I started looking at the art of prophesy from the other side after attending an Alpha Course at our local church. The argument of the guy on DVD was that Jesus was the Son of God because he fulfilled more than 200 Old Testament prophesies. Leaving aside issues like the Old Testament having been selected from amongst the far bigger set of Jewish sacred writings by the Christian Church after Jesus’ death, there is the more generic issue of only remembering the hits and not the misses.
You recall the day your horoscope was spot on, but not the 100′s of times it wasn’t. Science Fiction writers who manage to guess at some aspect of the future claim credit out of proportion to the ray guns, anti gravity devices and personal jet packs that never arrived.
That said there are some good SF writer futurists who are worth reading – Cory Doctorow and Bruce Sterling (in the blog roll) being two. However, I find their fiction much more telling in its predictions than their factual work. This is probably because you see the (near) future from the perspective of well realised characters. The future is a bit like the battle scene in War and Peace where the protagonist walks into it by accident. It is chaotic and confusing unless you can contextualise and establish a point of view.
Sterling’s “The Future Now” is a good book but not as good as Distraction or some of the Bicycle Repairman series short stories in giving a realistic picture of what technology might mean to our lives.
Tags: future, futurist, prophecy, science fiction
January 21, 2008 at 3:33 pm |
[...] Tim Anderson wrote an interesting post today on Back to the Future – Part TwoHere’s a quick excerptScience Fiction writers who manage to guess at some aspect of the future claim credit out of proportion to the ray guns, anti gravity devices and personal jet packs that never arrived. That said there are some good SF writer futurists … [...]