The April 2012 issue of Popular Mechanics has an article/editorial by Glenn Harlan Reynolds that is *disturbingly* familiar. I was flipping through the issue today while waiting for the Wal-Mart pharmacy to do their thing when I came across an article illustrated as if it were a mid-1950’s sci-fi “juvenile,” and starts off with the line:
THE FUTURE ISN’T WHAT IT USED TO BE.
SCIENCE FICTION USED TO BE ABOUT BOLD ENGINEERING. SO WAS AMERICA.
Mr. Reynolds makes much the same points I’ve been trying to make, and hopefully he’s done it better. The thrust of the article is that the pace of meaningful technological progress has slowed at the same time that science fiction has become far less inspiring. Some damned good points:
“We can’t Facebook our way out of the current economic status quo”
“There was some moment in the late ’60s and ’70s when people thought we had enough tech”
we’ve lost “speed of implementation” – “you can roll out a new social media platform or an iPhone app in a hurry, but do Twitter and Angry Birds improve lives the way rural electrification did?”
“We’ve given people new ways to communicate but nothing worth saying.”
“Facebook probably won’t save us from economic stagnation; it certainly won’t save us from an asteroid.”
“The golden age approach is just more inspiring.”
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It may be a chicken-and-egg thing – which came first, the end of inspiring sci-fi, or the end of inspiring reality. But the fact remains they are both currently largely absent. Go into a the kids section of a book store and *try* to find some science fiction. You’ll find instead a boatload of fantasy: wizards and vampires and werewolves and whatnot. Entertaining, no doubt, but nothing that can be achieved, nothing to strive for… and nothing to truly inspire. There are no Big Projects in aerospace these days, and little to no modern science fiction that would inspire kids. So, with nothing to inspire kids into aerospace, why would the go into aerospace? There are buckets of fortunes to be made in social media and software; almost nobody gets rich off of aerospace – and some of us get dirt poor off of aerospace. So with a culture as basically shallow as our, it is not surprising that those who might have educated themselves so that they could conquer the spacelanes now educate themselves to create the next Twitter.
Mr. Reynolds encountered a whole lot of pessimism in interviewing people – Neal Stephenson, Vernor Vinge – for his article, but maintained a level of optimism. A list of “bold and optimistic” science fiction, from Golden Age to today, is included. A few things it seems I may need to look up.