a bunch of Arab terrorists tried to—get this—blow up the World Trade Center. Of course they failed ludicrously Terrorists usually did, except in very far away places. They were figures of fun: the bearded buffoons who jabber and squabble and shoot ineffectually in all directions in Back to the Future and a dozen other films. They couldn’t even take out a satirist: Salman Rushdie toured at will. The only modern terrorists to have effected serious damage and taken a significant number of lives on American soil, at that time, were all white male Americans. Specifically, Tim McVeigh in Oklahoma City and the FBI in Waco. (Forget the overhyped Unabomber: OJ had a higher body count.)
musicians and writers were optimistic. Recording music had just stopped requiring hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth of machinery and expertise; the sound quality of consumer playback had just reached perfect. Publishing books suddenly no longer absolutely necessitated printing twenty-five paper copies in the hope of selling one, and writing them no longer required a (shudder) typewriter. Now, by God, writers and musicians were finally going to make a few bucks.
the Internet was going to make us all filthy rich. ’Nuff said.
just about everyone on earth knew, in his or her bones, that the United States of America would never, under any circumstances, first-strike a weaker opponent. It had just proven it, by allowing the Soviet Union to surrender. Everyone knew John Wayne doesn’t hit first. Or if they didn’t know it, America damn well did.
the province of British Columbia still believed it had some sort of obligation to spend perfectly good money on hospitals, health care, nursing care, education, special ed, social services, family services, legal aid, police protection, infrastructure, public housing and a publicly accountable ferry system. It had not yet come to understand that the only proper uses of tax dollars are encouraging international sporting competitions and paying fines in Hawaii.
the Beatles had two new singles out, both terrific. More were possible.
the US seemed poised to legalize medical marijuana. Or more accurately, the individual states still entertained the delusion that they had the power to do so, merely because the Constitution said they did and their citizens voted for it.
you could board an airplane in under two hours, carrying a nail clipper.
there was, or at least seemed to be, so little that was real to worry about, we all had endless time to waste worrying about nothing at all. A millionaire murderer’s glove size. An ex-princess’s stupid death. Y2K. Anybody remember when our biggest fear was that at the stroke of midnight on January 1, 2000, our term papers would be lost, planes would fly into skyscrapers, Revenue Canada would forget how much money we owed it and, through an error on the part of his computer dating service, Michael Jackson would accidentally bring home an octogenarian?
We were living in the Golden Years, for a while there, and were too dumb to know it. Instead of appreciating it, savoring it, making sure that half a century of that kind of forward progress would continue, we took our finger off the number for a minute. We decided it was safe to coast. We yammered about the End of History and invented “reality TV.” We decided we could afford to let dimwits take the reins of power for a moment, just to shut them up. How much damage could they do?
I choose to believe that the true Golden Age lies always ahead of us, never behind. But some years it’s harder than others.
Futures We Never Dreamed
FIRST PRINTED AUGUST 1996
FUTURES THAT SCIENCE FICTION never dreamed of have come to pass.
Sf has never claimed to predict the future, mind you. That’s not its job. What most sf writers do is try to create plausible futures that will generate compelling stories. Even our implausible futures are plausible, sometimes. That is, even when we create a satirical future, one we don’t expect you to really believe—say, a world in which politicians are selected for intelligence—once we’ve set the original, wild-card ground rules, we tend to proceed with rigorous logic and internal consistency. We can’t help it; that’s our training.
Part of the theory is that a reader comfortable at adapting to unlikely-but-possible futures—for recreation—will be less disoriented by Future Shock in real life, and thus be a more intelligent voter and a happier citizen. But this only works if the imaginary futures make sense. Spending time in a cartoon universe, with rules that change as the author finds convenient, accomplishes little of use. So sf writers generally expend immense (and almost completely invisible) effort on making even our most improbable future worlds work logically.
