00100	SCIENCE FICTION AS PREDICTION
00200	
00300	
00400		Personally  I hate and fear modern literature and it makes me
00500	especially unhappy when it invades  science  fiction.   The  literary
00600	authors are always trying to manipulate my emotions on behalf of some
00700	cause or other  they  have  read  about  in  the  \F1New  York  Times
00800	Magazine\F0.   They  want to make me share their hatreds; they rarely
00900	show affection for anyone except when they show him as  a  victim  of
01000	someone  who  represents  one of their hates. Therefore, I enjoy most
01100	old-fashioned science fiction in which the author shows us some  neat
01200	thing he has thought up or heard about in a straightforward adventure
01300	context with good guys and bad guys of a conventional  sort.   It  is
01400	even  better  if he can tell a good story without any fighting, but I
01500	understand that this is hard for authors.
01600	
01700		I put my biases in at the beginning just  for  honesty.   The
01800	real  subject  of  this article is a bit different; it is the ways in
01900	which the authors get the world wrong, because they copy  each  other
02000	and  the  first guy got it wrong or because they have to get it wrong
02100	in order to tell a good story.
02200	
02300		Now that man has reached the Moon, it is time to compare  the
02400	reality with science fiction.  Here are some of the differences:
02500	
02600		1.  Fifty  billion  dollars  were  spent on the space program
02700	before the first landing on the  Moon,  half  of  it  on  the  Apollo
02800	Project  itself.   If  we  look  at  1930s  science fiction, we would
02900	probably get a median expenditure of  between  $50,000  and  $500,000
03000	judging  from  the number of people involved and the time taken - the
03100	error factor is between 100,000 and a million. Well, I  don't  resent
03200	that  as  a  reader of entertainment, but it probably fooled a lot of
03300	people.  Imagine if you can a trillion dollar project to go to  Alpha
03400	Centauri.   Imagine that the project took an hundred years to prepare
03500	the first launch; since the journey will be a few hundred years,  the
03600	launch  should  be delayed as long as technology is advancing so fast
03700	that a ship launched later will arrive earlier.  One of  the  science
03800	fiction  writers  noted  this  point but as usual, he kept all of his
03900	characters on the space ship ignorant of this  possibility  until  it
04000	happened to them. Of course, that's another literary device - keeping
04100	a rather obvious possibility away from the whole of society.  Society
04200	as  a  whole  has  its surprises, but they aren't quite of this kind.
04300	Anyway it would be interesting to see if some author  could  make  an
04400	interesting  story  out  of  a  trillion  dollar project or even a 50
04500	billion dollar project.
04600	
04700		2. Alas the Moon has turned out at the extreme  dull  end  of
04800	the  possibilities  envisaged by science fiction, but we will explore
04900	it anyway.  I  don't  resent  their  choosing  the  more  interesting
05000	possibilities of meeting some form of life or even having dust traps,
05100	but as a result they couldn't show us exploration in face of boredom.
05200	
05300		3. By the way, Willy Ley did quite well in his 1940s book  on
05400	Rockets  and  Space Travel in predicting what space exploration would
05500	be like technically. All the techniques he was sure would  work  were
05600	used  and  had  about  the predicted performance.  Of the more exotic
05700	possibilities he mentioned the only one that has worked  out  so  far
05800	was  atmospheric  braking.   The exotic fuels like monatomic hydrogen
05900	haven't worked out.  Nuclear rockets would  work  all  right  if  our
06000	society  hadn't entered a stage of fearing technology.  In that it is
06100	interesting that the science fiction writers have no special view  of
06200	the  benefits  or  menace of technology that differentiates them from
06300	other intellectuals.  They distribute  themselves  into  rationalists
06400	and  twisters  of reality to fit preconceived ideas in about the same
06500	proportions as others.
06600	
06700	Here are some gripes:
06800	
06900		The village size planet.  "It was raining on the planet X."
07000	
07100		Lem's complaint.
07200	
07300		Some of the first futuristic authors showed us Utopias, but
07400	there is nowhere to go from there, and anyway an author who shows us
07500	a Utopia he really likes risks being taken for an enthusiast, than
07600	which there is nothing worse to a cynic.  However, when forms of
07700	oppression that had a social role in undeveloped societies are
07800	transferred without change to advanced societies, they libel
07900	humanity.
08000	
08100		The "if this goes on" story wherein the writer extrapolates
08200	one trend in society to extremes is pretty bad.