of the tech used in the stories was highly improbable. But this was well before the internet had achieved the ubiquity it has now, indeed most people had no contact with computers in their daily lives. Asimov's imagination still felt futuristic.
More than forty years later that view has changed dramatically. Data stored on tape? Nuclear power used for almost everything, even kitchen gadgets? Paper still a key means of disseminating information? The notion of 'the cloud' doesn't really appear. There are no touchscreens, and voice activation, now one of the fastest expanding technologies, plays only a minor role. Sixty five years on that future is already very, very dated.
But even more jarring than the scientific faux pas was the number of social attitudes that were stuck in their 1950s origins. Most characters smoked (but hey, they had atomic ashtrays....). Societies were ruled by hereditary monarchies, complete with the whole aristocracy thing - and democracy hardly gets a look in. Mind you, with some of the things going on in the world at the moment maybe that one isn't so far fetched.
But the most striking anomaly, that jumped off the pages time after time, was the position of women in this 'advanced' society. They cook. They do housework. They don't fight. They are 1950s homemaker woman spread across the galaxy. There are only two female protagonists of any significance. One is a fourteen year old schoolgirl, whose importance to events is in part accidental. And the nearest thing there is to a powerful female character is first introduced to the reader as "a young bride". Which says it all.
Oh, and not a single reference to anyone in the three books being from the LGBT community. It's a very straight galaxy.
We might not have those jetpacks, but at least our progress in social attitudes makes these predictions of the future look backward.
