Science fiction: Light years ahead of fact

Posted on 25 Sep 2008 at 11:32

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Our expectations of today have been shaped by predictions in the past. Stewart Mitchell looks back on those visions of the future, and compares science fiction with fact.

During the last century, science fiction (sci-fi) writers, inspired by the sudden acceleration in technological progress, prophesised ever more fanciful visions of how the world would change. Sometimes they got it right. They predicted space travel, pocket computers, mobile phones, gene therapy and - to a certain extent - the internet.

The best example of sci-fi accuracy is Arthur C Clarke's outrageous foreseeing of a network of geostationary satellites for telecommunications relays. He described the concept in a paper titled 'Extra-Terrestrial Relays - Can Rocket Stations Give Worldwide Radio Coverage?', which was published in Wireless World magazine in 1945. While the Bell Labs team that put the concept into practice claim to have come up with the idea on its own, such was the detail in Clarke's work that many people credit him with the idea.

Clarke got it spectacularly wrong sometimes, though. We haven't seriously considered spot welding the earth's tectonic plates together, as suggested in Richter 10, to stop an earthquake separating California from mainland United States. 2001 came and went, but life hardly resembles the classic Space Odyssey.

The idealised future of 1960s shows such as The Jetsons, which projected family life into the future, remains tantalisingly out of reach. When was the last time you saw a flying car cruising your high-rise metropolis, or packed an ageing relative into cold storage for cryogenic suspension? We are still no closer to time travel, we have little chance of mastering teleportation and we haven't even managed to build a robot that can unload a dishwasher.

Mind the gap

Space travel is perhaps the biggest letdown. Filled with the enthusiasm that fired man to the moon, creative types dreamed of more extreme missions further into the final frontier, but expeditions were held back by lack of suitable fuels and funding. The distance between the feasible and the achievable remains vast.

Films such as Blade Runner highlight the conundrum concerning fact and fantasy. The design ethos is accurate, but much of the hardware misses the mark. "You can see sci-fi's influence in everything from the design of mobile phones and the sleek chrome and black finishes on consumer goods to the architecture of modern skyscrapers," says Martin McGrath of the British Science Fiction Association and editor of Focus, the BSFA magazine. Cities such as Shanghai are looking more like Blade Runner every day - except for the flying cars.

Is this anomaly the fault of sci-fi writers, or technologists who can't keep up with the dreams presented by visionary minds? "Lots of sci-fi writers don't view their work as prediction. It's about telling stories about society, which they can't do in the here and now," says Graham Sleight, editor of the Science Fiction Foundation's journal. "They'll use as much science as they have to, but prediction is a mug's game."

Indeed, Sleight claims that, far from trying to presage new technology, sci-fi writers are using a futuristic setting as an outlet to explore important technical issues. "Often sci-fi gives people a platform to explore not only the technologies, but also the ethics, possibilities and impacts. A new wave of writers, such as Cory Doctorow for example, are questioning the fact that technology is putting too much power in the hands of too few, and how terrorism is leading us into surveillance states," he says.