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C00002 00002	SCIENCE FICTION AS PREDICTION
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SCIENCE FICTION AS PREDICTION


	Personally I hate and fear modern literature and it makes me especially
unhappy when it invades science fiction.  The literary authors are always
trying to manipulate my emotions on behalf of some cause or other they have
read about in the \F1New York Times Magazine\F0.  They want to make me share
their hatreds; they rarely show affection for anyone except when they show
him as a victim of someone who represents one of their hates.
Therefore, I enjoy most old-fashioned science fiction in which the author
shows us some neat thing he has thought up or heard about in a straightforward
adventure context with good guys and bad guys of a conventional sort.  It is
even better if he can tell a good story without any fighting, but I understand
that this is hard for authors.

	I put my biases in at the beginning just for honesty.  The real subject
of this article is a bit different; it is the ways in which the authors get
the world wrong, because they copy each other and the first guy got it wrong
or because they have to get it wrong in order to tell a good story.

	Now that man has reached the Moon, it is time to compare the reality
with science fiction.  Here are some of the differences:

	1. Fifty billion dollars were spent on the space program before the
first landing on the Moon, half of it on the Apollo Project itself.  If we
look at 1930s science fiction, we would probably get a median expenditure
of between $50,000 and $500,000 judging from the number of people involved
and the time taken - the error factor is between 100,000 and a million.
Well, I don't resent that as a reader of entertainment, but it probably fooled
a lot of people.  Imagine if you can a trillion dollar project to go to
Alpha Centauri.  Imagine that the project took an hundred years to prepare the
first launch; since the journey will be a few hundred years, the launch should
be delayed as long as technology is advancing so fast that a ship launched
later will arrive earlier.  One of the science fiction writers noted this point
but as usual, he kept all of his characters on the space ship ignorant of this
possibility until it happened to them.
Of course, that's another literary device - keeping a rather obvious possibility
away from the whole of society.  Society as a whole has its surprises, but
they aren't quite of this kind.   Anyway it would be interesting to see if
some author could make an interesting story out of a trillion dollar project
or even a 50 billion dollar project.

	2. Alas the Moon has turned out at the extreme dull end of the possibilities
envisaged by science fiction, but we will explore it anyway.  I don't resent
their choosing the more interesting possibilities of meeting some form of life
or even having dust traps, but as a result they couldn't show us exploration
in face of boredom.

	3. By the way, Willy Ley did quite well in his 1940s book on Rockets
and Space Travel in predicting what space exploration would be like technically.
All the techniques he was sure would work were used and had about the predicted
performance.  Of the more exotic possibilities he mentioned the only one that
has worked out so far was atmospheric braking.  The exotic fuels like monatomic
hydrogen haven't worked out.  Nuclear rockets would work all right if our
society hadn't entered a stage of fearing technology.  In that it is interesting
that the science fiction writers have no special view of the benefits or
menace of technology that differentiates them from other intellectuals.  They
distribute themselves into rationalists and twisters of reality to fit
preconceived ideas in about the same proportions as others.