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| 2001, A Space Odyssey |
As I discussed in
a previous post, scientists are often wrong when they predict the future of
science. Science fiction writers make mistakes too, especially when they are trying
to predict technical advances. Consider the film 2001, A Space
Odyssey, which got wrong almost all the developments
proposed for that year. Fourteen years after the date in the title, we still
don’t have a base on the moon, manned spaceships to Jupiter, artificial
intelligence, or humans in hibernation.
We should remember Asimov’s third law of futurics, which states that predicting the social consequences of future scientific
progress is more important than accurately predicting that progress.
A SF story predicting cars, but not the parking problem, would not have been a good
SF story.
In 1941, before Asimov formulated this law, Robert Heinlein correctly
applied it in his short story Solution
Unsatisfactory, which predicted the
Manhattan Project, the atomic bomb, its use to end World War II and the
subsequent nuclear stalemate between the great powers. Not bad, as an example
of what you can do in a well-built science fiction story.
