Science-fiction writers, myself included, were using a straight exponential trend curve, also a conservative one, and predicted generally that space flight might be achieved around 1975, and that we might land on the Moon or travel to Mars around the turn of the century.
If you really understand trend curves, you can extrapolate them into the future and discover some baffling things. The speed trend curve alone predicts that manned vehicles will be able to achieve near-infinite speeds by 1982, and I would not want to bet that I have not been too conservative in extrapolating the curve! It may be sooner. But the curve becomes asymptotic by 1982.
The trouble with a trend curve is that it may tell you quite accurately what to expect, but it doesn’t tell you how it is going to happen. I have no idea how we are going to achieve near-infinite speed (or near-infinite acceleration). The curve simply goes asymptotic.
If this is really the case, a true scientific breakthrough of major importance must be in the offing in the next twenty years. The breakthrough itself will probably be within the next few years. It takes time to go from theory and experimental hardware to practical engineering devices, although the trend curves show that this time cycle is getting shorter all the time, too. We can’t know how long the development cycle will be because we have no idea what the concept or theory entails at this time. But, with cybernetic computers, improved management techniques, and the benefit of centuries of accumulated knowledge and technique, you can bet that the development cycle will be much shorter than it was for the airplane or even the ballistic missile.
What does this mean to us as human beings and, especially, to science-fiction editors, writers, readers, and fans? Answer: plenty of entertaining speculation.
Suppose we get a new space drive within the next few years. What will be the consequences? What will be the impact of this upon the world political situation if it is discovered in America? In Russia? In Switzerland? In Spain? What is going to happen to a space exploration program built around rocket engines?
Suppose it is a true anti-gravity machine; what’s going to happen to the chief helicopter designer at Offwego Aircraft Company?
This is downright serious stuff, not fantasy, because the trend curve says that something is going to happen. Consideration of all the varied aspects of this is a proper, legitimate, and professed job for science-fiction. It is the only medium of communication by which this can truly be considered in advance,. Get busy; something’s going to happen damned soon to keep the speed curve rising.
The speed curve isn’t the only one that is going up fast. All trend curves are now rising rapidly, and all of them go asymptotic before 2000 a.d. Here are a few of them, plus some things to think about:
1. Life expectancy is increasing, and this trend curve indicates that anyone born after the year 2000 a.d. lives forever, barring accidents. Recent Russian biological work indicates how this may be achieved, but regardless of the method what are the implications? Should my grandson buy life insurance or accident insurance? In fact, what is going to happen to the life insurance business? How will all of this affect the practice of medicine, and how will the medical arts be changed as a result of the knowledge that permits longevity? Heinlein tackled one aspect of this in “Methuselah’s Children,” but what are some of the other aspects of the problem? If a man can live for a thousand years, does this make interstellar travel at sub-light speeds practical? And how much can a man learn in a thousand years?
2. Population is rising rapidly, and early in the Twenty-first Century there isn’t enough room on the planet Earth for everybody. This curve shows no more signs of leveling off than the other trend curves do, so we cannot take the easy way out via starvation, birth control, or mass destruction, because those things are apparently not in the cards when other trend curves are also considered. Can we export people to other worlds fast enough? Isaac Asimov says we can’t, and Dandridge M. Cole says we can... and both can back up their arguments with calculations. Or is this curve, in connection with other curves, simply telling us to expect an event of major cosmic significance in the next fifty years? If so, what?
3. Historical cycles are getting shorter. Rome rose and fell in about eight centuries, the lifetimes of many men. The British Empire came apart in a matter of years, not centuries. A cultural cycle today is about twenty years long. Soon, we can expect to see several major cultural changes in one life span. This is probably due to the improvement of rapid communication and transportation devices. All right: what are the effects of this upon the individual human being? How adaptable must a man be to withstand this? What sort of a successful human being is likely to result from adaptation to rapid cultural change?
4. The trend curve for controllable energy is rising rapidly. The richest baron of feudal times did not control the same amount of energy in his human serfs and slaves as you have at your command beneath the hood of your automobile. The advent of controlled nuclear energy has boosted that curve even more. It is highly probable that controlled fusion has been achieved in the laboratory and will become commercial within a matter of years, thereby kicking the curve up to an even higher level. By 1981, this trend curve shows that a single man will have available under his control the amount of energy equivalent to that generated by the entire sun. To use an energy source, you must have an energy sink; you must have some place to dissipate the energy in performing work. What are we going to do with this much energy? How are we going to use it? How will this alter our way of life? What can we do then that we can’t do now because we don’t have the energy sources? Unless a man has the proper training, we presently deny him the use of certain forms of packaged high energy such as explosives, nuclear reactors, and highspeed vehicles; what kind of training must a man have before he is allowed to use the energy of a star?
