Deliberate and Accidental Anachronisms in Sci-Fi

[Jade44]

Having read a ton of Sci-Fi novels in the last few years I find it interesting to note the many authors whose perception of the future is already outdated. I've been reading Sci-Fi for almost six decades and it is interesting to note that very few writers got the future right. Of course, predicting almost anything beyond a few years is next to impossible. Technology changes so quickly that it is easy for authors to get things wrong. One only has to think of the writers of the 1950s and and how different 2013 is from what most of them envisioned to understand that problem.

However, a few seem to almost deliberately miss the mark. In David Drake's Lieutenant Leary series, for example, the starships are sailed through "n" space like 19th century clippers. The gear on the ship squeaks and groans, and frequently rusts up and jams. Crowbars and massive wrenches are as much a part of the equipment as astral navigation aids. And computer techs still use physical input to enter data.

Weber, of course, has his ships acting like 18th and 19th ships of the line in that they can't shoot through their "wedges," forcing them to fire broadsides. His crews act an awful lot like jolly old salts, descending upon the sleazy bars and gin joints of the backwoods worlds visited by the hero and heroine.

Even David Weber has his naval staff using the equivalent of Ipads rather than some more advanced form of communication such as bio-electrical implants.

Mike Shepherd has his heroine wear her almost human artificial intelligence around her neck, and able to communicate directly with her mind. Graham Sharp Paul speaks of psionic implants that are physically linked to the brain. Ditto for Catherine Asaro whose Evolving Intelligences actually have personalities and are part of the neural network of their users. It seems to me that these authors are probably a little closer to the mark.

I don't object to any of this. In many cases it actually makes the books more interesting in that technology hasn't replaced people in every area, leaving something for the human crews to do. Sci-fi authors face the same problems in writing about technology that everyone else does. No matter how advanced they make their societies they are bound to underestimate the inventiveness of the future civilizations they try to depict.

 

[Montero]

Saw a documentary a while back (probably within the last year) looking at what the vision of the future had been, and what had come.

The main comment was that 1950s images were all about flying cars and living in domes and had a lot of large inventions to change the way we live.

In practice, said the documentary, what had happened was a massive change to small things, largely arising from computing advances - that the primary inventiveness of the latter part of the 20th century was either in computing, or derived from it - so computer chips were now in cars controlling engine performance, but the car itself was in a macro sense, the same as a 1950s car. (Steering wheel, internal combustion engine, four wheels on the ground, seats, windows.)

 

[BetaWolf]

That was a good post, Jade. I guess it's hard to go beyond what you're used to. Solar sails and magnetic sails do work rather like ships' sails, but no broadsides required.

You kind of go with that's in vogue when you're writing I guess. Brave New World had all the in vitro artificial womb stuff, but also the wealthy got around in helicopters, which I think is pretty cool still.

No positronic brain yet.

 

[Stephen Palmer]

Gene Wolfe used the star/ship equivalence to superb effect in The Urth Of The New Sun.

 

[Venusian Broon]

An accidental anachronism that gets me giddy with joy are the early 50s SF stories that have people of the future reach for...

...slide rules to calculate things!

I don't know why it tickles me, as I'm not old enough to know how to operate these arcane pieces of machinery.

Modern computery hadn't quite formed at the time. As Betawolf mentions, computers were for more important things like Positronic brains I believe, not calculators.

 

[steve12553]

Unfortunately, the Post WWII authors lived in a world where many of the realities of society lay hidden. Much of our current technology is driven by financial rather noble or heroic considerations. Look in your pocket at your smart phone and at the amount of functions driven by subscriptions services and attempts to lure you into subscription services. The fifties had a wonderful idealism in much of the best Science Fiction that was lost as society got farther from a heroic war and deeper into questionable interests. Asimov and Heinlein and the others just didn't anticipate the "Me" generation.

 

[jastius]

my dad would use a slide rule as an engineer in designing plans. once my caculator had been stepped on and i was having trouble doing functions and he showed me how to work the log tables to finish my homework. Well the teacher the next day marked all my answers incorrect because apparently when you use a slide rule and when you use a calculator you get two completely different answers. so if you were in a half broken down shuttle and had to manually calculate the trajectory you would not meet up with a computer calculated course heading.
Sometimes i think that is what happened to the world of tomorrow. Computers recalculated its course and we went off upon the wrong trajectory. We couldn't get there from here.

