Future of the past, future of the present

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In an entry from 2002, I commented:

I wish I knew who it was who said that up until cyberpunk, sf was presenting the future of the 1950s; with cpunk, it began presenting the future of the 1980s. I think to a large extent it still presents the future of the 1980s, with occasional meanderings into the future of the late 1990s (specifically the dot-com bubble). It'll be very interesting to see what comes next.

It just occurred to me, reading a Walter Jon Williams story from a recent issue of Asimov's, that the future of the early 2000s has come to permeate a certain branch of sf: it's the posthumanist/Singularist future, a postcapitalist world in which personalities can be uploaded and backed up, nanotech can restructure bodies, and money and scarcity are obsolete.

In the year 2000, there were a lot of articles saying "Where are my aircars, videophones, and personal robots?" A lot of people grew up reading sf and believing in the future of the 1950s, and it's been kind of disillusioning to them to arrive in The Future and find that it's not what they were expecting.

Nanotech has become the new magic: all you have to do to achieve Clarke's Law-style magical results in a science fiction context is to utter the magic word "nanotech" and wave your hand wand. Wil McCarthy wrote a bracing piece in the SFWA Bulletin a couple years back, "Nanotechnology: Abuses Of, and Alternatives To," in which he debunked the fashionable idea that nanotech can do anything you want; that article led me to consider nanotech-as-magic to be another genre convention, convenient for storytelling purposes but without a lot of bearing on the way things will really work in the future.

So in my more cynical moments, I wonder how long it'll be before some of today's Singularists start writing articles wondering what happened to the Singularity they were promised, and why scarcity hasn't ended yet. (In my less cynical moments, I figure I'll still be wondering that when the Singularity happens.)

The future becomes obsolete faster and faster these days.

(On an only vaguely related note—speaking of vaporware—I see that a year ago I linked to info about StorCard, which was promising a 5GB disk drive the size and shape of a credit card, for $15, to be available "in the second half of 2003." The StorCard site appears not to have been updated since last January. Oh, well.)

3 Responses to “Future of the past, future of the present”

  1. David Moles

    There definitely seems to be another “consensus future” shaping up over the last few years — I haven’t read the WJW story you’re talking about, but you can see it in stuff from Greg Egan and Ken MacLeod and Charlie Stross, and probably in all kinds of other stuff that I’ve missed.

    I have a feeling this one may have nearly run its course, but I suspect it’ll keep muddling along until something comes to replace it — and that, I think, won’t happen until we see another Zeitgeist-defining consumer technology, like drugs in the 70s, PCs and video games in the 80s or the Internet in the late 90s.

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  2. Arthur D. Hlavaty

    Perhaps one function of sf is to provide us with ever-new disappointments.

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  3. Jed

    Someone in a LiveJournal comment I stumbled across pointed out that I was conflating 1920s (and maybe even earlier) sf tropes with 1950s sf. A good point. But my impression is that the consensus view of what the future on Earth would be like didn’t change all that much from 1920s sf until the dystopic post-holocast stuff started appearing in, what, the mid-’40s? The mid-’50s? If I had the Encyclopedia of SF, I could check. Anyway, it seems to me that aircars and videophones continued to be part of the consensus sfnal future at least through the Jetsons (early ’60s).

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