Re: Oldest SF not necessarily most dated?

ilya2@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
 wrote:
> While all SF from 30's, 40's and 50's is dated in obvious ways, it is
> 1970's SF I find most jarringly dated. One example is John Varley's
> "Titan". Granted, one dated trope is technological -- 7-person
> space****p arriving at Saturn apparently without a single unmanned
> probe preceding, -- but what strikes me most is the very "1970's feel"
> to the book. Free love and widespread drugs. Everyone on board the
> ****p sleeps with everyone else (in series, not at once) except for two
> clones who are in an exclusive *****uous lesbian relation****p (that's
> a mouthful!) -- and *NASA is described as prudish*! Apparently because
> NASA prefers the above facts not to be known to public. And if you
> think that streches the belief, cocaine is not only legal, but is
> allowed on board. I doubt any publisher today would touch such a book
> with a ten-foot pole for that reason alone.
> 
> Greg Benford's "Into the Ocean of Night" was also written in 1970's,
> takes place in 1999, and to me is equally jarring. Chronic shortages
> of oil and clean water, famines in India, three-corner marriages taken
> for granted, etc.
> 
> Does anyone else feel the same way?

Sure.
SF, by its very nature, tends to be based on *current trends* in science 
and technology and their implications for social trends.  An author 
looks at where society *appears* to be headed, and then he sort of 
extrapolates that way into the future.

For example, in the 1960's, the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. were in a furious 
"manned space race."  Therefore, many SF stories of that era assumed 
that pace would continue so that by the 21st century, we and the Soviets 
would be well on the way toward manned exploration and colonization of 
the solar system. Which turned out to be wrong.

Much, maybe most, SF has this theme, "If Present Trends Continue...."

Unfortunately, present trends do *NOT* always continue.  Often they 
reverse, sometimes in a sudden crash:  The U.S.-U.S.S.R. "space race" 
did not continue--it ended.  The Cold War and arms race didn't continue 
till World War III broke out--the U.S.S.R. just collapsed without firing 
a shot.  Computers didn't get bigger and bigger, requiring liquid helium 
coolant as some SF writers had assumed; instead the silicon chip and 
microprocessor were invented, and computers suddenly got a whole lot 
smaller and cheaper.  Population doesn't continue to exponentiate till 
we all starve like in "Soylent Green"; once a society reaches a certain 
level of affluence, its birth rate can decline even below replacement 
levels.  And so on.

SF tends not to deal with sudden reversals or paradigm ****fts like this. 
  First, they're unpredictable.  Second, writing stories about a major 
quantum jump doesn't serve the author's purpose:  During the Cold War, 
the point of writing stories about a future global thermonuclear war was 
to sound an antiwar theme.  What would have been the point of writing a 
story in which the Soviet Union just collapses peacefully?  It would 
have been dismissed as unrealistic and pointless--during the Cold War, 
we couldn't just sit around and hope for the Soviet Union to collapse, 
any more than we could have just hoped for a meteorite to hit the 
Kremlin from outer space.

SF is notoriously poor at predicting social revolutions.  And yet over 
periods of a century, it's the revolutions, not the slow and steady 
accretion along linear trends, that make history.


-- 
Steven L.
Email:  sdlitvin@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
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