My favourite Heinlein prediction is the "Shipstone" from Friday - an energy storage device that packs "more kilowatt-hours into a smaller space and a smaller mass than any other engineer had ever dreamed of. To call it an "improved storage battery" (as some early accounts did) is like calling an H-bomb an "improved firecracker."
In the novel, the Shipstone's eponymous inventor realised "that the problem was not a shortage of energy but lay in the transporting of energy. Energy is everywhere—in sunlight, in wind, in mountain streams, in temperature gradients of all sorts wherever found, in coal, in fossil oil, in radioactive ores, in green growing things. Especially in ocean depths and in outer space energy is free for the taking in amounts lavish beyond all human comprehension.
"Those who spoke of "energy scarcity" and of "conserving energy" simply did not understand the situation. The sky was "raining soup"; what was needed was a bucket in which to carry it."
I really hope this is what Elon Musk is working on next.
Categorizing Heinlein and Clarke as "modern" is a bit unfair to the current crop of SciFi authors, In my view. Authors like Iain M. Banks, Stephen Baxter and Peter F. Hamilton (all Brits, coincidentally) go way beyond anything Heinlein and Clarke ever came up with. This is not to belittle the accomplishments or significance of either of them, of course, but limiting your scope to those two disregards the tremendous changes in the SciFi field in the last, say, 25 years or so.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diaspora_(novel) - this book was as mind blowing to me as Anathem, and bears multiple readings. I've fallen out of scifi in the last few years, and Egan has sucked me back in.
If you haven't read it, the Gap series by Stephen R. Donaldson is really worth a read (though walking around in Donaldson's head for 5 books can make you want to take a shower later).
The Golden Age trilogy by John C. Wright also makes lots of interesting and thought provoking predictions. It's an astonishingly dense read though, but the ideas will continue to unfold in your mind for a long time afterwards.
Banks and Hamilton seem a little to close to "Magic" vs scifi IMO. Basicly, plot driven technobabble vs. a look at reasonable possibilities. Ex: A culture knife missile has a rediculusly wide range of weapons with little thought as to why you would use A vs B. Hamiltons first series is about a psychic and his second revolves around ghosts in space causing a zombie apocalypse.
Though if you have a good counter example I am interested.
I'm not sure what you expect of scifi; the same can be said of Heinlein and Clarke (maybe Heinlein a bit more than Clarke).
Night's Dawn (Hamilton's second trilogy) was pretty well done in that respect if you ask me. Sure, the premise is far-fetched, but the background and technology was pretty compelling in my view. Hamilton clearly has a grasp of orbital mechanics, for example. And you gotta admit you would _love_ to get a set of Neural Nanonics installed :).
I don't know, but I just can't fathom classifying Banks and Hamilton as anything other than hard scifi.
"Interplanetary exploration and exploitation" - in that case, exploration started long before 1995. We had Viking on Mars in the 1970s. On the other hand, we have no interplanetary exploitation worth talking about, and there are no colonies on Venus which would have rebelled. Nor one on Antarctica. So Heinlein was either too pessimistic or (much more likely) too optimistic.
"Antipodes rocket service" is not close. "Antipodes service" means non-stop service to the other side of the world. Concorde didn't use rockets and required several refuellings to get that far.
"Rise of religious fanaticism" Is there any time since that prediction was made that it wasn't true? The Christian right (in Heinlein's construction, they would be religious fanatics though not as severe as Nehemiah Scudder) has been influential in US politics since the 1970s, and managed to take over most state GOP membership by 2000.
"Commercial steroptics" too is a tricky one. There have been a number of 3D movies (red-green and polarized), including red-green 3D shows broadcast on TV. In the 1990s the place I worked at had 3D shutter glasses in order to visualize protein structures, and I saw an autostereoscopic laptop about 10 years ago. These were all from companies, so qualify as "commercial".
Why does then does "3D TV, Oculus Rift" count as particularly notable, other than being what there is now? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3D_television says "As of late 2013 the number of 3D TV viewers started to decline in popularity" and points out that "In July 2013 the BBC announced that it would be indefinitely suspending 3D programming due to a lack of uptake" and "In 2013, in the US, ESPN 3D was shut down due to lack of demand, followed by Xfinity 3D and all DirecTV 3D programming in 2014."