One would think that after a century or so of this we would—quite incidentally—have produced quite a few startlingly accurate predictions by now. This turns out to be the case—and the case has been made elsewhere, and I do not propose to make it again here. Successful “prediction” by throwing darts is a trivial aspect of sf, one which can easily get in the way of understanding its true strengths and virtues.
What I’d like to talk about instead are some of the futures we sf writers could never have imagined—but that have come true.
The recent fuss about evidences of life on ancient Mars brings up the most obvious and appalling: in eighty-some years of commercial sf, not one writer ever predicted, even as a joke, that humanity would achieve the means to conquer space—and then throw it away. None of us guessed there might be raised up a generation so dull and dreamless they would not realize (or listen when they were told) that incalculable wealth, inexhaustible energy and unlimited adventure are hanging in the sky right over their heads, a mere two hundred miles away. We could never have conceived of a society that, faced with an imminent rain of soup, would throw away its pails.
A few years ago in Florida I saw and photographed perhaps the most transcendently sad, baffling, infuriating sight I have ever seen: an Apollo Program booster, one of two or three left in the world, one of the most stupendous devices ever built by free men…lying on its side on the ground, rusting in the rain. I wept along with the sky.
It is as if Ferdinand, informed of the discovery of the New World, were to have forbidden any more of his ships to sail beyond sight of land—“We’ve got urgent problems right here in Spain: we can’t go throwing money away in the ocean”—and no more sensible monarch could be found anywhere in Europe.
The next most obvious example: I don’t think one sf writer predicted the quiet collapse of the Soviet Union. Even the most liberal of us accepted without question the seeming truism that a slave state could never collapse until the last kulak was expended. Apparently with all our vaunted exploration of the behavior of alien cultures, we failed to do enough homework on one of the most prominent ones available for study on our own planet. In our defense, nearly every scrap of data permitted to leave the USSR was as suspect as they could make it—and even the spooks, privy to much more and better data than we were (and paid to specialize in it), were caught just as much by surprise. But it’s still embarrassing.
Many sf writers have hopefully predicted the eventual conquest of all diseases. But none of us could have dreamed that one day mankind’s oldest and deadliest scourge, the taker of more human lives than any other single cause—smallpox—would be eradicated from the planet, utterly and forever…and that the event would arouse no notice at all. Did they have a party on your block when the last smallpox vaccines were destroyed awhile back? Was there a parade in your town, honoring the heroes and heroines who avenged millions of our tortured, disfigured and slain ancestors? Are you familiar with their current efforts to do the same for polio, chickenpox, diphtheria and other diseases?
Several sf writers foresaw the VCR. Not one of us ever guessed that by the time it arrived, a sizable fraction of the populace would feel incompetent to operate one. We still have trouble grasping that there are people with shoes on who find it a challenge to set a watch, twice, and specify a channel number. Even harder is understanding why some of them seem proud of it.
I haven’t checked, but I’m sure at least some sf writer predicted the
disposable lighter—and that none ever envisioned a feature mandated by law which would make them virtually useless for senior citizens, musicians and invalids, while perfectly accessible to toddlers.
Nor could any of the thousands of us who foresaw computers, or even the dozens who foresaw personal computers, have guessed that in the end an operating system that Spoke Human would be supplanted by one that required you to learn to Speak Computer.
Being logical folks, perhaps we tend to be interested in and think about and write about other logical folks—so all of us, save Robert Heinlein himself, failed to see the Crazy Years coming.
Evil’s Rootkiller, or Brother, can you spare a paradigm?
FIRST PRINTED NOVEMBER 2000
ONCE THIS PLANET WAS OWNED jointly by Portugal and Spain.
Most Terrans did not know that at the time—but it was true, nonetheless. My source is literally infallible. In 1494, Pope Alexander VI drew a line across a map, and declared with the authority of God that this side belonged to Spain and that side to Portugal. No, really.
