Re: Oldest SF not necessarily most dated?

Steven L. wrote:

> 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.

_Tends_ to be, yes -- but not all of it is.  Some writers pick up on
trends which others don't notice (which, of course, may be as illusory
as the Martian canals.)  Some are contrarians.  Some work off their
hopes and/or fears.

 
> 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.



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Dan Goodman
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