For that matter, "Also in May 1997, ABC had a special line-up of shows that showcased specific scenes in 3D. The shows included Home Improvement, Spin City, The Drew Carey Show, Ellen, Family Matters, Step by Step, Sabrina, The Teenage Witch, and America's Funniest Home Videos."
These suggest that there have been several phases where people believe there is a commercial market for 'steroptics', push it on the hopes of developing such a market, and then finding that it's a lot smaller than they had hoped. It may be that Oculus Rift is the first to crack the problem, that hasn't been established, and there are other head mounted displays stretching out decades before it, including the VR crazy of the 1990s.
He explicitly stated that this is not a chart of the future, but a chart of a future, as in this could happen but is not a prediction. For example, the religious fanaticism one sort of matches but he was talking about the democracy in the US being replaced by theocracy. That is thankfully not close to happening (I know, I know, money, politics, religion, etc. but we are nt sending virgins to New Jerusalim).
"The general bacteriophage which has so nearly eliminated disease caused by pathogenic micro-organisms on Earth was found capable of a subtle modification which made it potent against the analogous but different diseases of Venus. The hungry fungi were another matter."
Yes, at the time there was still occasional thought about using bacteriophages as treatment for all sorts of infections, but interest more or less died out when antibiotics turned out to be so awesome: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phage_therapy
What I find interesting about science fiction is how difficult it is to predict technological progress consistently across different types of technology.
For example, in The Moon is a Harsh Mistress (written in 1966, set in 2075), space travel and colonization is much more advanced than it is in 2014. Artificial intelligence is also far superior. But digital electronics and computer networking are much more primitive. A portable audio recorder has only an hour or two capacity, and it transmits data by playing the audio sped up through the telephone. PCs don't appear to exist, and computer monitors and terminals are rare. There doesn't appear to be cellular phones or an equivalent. And there's no Internet. An AI system reads books with a scanner and a robotic page-turner.
"There's no internet" is a rather damning accusation that can be made of practically every sci fi story written up until there was actually internet! And even then, they generally didn't anticipate just how much it would change our lives. Stories set hundreds of years in the future contain computer usage patterns that look primitive within five years of when they're written. Amazing!
I think that in itself is a commentary on just how big a deal the internet is, historically speaking.
I think the classic tropes of science fiction are a product of the era in which they are written:
Starships must have seemed inevitable in a culture that witnessed the aerospace industry progress from its first powered flight to landing on the moon in a few decades.
Androids as stock material and fodder for stories about race issues must surely have come from a culture that didn't see their programming as the hard or interesting part of the question. Now that we know how hard it is, stories set decades in the future are a lot more conservative about how relatable the AIs end up being, what they can do, how human they really are.
The cyberpunk tropes of lone hackers and underground teams outmaneuvering corporations and governments seem to me like a big reflection of the hobbyist PC revolution of the 80s and 90s. They seem quaint now, though.
I found Brin's Existence really refreshing on this front -- the predictions and tropes seem based on looking at technology of today and extrapolating from that. I really enjoyed it!
> I think that in itself is a commentary on just how big a deal the internet is, historically speaking.
I think it's also a testament to how history is sometimes dominated by paradigm shifts rather than gradual change. Sci-fi writers seem reasonably competent at predicting future technology when that technology changes gradually.
> I found Brin's Existence really refreshing on this front -- the predictions and tropes seem based on looking at technology of today and extrapolating from that. I really enjoyed it!
So based on the rest of your post, give it 5 years and you'll find the predictions disappointingly dated.
I think that's mainly because of the incredibly remarkable developments in computer technology.
Since 1966 most industries have seen technological improvements of one or two orders of magnitude, if that. 7% economic growth compounded over 50 years is a growth by factor of 30x.
Data storage per $ has increased by a whopping 8 orders of magnitude, or a factor of 100 million.
Meanwhile, FLOPS/$ has increased by about 11 orders of magnitude, or a factor of 100 BILLION.