And Alexander’s ruling was effective. If you’ve ever wondered why Brazilians speak Portuguese, that’s why: Brazil happened to lie on that side of the Papal Perimeter. Spain had Columbus and conquistadores, Portugal had great navigators, and together they divvied up the incalculable wealth of the New World. So today Spain and Portugal are the two most powerful nations on earth, their mighty economies the bedrock of western commerce, their languages spoken by all civ—
Oops.
What happened? Half a millennium later, the former co-rulers of Earth are second rate powers, at best. What ruined them? War? Plague? Intrigue?
Money.
Specifically, all those shiploads of treasure you’ve read about in a hundred books, seen in a dozen movies. Gold. Silver. Emeralds. Sure, lots ended up on the bottom of the ocean—but all too much made it home. Spain and Portugal were suddenly rich…
Unfortunately, they were rich in money, not wealth.
Gold is not wealth. Gold is what you use to buy wealth. Wealth is desired consumables. Corn. Wheat. Iron ore. Potable water. Arable land convenient to a market. Stuff you couldn’t ship across the Atlantic, at least in the sixteenth century.
The two Iberian superpowers got tons of new money, but almost no real new wealth. Economics 101: too many pesetas and escudos chasing too few potatoes is a recipe for disaster. Massive inflation, balance of trade collapse, currency devaluation: both economies went to hell and stayed there. Too much money can actually destroy wealth.
So turn it around. What happens to money…if the supply of wealth should suddenly become infinite?
Time to start thinking about it. There is a new and utterly astounding prospect on the horizon called nanotechnology. It involves Very Tiny Machines which move individual atoms around in order to build things the same way nature does: molecule by molecule. At viral speeds. If nanotechnology works even half as well as its advocates hope—and so far, all the signs are good—we may have near-infinite wealth sometime within the coming century. And if it comes, it will come all at once.
I know: early nuclear power enthusiasts once promised “energy too cheap to meter.” This is fundamentally different—by many orders of magnitude. Nanotechnology hopes to produce objects that basically grow themselves, out of free parts.
If it works, the day I finish programming a “stem cell” nanoassembler to make, say, yachts on command, the effective cost of such a yacht plunges to zero—everywhere.
I can send that assembler seed’s instruction-set to Tasmania instantly and cheaply, the same way I filed this column: over the Internet. Load that set into an invisibly tiny, self-replicating assembler there, and it will make free yachts from random Tasmanian atoms just as easily as mine does from Canadian atoms. All God’s chillun got atoms…
Sooner or later, the same will apply to absolutely any commodity which can be made from molecules. Everything humans buy or sell except original art, sex and other personal services, in other words.
We’ll all be Totally Rich. There will simply be too much wealth to steal. Want it to literally rain soup? No problem—how about a whiskey shower for dessert? If all those Porsches are cluttering your lawn, tell them to disassemble themselves. As for real estate, by God we will make more—as much as we want!
Money is basically a scheme for keeping score in a presumed zero-sum game. We collect it to protect ourselves from famine or other scarcity. It exists only because scarcity exists. Once we’re all infinitely rich, there will be no real use for the stuff. We’ll have to quit the habit of trading work for what we want: there simply won’t be enough work to go around. (For awhile, programming various skills into nanoassemblers, or designing new products, will constitute useful work…but these are clearly finite tasks, and ones which people capable of them will probably do for the fun and prestige of it.)
If you think the dawn of the Information Age has been disorienting, wait’ll you see the Age of Plenty. In the last century, humanity has slowly and painfully begun weaning itself from imperialism, genocide, racism, slavery, religious tyranny…hell, we’ve even begun trying to stop abusing our own spouses and children. But wait until we have to give up money.
And all those funky things that grow in the damp shadows beneath it. Class structure. Snobbery. Poverty as social control. Income as proof of character. Wealth as license to misbehave. Many of the truly hateful things about the world-as-it-presently-is, if not most of them, derive from scarcity. And before the end of the century, we might just run plumb out of the stuff.
