Science Fiction and the Future - guest post by SciFi author Patty Jansen

Where's my flying car? This has been a catch-cry of people taking a stab at Science Fiction's poor record of predicting the future. We don't have flying cars, we don't have domestic robots, and we are nowhere near building human outposts elsewhere in the solar system. Yet all these things were suggested by science fiction writers. Still, they failed to foresee the mobile phone, the internet and the GFC.

What gives?

Well, you know, since I'm a writer, I can tell you that the first concern of a writer is to write an entertaining story, never mind whether it's realistic. Since much of Science Fiction takes place in the future, a writer has to make some sort of attempt at predicting what it will be like. And the result had better be entertaining, in other words: vastly different from today's world. It is not so much that writers think, or ever thought, that flying cars will be realistic, but that readers expect them. Writers and readers alike know that we won't have settled Mars within the next fifty years. It is much more likely that the world continues its current space exploration funk, driven by rising costs for energy and financial woes. But that is boring to write about, unless you throw in a violent war or a virus or two, by which time the doomsday scenario is no longer realistic.

Can't win.

Yet…

In May 2011, I was lucky enough to attend the NASA JPL open day. Amongst other awesomeness (OMG, the control room!), we wandered the park/campus-like grounds and came across some plaques with quotes from writers of Science Fiction.

I felt rather taken aback by that. Because, you know, Science Fiction has a very poor record of getting predictions right, not even in space travel. The awesome Gregory Benford talks about how the portrayal of space exploration in science fiction is in fact a product of  the knowledge and space exploration of the time that the book was written.

I suggest there may be something else going on.

Many of the writers of hard Science Fiction are also scientists of some description. They write Science Fiction not to be accurate, but to step outside the need to be 100% scientifically accurate.

Much of science is conducted through hypotheses. A hypothesis is an educated guess of the way experimental results pan out. The experiment is designed to prove or disprove it. Hypothesis-setting is powerful, yet dangerous, because hypotheses are often a product of the science team's knowledge and the societal environment in which the science operates, often referred to as dogma. The prevailing scientific opinion can be wrong. This is how the medical science for so long missed the fact that stomach ulcers were the symptoms of an infection. Or why Galileo and his peers faced such vehement opposition to their suggestions of a heliocentric solar system.

In both, and many other, cases someone stepped outside the prevailing opinion and said 'But what if…'

'What if?' is the domain of Science Fiction. What if we had faster than light travel? What if we could upload ourselves to computers? What if we all lived for 500 years? What if there were aliens?

All these questions inspire real-life scientists in their daily work. There are people working on breaking the speed of light, on computer-mapping our minds, on increasing longevity, on the search for aliens. The results are unlikely to be as Science Fiction envisaged, but that doesn't diminish the value of the questions they put in people's minds.

Bio:

Patty Jansen lives in Sydney, Australia, where she spends most of her time writing Science Fiction and Fantasy. She publishes in both traditional and indie venues. Her story This Peaceful State of War placed first in the second quarter of the Writers of the Future contest. Her futuristic space travel story Survival in Shades of Orange will appear in Analog Science Fiction and Fact.

Her novels (available at ebook venues, such as Amazon’s Kindle store) include Watcher's Web (soft SF), The Far Horizon (SF for younger readers), Charlotte's Army (military SF) and books 1 and 2 of the Icefire Trilogy Fire & Ice and Dust & Rain (post-apocalyptic steampunk fantasy).

Patty is a member of SFWA, and the cooperative that makes up Andromeda Spaceways Inflight Magazine, and she has also written non-fiction.

Patty is on Twitter (@pattyjansen), Facebook, LinkedIn, goodreads, LibraryThing, Google+ and can be found at: http://pattyjansen.com/