Predicting the Future of Science Fiction

With its roots in the horror genre, it is perhaps no surprise that science fiction often tends to the dystopian and the pessimistic, ringing warning notes about the future and the ways we might use (or misuse) technology.  The element of prediction, though, is a common denominator throughout science fiction, whether optimistic or pessimistic about the future (or the present), or perhaps extrapolation would be a better term.  HG Wells and Jules Verne, the grandfathers of science fiction, both tapped into this idea of extrapolation to take what was currently known about the world, about science and physics, and make guesses about what the world might look like in the future.  Sometimes those guesses were dramatically off, while at other times they were startlingly prescient, such as From the Earth to the Moon, which has remarkable similarities to the Apollo moon missions that wouldn’t happen for another century.

During the first Space Age, science fiction as a distinct genre truly emerged into its own space.  It took scientific concepts and brought them to a fruition on the page that they could not yet achieve in the laboratory or the factory, oftentimes predicting or presaging advances that would become commonplace in later decades.  The original Star Trek, for instance, predicted an internet-like database accessible remotely long before computers were anywhere close to sufficiently capable for such networking, and its voice-interactive computers are arguably the inspiration behind most of our current voice-activated technologies.  The series’ transporter technology, based on a crazy idea about quantum teleportation, was viewed at the time as preposterous, while today we’ve used the same principle to teleport individual particles in laboratories.

Nor is Star Trek the only example, not by far.  Science fiction today, though, is lacking some of that imagination about what the future might hold.  It’s like we’re so confident that we know enough about how the universe works to extrapolate everything that’s possible that everything in science fiction is really just more versions of what we already have: better computers, more complex AI, bigger space stations, and so forth.  Aside from being more pessimistic about the future, modern science fiction seems to be less about asking “what if,” than about asking merely “what?”

Where are the AI-sentient spacecraft crewed symbiotically with humans to explore the galaxy?  Where are the FTL drives based on singularities or the silicon-based aliens living on rogue planets that have no host star?  Science fiction isn’t supposed to just be established science – it’s supposed to be fiction, too.  It’s supposed to explore the boundaries of our knowledge and examine that which we only suspect or that we only think we know. True hard science fiction, like Foundation, Heavy Planet, Rocheworld, Ringworld, or Inherit the Stars show a sliver of the genre’s power and potential.

Until we overcome that hubris, that sense that we have the answers, I fear that science fiction will remain merely derivative, giving us more of what we already have without exploring new concepts and pushing the boundaries of our understanding.  Given science fiction’s historic impact on actual science and engineering, that matters for more than storytelling and interesting books to read; it suggests that we don’t have a clear version of how to make the future different from the present, of how to alter the trajectory our world is taking from an inevitable path based on its current state.  If we don’t have a vision for the future, the future might never arrive.