5. The number of circuits in cybernetic devices is increasing on the familiar trend curve. The human brain has an estimated four billion neural circuits. By 1970, computer engineers may have achieved the same number of circuits in a digital computer; they may do this by building one large computer or by slaving many smaller computers together by data links as they have already started to do. The speed of digital computers is quite high, and they are getting faster all the time. What are the logical consequences of this? Will these machines think? Will they repair themselves? Will we finally achieve the ability with these machines to handle problems with extremely large numbers of variables, problems which cannot presently be solved? What problems? Will these machines be used in the manner of Ken Crossen’s SOCIAC, or will we put them to work as tools to help us solve the riddles of biochemistry and psychology? By building complex machines of this type, will we gain a better understanding of our own mental processes, and, if so, what are the consequences? Assume that mankind will not allow itself to be replaced by its own machines, and then consider what steps mankind must take to achieve a dynamic, viable solution to this problem.
6. The amount of knowledge that must be assimilated by our young people before they are equipped to earn a livelihood is also increasing on the super-exponential trend curve along with the curve representing the total accumulated knowledge of the human race. People used to spend only a few years in school learning the three R’s. Now, they must spend at least 12 years in school... or 16 and more if they desire to enter a profession. Question: Must we therefore spend more and more of our lives in school, or have we already reached the point where we must both study and work during our entire lives if we are to keep up with our own field of endeavor? What must we do to our educational system to cope with this? This is more serious than the growing shortage of classroom space and teachers, because there will always be a shortage of these two items from now on; we can’t catch up. But the amount we must learn continues to increase. What sort of educational system can be designed to cope with this?
All of these trend areas have been touched by science-fiction, mostly in a cursory and incomplete fashion, and mostly by extrapolating a single curve to
its ultimate limit without consideration of the other curves. In writing such stories, the authors have allowed one factor to advance while everything else stood still. This isn’t the case. All the trends are upward, not just one of them, and any yarn based on a single curve without consideration of the others results in an unrealistic extrapolation toward a non-viable future state of affairs. But writers continue to make this mistake, and competent scientists and managers make the same one when they attempt to chart the future on the basis of extrapolation. In research management or science-fiction writing, one must consider every possible factor, weighing each as to its importance and recognizing that there is a time scale involved, too.
In other words, one says to himself that Gadget A is not possible until Metal B is developed. When Gadget A becomes a reality, Device C results. It is then possible to cross-fertilize this technology with the data now in existence in Science K. We come up with an instrument that will be useful at that time in thrimaline research over there, possibly leading to... In other words, a multi-dimensional array. Organized brainstorming, or cerebral popcorn.
Science-fiction, where it has considered future trends and future cultures, has been both unimaginative and conservative. In relation to reality, that is. The predictions of s-f are an order of magnitude better than those of professional scientists, but are still several orders of magnitude below reality. Things are going to happen much faster than we think, and they are going to have much wilder implications than we have considered. We need only look at the last twenty-five years. And we need to realize that we will see just as much change in the next ten years.
If we have the courage to admit this to ourselves, it means that it is time to think, time to argue, time to speculate, and time to philosophize. If the trend curves can tell us that all this—and more—is going to happen, we should try to do a little engineering and planning in advance so that they don’t happen willy-nilly, so that we can have some control over making them happen the way we want them to. We can and must plan for the future world in the same manner that a successful business plans for the inevitable retirement of a bond issue on a certain future date.
Science-fiction is the obvious and logical medium in which to do this. S-f is truly speculative fiction. It has been fairly successful in the past, but its true Golden Age is yet to come if it again realizes that the future is starting to happen right now. There is plenty left to speculate about because the well hasn’t gone dry.
Ed. Note: The latest set of Stine predictions will be available by the time you read this, in his new book. Man and the Space Frontier (Knopf. 1961).
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SUMMATION
The Year in S-F
by Judith Merril
When I determined to include in this collection the excerpts from Harry Stine’s as yet (at this writing) unpublished article, I was motivated by several things.
First, and most evident, was the paucity of good science fiction. There was an abundance of high-quality speculative and imaginative fiction of various kinds, published in every conceivable medium, during 1960; there was very little “real science fiction” anywhere—in or out of the specialty publications—and of that little, most was mediocre to poor.
At the same time, I did not, and do not, believe that the genre is disappearing. It is, certainly, diffusing—spreading out from a limited-circulation group of fiction magazines and a select grouping of hardcover book titles, to the mass markets: paperback novels, radio and TV, comic books, newspapers, and large-circulation general magazines.
