Gonna be the future soon...

May 30, 2009 10:54

CNN, in a fit of myopia, wants to know Why our science fiction future fizzledThis makes me wonder who the hell is supposed to be writing for CNN these days. I'm too cheap to buy an iPhone, so I have to settle for having the sum of human knowledge accessible on my laptop, rather than actually in my pants. My cellphone admittedly doesn't talk to ( Read more... )

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crouchback May 30 2009, 17:15:43 UTC
We certainly are-but the things that most golden age SF was written about (space travel, life on other planets, harmonious and well ordered societies) are what people think they were promised (and they're not too far off either-we had a President who promised the world freedom from fear and want, after all).

I don't think the world of Star Trek is ever going to appear (it posits a humanity freed from the downside of human nature without, somehow, losing its humanity).

You can theoretically have the sum total of human knowledge in a size smaller than a playing card, to be sure (the reality is, as so often, a bit different from the theory). But I must say, I understand the disappointment of people who grew up with an image of the future where they'd be able to go to Alpha Centuari at FTL speeds, or visit their kids in the colony on Olympus Mons, and are instead living in a future where technology has made navel gazing and self-obsession possible at a scale never before imagined-only transmittable at sublight speeds-and where we've basically decided that space travel is for robots. (Watching pictures transmitted by those robots while sitting on your couch in front of a view screen not too far from what the Golden Age of SF featured is apparently the proper role for human beings.)

I'm personally nervous that we are, in fact, heading towards the future postulated in a work written in 1909.

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mrf_arch May 31 2009, 15:18:07 UTC
We certainly are-but the things that most golden age SF was written about (space travel, life on other planets, harmonious and well ordered societies) are what people think they were promised

Mmm. Of course, being promised a harmonious society with no work required should make anyone with two brain cells to rub together a bit nervous...

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keyne June 1 2009, 03:20:41 UTC
I don't think the world of Star Trek is ever going to appear (it posits a humanity freed from the downside of human nature without, somehow, losing its humanity).

This is why I'm a Star Wars fan instead. Give humanity a hyperdrive, let it spread out through a galaxy interacting with various alien species ... and see human nature operate just as it always has.

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