 

[Jo Zebedee]

I get told off for this a lot in my stuff -- mostly because as a sci fi writer I'm not massively interested in tech, but... Take the boiling kettles. It really hasn't changed much over the years. Why? Because it does what we need it to do. Sure we can have pods that we press that do it immediately - which is what I replaced my kettles with when a certain beta had a kink of laughter over them - but really, short of making it more high tech,why do it? Similarly travel - the same things becomemore modern but are essentially the same - a car is a motorised horse and trap. Future travelling devices will be variations on a theme.

I love the idea of mixing the archaic with the future. Not everything will change. The style might, but the function won't.

So, can I have my kettle back.

 

[Timba]

And yet some are remarkable for what they predict. For instance per Wiki Jules Verne "In 1863, Verne had written a novel called Paris in the Twentieth Century about a young man who lives in a world of glass skyscrapers, high-speed trains, gas-powered automobiles, calculators, and a worldwide communications network, yet cannot find happiness and who comes to a tragic end." Downright spooky how much he got correct with this and of course From the Earth to the Moon and 20,000 Leagues. Of course he also got lots of things wrong I imagine but still I find it remarkable that he got so much right.

 

[nightdreamer]

...slide rules to calculate things!

I don't know why it tickles me, as I'm not old enough to know how to operate these arcane pieces of machinery.

I am old enough to remember. In fact, I used to own some, and use them in real calculations. Still, I find them endearingly anachronistic. There are several mentions of them in Have Space Suit -- Will Travel, one of my favorite novels, and I just can't see replacing them with calculators.

And I've always gotten a kick out of "Doc" Smith's Lensman series, how expert pilots maneuver huge ships with keyboards and foot petals. Really can't blame him, though, for not forecasting computers to do all the work. They're not nearly as romantic in that regard.

No mention of anachronisms is complete without including steampunk -- steam-powered cyborgs and all. Love it!

 

[Vertigo]

An accidental anachronism that gets me giddy with joy are the early 50s SF stories that have people of the future reach for...

...slide rules to calculate things!

I don't know why it tickles me, as I'm not old enough to know how to operate these arcane pieces of machinery.

Modern computery hadn't quite formed at the time. As Betawolf mentions, computers were for more important things like Positronic brains I believe, not calculators.

I wasn't allowed to use calculators until I got to Uni. So I grew up with log tables and slide-rules. Sadly I've now lost mine.

One of the most fun examples of what you describe is in James Blish's Cities in Flights series where he has talking computers but they still do their astro navigation using slide-rules; love it!

my dad would use a slide rule as an engineer in designing plans. once my caculator had been stepped on and i was having trouble doing functions and he showed me how to work the log tables to finish my homework. Well the teacher the next day marked all my answers incorrect because apparently when you use a slide rule and when you use a calculator you get two completely different answers. so if you were in a half broken down shuttle and had to manually calculate the trajectory you would not meet up with a computer calculated course heading.
Sometimes i think that is what happened to the world of tomorrow. Computers recalculated its course and we went off upon the wrong trajectory. We couldn't get there from here.

Jastius, sadly I think your teacher does not know what he/she is talking about. Logarithms (and all other similar tables) are the same whether they are obtained from tables, slide-rules or calculators. The only difference would be the level of accuracy, where a slide-rule relies upon the limited level of accuracy obtained by reading the scales. So maybe your teacher expected a certain level of accuracy and your slide-rule generated answers didn't meet that level and so they were marked wrong.

On the general topic this is always something I love when reading older SF. Another favourite of mine is a critical clue in Asimov's Caves of Steel was the fogging of some camera film by a radioactive source. So he's got positronic brains but no digital imaging. To be fair I think the rapid rise of digital cameras took a lot of people off balance.

Actually another interesting example of a deliberate 'anachronisms' were the shields in Dune requiring the use of knives in future combat.

 

[Ursa major]

The only difference would be the level of accuracy, where a slide-rule relies upon the limited level of accuracy obtained by reading the scales. So maybe your teacher expected a certain level of accuracy and your slide-rule generated answers didn't meet that level and so they were marked wrong.

While precision is a problem with slide rules - they are constrained by size, the printing technology and the limits of their users' vision - a bigger problem is the accuracy: a slide rule might tell you the answer is 342, but is it 342,000 or .342 or 3.24 x ten to the n (where n might be any integer, positive or negative). The slide rule will not give you this order of magnitude; the user has to determine this for themselves.

 

[steve12553]

While precision is a problem with slide rules - they are constrained by size, the printing technology and the limits of their users' vision - a bigger problem is the accuracy: a slide rule might tell you the answer is 342, but is it 342,000 or .342 or 3.24 x ten to the n (where n might be any integer, positive or negative). The slide rule will not give you this order of magnitude; the user has to determine this for themselves.

