WHIZZ-BANG and on-line—it’s the year 2000 and suddenly the future’s
sexy. Our newspapers and TV screens are full of scientists and futurologists
extrapolating the trends of the past five minutes into predictions for the whole
century. Of course the only certainty is that they’ll be wrong. Just look at
what the great writers of the golden age of science fiction thought the world
would look like in 2000.
Let’s start with Arthur C. Clarke, whose 2001: A Space Odyssey
(1968) was precisely dated and full of technical detail. At first glance, his
novel hasn’t worn well: the Moon doesn’t yet house 1700 people in a “familiar
environment of typewriters, office computers, girl assistants, wall charts and
ringing telephones”. HAL, the sinister, self-conscious mainframe, is
probably as far from reality now as it was in 1968. Nor have we found a way of
freezing astronauts and bringing them back to life. But let’s not be too hard on
the inventor of the communications satellite. Clarke’s space technology is still
believable—more so because the Stanley Kubrick movie of the same name
eschewed the usual cop-out of “artificial gravity”. If we really wanted to go to
the outer planets we would do so in spaceships looking something like the
centripetal ring of Clarke’s Discovery.
Clarke’s real triumph was to have a stab at predicting the consumer
electronics revolution. The head of the US space agency in 2001 owns a plastic,
all-purpose credit card, a home video recorder and an answering machine, and is
pursued by a reporter carrying a miniature TV camera. In the 1960s, these were
about as far-fetched as alien monoliths on the Moon. This was where most sci-fi
prophets of the golden age tripped up. The most spectacular example is a 1955
short story called “Tieline” in the magazine Astounding Science Fiction,
in which a starship flies across the galaxy to deliver an exciting cargo: “a
recorder and 50 tapes”.
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The author, Eric Frank Russell, was more interested in humanity than gizmos,
and his work is the greater for it. But classic sci-fi made two standard social
extrapolations: overpopulation and totalitarianism. Clarke predicted (correctly)
a population of 6 billion by 2001, with the consequence that even the US
suffered “meatless days”. Even to optimists of the golden age, the year 2000
looked a pretty totalitarian place. Clarke takes for granted the government’s
ability to impose a news blackout on contact with aliens.
Robert Heinlein takes the vision to its logical conclusion in Starship
Troopers (1960). This interplanetary Mein Kampf celebrates the
saving of “civilisation” at the close of the 20th century by a band of
ex-servicemen who string up anyone whose face doesn’t fit. I suspect, however,
that sci-fi totalitarianism has less to do with political philosophy than with
Hollywood wardrobe departments. The standard way of setting a scene from the
21st century was to dress the cast in identical utilitarian overalls of
artificial fibre. A glance around the streets of London’s Soho or Tokyo’s
Shinjuku shows how they couldn’t have got the 21st century more wrong.
And what about all that Orwellian rubbish about 24-hour video surveillance
and “a boot stamped on a human face—forever”? Hmm . . . perhaps we are
living in The Future after all. The scary bit is, we seem to like it.
