Old SF

[woodwardiocom]

I'm currently reading David Brin's Earth which is a fine disaster novel (though it's so green and crunchy you'd think Capn' Crunch had a kid with a leprechaun). It was written around 1990, and makes a valiant effort to predict what the future of the Internet will look like. As with all such novels from around 1990, it's wrong in ways both funny and annoying.

Now, "wrong predicitions" are hardly a new thing in SF. Back prior to 1965 or so the entire future of humanity in space was a constant thing in SF, and all those spaceships-built-in-backyards and moonbases-by-1999 didn't happen. And yet, those failed predictions do not become annoying when I go back and reread them, since they're so darn optimistic. They are a future-slash-present I would like to live in.

Whereas, the false Internets, from Gibsonian cyberspace to Brin's ferret programs, are rarely optimistic, and when they are, the reality has made them trite: Yes, we have shared virtual hallucinations, but we use them to play World of Warcraft, not to do real work.

(Or it might be just me. I have a soft spot for Golden Age SF the size of an elephant's fontanel, but I judge "modern" SF more harshly.)

Comments

[stakebait.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I think it might just be you, because I'm the other way around. I really dislike 90 percent of Golden Age SF, to the point where it almost chased me away from the genre entirely. I cannot handle the overt sexism and sometimes racism and the disappearing of everyone else.

Its not that I blame the authors exactly, they were creatures of their times, as am I, and god knows what I'm not seeing. And as you say, wrong predictions are nothing unusual.

But the casual assumption that the straight white protestant male would rule the roost forever and ever, down to under the sea and out to the stars... well, to me they feel like dystopias that think they are utopias, which I find much creepier than worlds where the characters and author would agree with me that they're screwed up.

I would loathe to live in that future/present. I like to think I would be leading the revolution, but probably I would just be taking Valium and thinking it was my fault that I wasn't satisfied to stay home and nag while my husband herded asteroids and my son built a rocket in the backyard, and my daughter pined for a boy who could build a rocket in HIS back yard, because she wants an adventure but she's not allowed one of her own.

I know, of course, that that's not the part of it that you meant you wanted to live in at all. But I can't separate it. To me the bigotry is the taproot of the optimism, a world that lets a young white male believe he can do anything he dreams of all by himself or with a close friend or two is only possible if hidden Epsilons or house elves are doing the hard group and infrastructure work of it somewhere out of sight.

[woodwardiocom.livejournal.com]

My soft spot does not prevent me from recognizing that John Campbell's sexism and bigotry did, and is continuing to do, a lot of damage to the SF genre.

(I actually moderated a "John Campbell — Threat Or Menace?" panel at Arisia a few years back...)