In other words the user has to know what they're doing. This was true with many older pieces of test and measuring equipment. Technology spoils the technician.
As mention by Vertigo, I would beg to differ as to Dune. In the Dune universe much technology was cast aside many years earlier because of the problems it generated. These oddities may not qualify as anachronisms for that reason.

 

[Mark_Lawrence]

And I've always gotten a kick out of "Doc" Smith's Lensman series, how expert pilots maneuver huge ships with keyboards and foot petals. Really can't blame him, though, for not forecasting computers to do all the work. They're not nearly as romantic in that regard.

I loved the Lensmen series though it felt dated when I read it and that was back in the late 70s. I can't quote it but my memory is of greasy engineers with monkey wrenches fixing hyper-drives whilst smoking.

 

[nightdreamer]

I loved the Lensmen series though it felt dated when I read it and that was back in the late 70s. I can't quote it but my memory is of greasy engineers with monkey wrenches fixing hyper-drives whilst smoking.

Yep. Burned-out windings in the Bergenholm, which device had to spin like a motor and worked better with uranium cores. The science is hopeless, but the adventure is epic. I must have first read it in the late '60s.

Love the part where Virgil Samms avoids detection by running his Bergenholm off a diesel-powered generator and using the few dynes of thrust from the exhaust to get him around.

 

[Steve Jordan]

Writers often have to balance the desire to write a future story with the fear of losing their audiences in an almost inconceivable world of strange technology. That's why a great deal of future stories use very recognizable, often deliberately romantic or dramatic imagery that doesn't make a lick of sense (cough-Star Trek!-cough).

On the other hand, some of the advances in technology that we've seen in real life have been molded by the desire to keep it familiar to the user, who in real life often balks at unfamiliar tools... your computer's keyboard, and its decades-old layout, is a perfect example. We can always expect technology (even in fiction) to advance only as fast as consumers will accept it.

 

[BetaWolf]

Well said, Steve Jordan. Even set a century or two from now, science fiction should not be too far off from what the reader is used to.

One of my favorite details of Brave New World btw was Huxley's guess that very fast helicopters (I forgot what he called them) would replace automobiles, at least for the wealthy.

But there is really no reason to assume that designs that work well (ergonomically speaking) now should change that much. Handheld devices, including weaponry, shouldn't change all that much, even if the details do (a Glock .45 fits the hand well, has a good weight to it, etc., even if the kind of projectile changes). Keyboards along the same angle, even if they evolve into some kind of touchscreen version. When I am typing away, I like the tactile feel of a well-constructed keyboard and the click-click-click.

 

[manephelien]

The huge computers imagined by Heinlein and Asimov etc. such as Mike/Michelle/Adam Selene in The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, or the communication satellites with human crew imagined by Clarke.

 

[chrispenycate]

Most of what Verne wrote about already existed; he just enlarged and extended. If you notice, while he's regularly credited with prophesying atomic energy in 20000 leagues, it's quite clear; what powered the Nautilus was electricity. He avoided anything too speculative, and indeed criticised Wells for his antigravity, insisting that giant cannons were far more realistic (and actually existed) The fact that anything travelling at escape velocity (all right, almost escape velocity) low in the Earth's atmosphere would burn out like a meteor obviously escaped him.

But using manpower in Drake's spongespace was partly to get the social classes he wanted, an equivalence to the British empire in the eighteenth century, and the reasons for muscle power rather than motors was clearly spelt out; it was not an oversight. And, with the amount of energy involved in interstellar travel I suspect that sailing – using some form of naturally occurring energy rather than relying on internal fuel reserves – could turn out to be the most practical solution, and particularly talented individuals get better results than pure calculation machines (and Adele's data wands seem considerably more flexible than a keyboard or trackpad (and in that society I'd be very hesitant about letting a medic loose with a direct neural interface).

Weber's HH series is unashamedly mimicking Horatio Hornblower, so too much ease in control systems would not feel right. And I might occasionally argu – ahem – discuss technical details, there is no doubt that he's spent a lot of effort building an internally consistent technical environment. Voice controls would not be practical, and I'm far from convinced that hard wiring to a brain is a reasonable solution in a military situation.

 

[BetaWolf]

Good points, chrispenycate. I like the new avatar, too.

I think that it's useful to show things backfire sometimes, too. So a prototype or first production model could have lots of problems when applied to a new situation.

I agree that Drake's ideas of muscle power is workable. There is the lingering problem of what to do with humans once all types of work become mechanized. I was actually thinking much the same thing when I was having my hair cut yesterday. There should be the development of skilled labor in certain areas, even after "The Singularity" happens.