[EID] Predictive SF?

[Jeff Harris]

Dear Everybody,

Dick Tracy probably takes the cake with his two-way wrist radios, but 
that is a crime comic strip and not SF. However, a few corrections are 
in order. The title of the Heinlein SF short story is actually " -- We 
Also Walk Dogs" and it appears in a collection of Robert Heinlein's 
short stories. Anthologies are collections of works (essays, short 
stories, and other text works) on a variety subjects and by a variety of 
authors, although there may be overarching themes or common focuses to 
given anthologies. If the works are all by a single author then it's 
called a collection.

Actually I find it is much more interesting to find the things that SF 
didn't predict. For example, there's a Henry Kuttner story where the 
protagonist wants to find out what's on the television news and he pops 
into a cinema showing the television news. The success of SF 
predictions, I'm afraid, is put down to the 'shotgun effect' where if 
you predict enough things a few of them are bound to be correct.

Heinlein himself wrote a few SF stories, novels and short stories, 
wherein he anticpated that World War 3 was most likely to happen in the 
twentieth century. Strangely enough, I, for one, am quite happy his 
predictions in this area were wrong.

If anything, the most important prediction makes about the future is a 
simple one, and it happens with every SF story set in the future, any 
future, namely, that the future will be different. Whether any of them 
is ever right is immaterial, we should rejoice in SF's diversity in its 
propositions for the future.

best,

Jeff

On 3/02/2010 3:40 PM, Dalrymple, Garry wrote:
>
> Dear All
>
> 'Grace Cormet's telephone buzzed.    She took it out of her pocket and 
> said, 'Yes?'
>
> That passage was from Robert Heinlein's short story, 'We also Walk 
> Dogs', published in a 1954 copyrighted Anthology, 'The Green hills of 
> Earth', described on the back of the book as the second book of the 
> future History series about life in the 21^st Century.      Is this a 
> first ever SF description of a wireless mobile phone being a routine 
> device?
>
> In John Birmingham's 'World War 2.1' series the 'pad' computer is the 
> universal personal possession / communication device.     Has this 
> 'prediction' already been superceded by the powers of the just 
> recently announced Apple Ipad?
>
> Anyone care to suggest instances of items that were optimistically 
> 'predicted in SF' but which arrived ahead of time in the real world?
>
> Garry P Dalrymple
>
> Still waiting for my Aircar and personal jet pack
>
>
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