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Why The Future Is The Realist’s Greatest Shortcoming
Why didn’t sci-fi predict the Internet? Where are those flying cars and wormholes? And what do realists have to say about it?
The fact that nobody in sci-fi predicted anything quite like the Internet says a lot. I’ve known that it says a lot for quite some time, but I’ve been mostly helpless as to what it says exactly.
After reading all sorts of sci-fi from different periods, it is rather obvious that authors mostly project present issues to an imagined future or — if especially accomplished — imagine the issues of a projected future. This, in my experience, makes for wonderful entertainment and fascinating pondering, but not particularly reliable predictions. It is not literature’s purpose to concern itself with predictions, though, nor have I ever heard a sci-fi author pretending to see into the future more than anybody else does.
Still, being passionate about both sci-fi and the future, it has always bothered me somewhat that the two don’t seem to get along too well. I recently read an article that tried to explain why the Internet couldn’t have been predicted by sci-fi, and it all came down to the seemingly menial problem that the early Internet was created to solve: communication between research teams.