That scifi writers were able to get even close to modern technology is amazing. Of course, don't forget that as late as 15 years ago, portable audio players did only have an hour or two of capacity.
I think that has to do with the fact that one discovery or invention leads to a cascade of others. And upon those, yet more cascades of discoveries and inventions.
It's as if technological and scientific advancement was a genome, it's very difficult to predict how it would branch out from a single mutation yielding many new families along the way.
In stranger in a strange land he predicted the waterbed, something which didn't appear until a few years later, in 1968.
> Charles Hall, who brought a waterbed design to the United States Patent Office, was refused a patent on the grounds that Heinlein's descriptions in Stranger and another novel, Double Star (1956), constituted prior art.
While I get that Heinlein may have intended to make genuine predictions...
"Heinlein carefully points out that all good science fiction writers tell a story first and prophesy second, using arguably the greatest of them all, H.G. Wells, as an example."
There's something I really dislike about evaluating science fiction as prediction in general.
A work of fiction can't be right or wrong, just more or less similar. Flying cars and geopolitics in the year 2000 are no more right or wrong than the color of imagined character's eyes.
H.G. Wells differed from Jules Verne in that he was more inclined to let his fantasy loose.
The Frenchman actually criticized him for it:
We do not proceed in the same manner.
It occurs to me that his stories do not repose on very scientific bases.
No, there is no rapport between his work and mine.
I make use of physics.
He invents.
And yet Wells, bold as he was, was often right (predicting laser, for example).
The irony is that one of Jules Verne's best known works is a physically-impossible Journey to the Centre of the Earth, whilst one of Wells' best known works conceives tactical nuclear weapons, radioactive waste on battlefields and MUAD before the structure of the atom was properly understood, and once the neutron was discovered a couple of decades later was acknowledged as an influence on Szilard's thinking when he actually identified the potential for a functioning atom bomb...
His utopias are horribly woolly, but for prediction Wells has few equals
>> Among other predictions, he stated that war [with the Russians] was inevitable; suggested we all build bomb shelters; and be prepared to shoot our grasshopper neighbors who would want in at the last minute.
In “The Roads Must Roll" Heinlein postulates a set of roofed conveyors, equipped with variable speed strips, that run long distances across the country. A person rides the 'roads' by getting on a slow strip at the edge and transferring (by walking) to strips of increasing speed; the center one rolls at 100 miles an hour. It’s a bold concept, conceived ten years before the rapid development of commercial air traffic and the Interstate highway system.
That's 1959. Herbert George Wells came up with this exact idea a few decades earlier (in "When the Sleeper Wakes").
It made sense in The Caves of Steel, written several years before by Asimov, at the much smaller scale of an indoor city. On an interstate scale it honestly seems goofy and inefficient.
More inefficient than using an engine rated at ~ 25% efficiency to propel thousands of pounds of steel, glass, and plastic to transport a single person?
> More inefficient than using an engine rated at ~ 25% efficiency to propel thousands of pounds of steel, glass, and plastic to transport a single person?
Sure, as you're moving a lot more material per person (and even if the engine is more efficient, upright humans aren't optimally aerodynamic -- or even as good of an approximation as typical cards -- so end to end efficiency is still going to be a problem.)
I'm surprised this doesn't mention Blowups Happen and Solution Unsatisfactory, involving a nuclear power plant and the development of nuclear weapons, respectively. They were both published in 1940. Two years later, the first nuclear reactor was made, and the Manhattan project started. After three more years, the first atom bomb was detonated at the Trinity site in New Mexico.
In the novel, the Shipstone's eponymous inventor realised "that the problem was not a shortage of energy but lay in the transporting of energy. Energy is everywhere—in sunlight, in wind, in mountain streams, in temperature gradients of all sorts wherever found, in coal, in fossil oil, in radioactive ores, in green growing things. Especially in ocean depths and in outer space energy is free for the taking in amounts lavish beyond all human comprehension.
"Those who spoke of "energy scarcity" and of "conserving energy" simply did not understand the situation. The sky was "raining soup"; what was needed was a bucket in which to carry it."
I really hope this is what Elon Musk is working on next.