Back to the Future Day has come and gone. Fun, wasn't it? Well, not for the Cubs. For fans of the movie, though, we got to compare the real day to the one in the movie. What came to pass? What didn't (again, sorry Cubs fans)? However, some people take this fun too far, and ask, “What predictions did 'Back to the Future' get right?” Science fiction is a fantastic genre, and almost always deals with what might happen, and this can trick people into believing that Science Fiction is the genre of “predictions”. It is not. Science Fiction is the genre of possibilities.
What's the difference? In 1993, William Gibson released his fourth novel, “Virtual Light”, a story set in San Francisco in the year 2006 and features a subplot about a TV show called “Cops in Trouble”, a reality show focusing on police officers who have screwed up. Many give Gibson credit for predicting the popularity of reality television, and that seems fair, until you realize that the real-life reality show “Cops” premiered four years earlier, in 1989. This is not to take anything away from Gibson; it would be easy for someone to notice shows like “Cops” and others that started in the late 80s/early 90s and say, “These will never last.” Even when shows like “Survivor” started in the early 2000's, people were still saying that.
Gibson did not predict the popularity of reality TV. What he did was actually way cooler. He looked at the current situation, and extrapolated what might happen. From an interview in GQ: "I was never able to predict," Gibson says. "But I could sort of curate what had already happened." He curates what has already happened. That's what most science fiction writers strive to do. Take what they see in the world around them – technology, culture, people, attitudes, etc - and put them together in such a way that they can see where society might be going.
It seems magical, but it is not. Science fiction writers cannot see the future. “Virtual Light” may have given us a glimpse of the future of reality TV, but it also presents VR glasses as a commonplace item, which, in 1993, we all believed would be an accurate prediction. However, today, 22 years later, we're still wondering if something like the Occulus Rift will finally catch on, and make home virtual reality a thing. Sometimes, these works inspire innovations - wireless communicators led to work that became cell phones; Jules Verne's projectile in "From the Earth to the Moon" can be seen in the design of the Apollo CSM - but many times, they just notice the trends.
This isn't unique to Gibson, either, this is all of Science Fiction. As Ray Bradbury put it, “Science fiction is the art of the possible.” Science fiction explores our society, our nature, through exploring where we might be going (and in the case of sub-genres like steampunk, where we might have gone had society progressed differently). From Hugo Gernsback, one of the fathers of modern sci-fi:
"Science fiction...can be defined as: Imaginative extrapolation of true natural phenomena, existing now, or likely to exist in the future."This is why claiming these works “predict” anything rankles me so. It cheapens science fiction, takes something noble, and pushes it into the realm of hotline psychics and palm readers. Yes, these comments are meant to praise visionaries like Bradbury, Gibson, or Jules Verne. We trumpet how good these writers are based on what they predicted correctly. What does that say about writers who predicted incorrectly? What does that say about the science fiction writers who looked at society and made what seemed like perfectly reasonable claims at the time, but turned out to be as far-fetched as turning lead into gold? Do we call them crackpots? Silly writers of fantasy?
Ray Bradbury is credited with predicting flat-screen televisions, as some of his stories featured flat-panel monitors. However, he also wrote stories about colonies on Mars, where the humans explored the surface in everyday clothing, breathing and functioning normally, and even interacting with fully-formed, intelligent life. None of this is possible. Is Bradbury now a bad science fiction writer?
No, because the point of science fiction is not that anything written therein actually comes to pass. The point isn't that this is what is going to happen, it's what could happen. Back in the 1950's, we didn't know much about Mars, and many people truly believed it had an atmosphere and intelligent life. It hadn't contacted us yet, but then, we hadn't grown sophisticated to contact it yet, so maybe it was in a similar stage of its existence. Alternatively, maybe they were far more advanced, and didn't want to contact us.
Even deeper than that, though, is that these stories aren't about Martians, they are about Earthlings. They are about us. Even stories written about the far reaches of the galaxy, about races who have nothing to do with humans, are about us. That is what science fiction is: it is an exploration of the human nature, through the metaphor of science.
In “Doctor Who”, one of my favorite TV shows of all time, The Doctor (non-human), squares off against various other non-human adversaries, including the humanoid-turn-cyborg Cybermen, and the mutated alien Daleks. The Cybermen, human brains, stripped of emotion, of persona, of individuality, marching across the galaxy, converting all they deem compatible, destroying all who oppose them. This is not just an alien race conquering the galaxy, it's humans forgetting what makes them human. That's the fear we have when watching these episodes. Not that we might be killed by the Cybermen, but that we might become like them, that our current society asks us to become them. Cold, calculating, emotionless.
The Daleks, while similar, don't quell all emotions. They leave the hatred for all others. Born of an endless, genocidal, planet-wide war, the Daleks were engineered to be the super-soldiers that would wipe out the enemy, and end the war once and for all. They succeeded, and then progressed out into the galaxy to continue their conquest. The Daleks represent the flipside of the Cybermen: anger and emotion carried to the extreme, boiling over until all we want to do is exterminate.
These stories take place in the future (mostly), but they neither predict nor foretell of coming invasions of alien races. They tell of the dangers inherent in human nature. They also inspire the best of human nature – the drive to overcome, to survive, to innovate. This is why science fiction is such an important genre, and what so many people miss about it when they pass it off as nerdy or silly fantasy. We may never have warp drives to take us to distant stars within our life times, and there might not be intelligent life on Mars, or breathable atmosphere. Science may prove that lightsabers cannot exist, but it has also shown that teleportation, at least on a very small level, might, in fact be possible.
The question should not be, “Was this prediction accurate?” It should be, “What does this prediction say about us, and what did it inspire us to achieve?”