I suspect we’ll find the conquest of Death far less traumatic than the death of Money. Science fiction has often imagined long life, but seldom universal wealth. And as with any profound change, it’s the transition period that’ll be the worst. Some of the most profoundly sick people our species ever produced—those addicted to pushing other people around—will be forced into mental health for want of victims…and they’ll go kicking and screaming. It’ll be worse than all the junkies in history going into withdrawal at once. How will the Donald Trumps of tomorrow prove their superior worth, majesty and importance without cash for a codpiece? What if ruthlessness and avarice themselves became obsolete, pointless?
Closer to home, how will we persuade other people to perform services (like making up interesting stories) for us—if not by simply waving money, universal irresistible catnip, under their noses? Well…I think we’re just going to have to try asking them nicely. Or devoting a little thought to what they might want or need, and performing some service for them.
The Golden Rule, they called that…way back in the twentieth century, when anyone but electrical engineers still cared about gold.
Plus ça Change
FIRST PRINTED MAY 1997
FOR SOME TIME NOW, it has been getting harder to dream a dream that isn’t apt to up and come true on you—forcing you to live with all its new complications and implications, which once could have been safely left for your grandchildren to worry about.
Isaac Asimov used to say that when his father was born, man had not yet left the surface of the Earth in powered flight; when Isaac’s father died there were footprints on the Moon and color video cameras halfway to Saturn. Progress has certainly been progressing, and perhaps you agree with the cat who, after making love to a skunk, said, “I reckon I’ve enjoyed about as much of this as I can stand.”
But oddly, the picture becomes brighter the further ahead you look. Focus past the immediate future, the next administration—gaze from the science fiction writer’s stance at the near future, the next generation or so—and things improve somewhat.
If you worry that accelerating future shock may make you a Stranger in a Strange Land, allow me to reassure you. Let me tell you about the familiar, bedrock universals that will carry over into any world of tomorrow, reminding you of the world you know now. Every so-called “law of nature” is vulnerable to new and better observations, save one.
I’ll bet cas
h on it: Murphy’s Law will outlive thee and me.
For instance:
If tickets become available in your lifetime for regular passenger service to Luna, or Mars, or Titan, you can reliably expect that the seats will be too cramped for a scarecrow, the in-trajectory movie will be one you have already seen and hated, the food will be tasteless and toxic and the coffee will qualify as an industrial solvent. The flight you wanted will be overbooked, and you’ll never see your luggage again. And parking anywhere near the spaceport will cost more than the trip.
Similarly, if vacation paradises are built in orbit during your lifetime, you will find them full of the wrong kind of people, infested with tourists rather than thoughtful travelers like yourself. Everything will be mercilessly overpriced, including air. If your hotel is in “luxurious free fall,” you will need bellhops not only to handle your luggage, but to handle you; they and all resort employees will customarily be found floating a few feet distant, one hand drifting your way, palm upward (relative to you). Be certain to tip the air steward adequately. The plumbing will be indescribably barbaric and give you at least one disease unknown to your doctor at home. The promised “romantic spacewalk” will consist of fifteen minutes in something very like a coffin with arms, with plumbing that makes the stuff inboard look good. Half the photos you snap will be spoiled when you forget to keep the Sun out of frame; the rest will be ruined by cosmic rays. The entertainment will probably be truly spectacular, but the drinks will cost two weeks’ pay apiece, and their essential recipe will be two parts hydrogen to one part oxygen. Upon re-entry, you will sprain something, and when you land a horde of sadistic customs inspectors will gleefully insult you, confiscate your souvenirs, subject you to something like a full-body CAT scan with unshielded equipment, stick a hundred needles into you and fog any surviving film. Then you’ll get home to find out that (as Tom Waits said) everything in your refrigerator has turned into a science project, the water was left running in the bathroom and your next-door neighbors had a much better time at the Luna City Hilton for half the money.
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