In another sense, too, it is diffusing. Until a few years ago, “pure science fiction” confined itself, with rare exceptions, to speculation about space, the atom, and possible inventions or discoveries in the physical sciences.
The very technological advances that have swallowed up the old subjects almost entirely have, meantime, opened up whole new frontiers. And in the same way, the new media of communication now open to science fiction provide it with a new function as well.
Science fiction did not invent speculative thinking; it was quite the other way round. For whatever reasons of historical happenstance, the special kind of thinking that lies between outright fantasy and scientific hypothesis was focussed for a while largely in the s-f magazines. Now, some of the best story plots are going into reports by research and development men for the government, the armed services, the big corporations, and such novelties in our scheme of things as the Rand Corporation. What part of this thinking is not channeled into governmental or industrial secrecy is as likely to appear in essay form in a serious journal as in adventure trappings in the magazines.
Mr. Stine has pointed out several areas not currently being examined in this way by industry or government, and has provided a tool for the job. Meantime, there is another job for s-f to do—and one it is doing effectively.
The switch to initials just above was intentional. I am talking now about the whole field of science-fantasy, of speculative literature. And the job I refer to is roughly equivalent to that performed by the Encyclopedists before the French revolution: PR, essentially, public relations.
I have stressed throughout the book the underlying theme of communication. Perhaps writers in the field are so concerned with the one subject just now because the motivation of the writers themselves has shifted somewhat from extrapolation to explanation?
The modern scientist cannot possibly even attempt to keep up with progress in specialties outside his own; publications come too fast and frequently. But the modern citizen must keep up with at least the broadest outlines of new developments—and must be prepared, continually, for the most radical of new departures. The best of academic educations have not prepared even the most willing laymen to think in terms of tomorrow’s strange new world; and few citizens have either the studiousness or the background to keep up with the accelerating rate of change.
TV has proved, or re-proved (the advertising agencies did it first) the relative impact of pictures and words; there is the same distinction to be made between word-pictures and word-studies. To the specialist, the study is more informative; to almost all others, the word-picture is more so —not only because it informs more quickly, but because it does it more graphically.
Newspaper columnists, among others, have seized on this “pictorial” use of s-f recently. Of the future-story columns I’ve noticed, two in particular struck me as most effective: William A. Caldwell’s “Locked Alone in the World,” (under the by-line: “Simeon Stylites”) and William V. Shannon’s “1961.”
For non-fictional, straight-article presentations of speculative material throughout the year, both The Saturday Evening Post and the Saturday Review made impressive publishing records—addressing similar information to different readers in very different styles.
A surprising amount of material was also published during 1960, in general and literary magazines, about science fiction, science fantasy, and the “s-f way of thinking.” Some of the special attention was, of course, stimulated by the Amis book (Nation’s “Lucky Jim and the Martians,” for instance). More of it was the product of the dilemma of education and communication in general: Norbert Wiener’s “The Grand Privilege”; John Lear’s “When Space Travel Was Witchcraft”; N. R. Hanson’s “Science Is a Way of Seeing” (all in SR); Thomas N. Scortia’s “The Captive Eggheads” and Robert Bloch’s “The Clown at Midnight” (in Rogue); and the extraordinary article, “Unbelievable but True,” in The Saturday Evening Post.
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Within the specialty field, also, fact articles—and critical essays—have been more numerous and more interesting. The previously established series by Willy Ley (Galaxy), Isaac Asimov (Fantasy and Science Fiction), and Kenneth Johns (combined pseudonym for Kenneth Bulmer and John Newman in New Worlds), continue as brisk and intriguing as before. John Rackham contributed a thoughtful piece on “The Science Fiction Ethic” to the 100th issue of NW. Sam Moskowitz’s scholarly series of res
earches on fantasy authors (Fantastic) is coming up to contemporary writers. Ted Sturgeon’s initial column in If promises a bright future—though Fred Pohl’s reviews will be missed. In the same way, while mourning Damon Knight’s absence from s-f reviewing, I have found Alfred Bester’s fresh approach to s-f criticism (F&SF) provocative and stimulating. A whole new publication devoted to “science-fiction-non-fiction” has emerged: The Journal of the Interplanetary Exploration Society. But the most dramatic of the excursions into speculative essay took place in Analog.
It was John Campbell’s magazine to which the title of the SEP’s “Unbelievable but True” piece applied, and the article seemed to have been stimulated primarily by Campbell’s crusading articles and editorials for investigation of the Dean Drive.
The “Dean Drive” is an invention of a Washington, D. C., mortgage expert named Norman Dean: a device to convert rotary motion into unidirectional motion, extremely suitable for a space drive (among thousands of other applications) because it somehow appears to get around Newton’s law about action and reaction. All the energy goes into the push—none into push-back.
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