When Science Fiction Gets it Wrong (Horribly Wrong)

"The recorder in his backpack vibrated noiselessly to make a holotape recording of the network of buildings ... the Colony was ten kilometers farther on, but electronically enhanced lenses brought its low buildings close enough to touch."  

- The Legacy of Heorot, by Larry Niven, Jerry Pournelle & Steven Barnes, Copyright 1987. 

“Anachronistic science fiction” is my term for SF writing that posits a future we now know never happened. The above is a great example of why I love re-reading it: unintentional entertainment value. In Heorot, humans travel through interstellar space (at FTL speeds) and work with the technologies of suspended animation and genetic engineering, yet are forced to haul around a cumbersome recording device that sounds suspiciously like an 8-track tape deck combines with a laser disc player. Why?

In 1986, most U.S. homes were still using 5 3/4 floppy drives and the digital compact disc and laser discs were just making headway. Media storage still “felt” big and bulky. I’ve no doubt the “holotape” sounded really cutting edge. Or perhaps it was just plain laziness (I love the fudging when they get to "electronically enhanced lenses" - hilarious!) since digital recording technology - compact discs to you and me - were being tested in the R&D labs of Philips as far back as the mid-1970s.

Dick Tracy ca. 1961: He understood Moore's Law

NB - the holotaping didn't detract from the over-arching story in Heorot - a cautionary tale of how not to mess with nature when colonizing a new world. I've no doubt the script writers for Avatar were probably inspired by it.

While it’s entertaining for me to see how an SF writer’s then-contemporary view of technology was convincingly extrapolated into something we now know to be off-base, what I love most about anachronistic science fiction is the way it reflects the collective anxieties, conscience, and popular culture of the period during which it was written. It’s a form of nostalgia, really. 

Inspired by Heorot’s holotaping session, I conducted an unscientific survey of my SF library to find other examples of “anachronistic SF”, trying to understand what it told me about the author’s choice’s and if those wrong choices really mattered.

Unsurprisingly, I was able to easily group my findings:

Cloud Computing & the Power of the Network

William Gibson popularized the notion of a global information network (called "the Matrix" in his seminal 1983 book Neuromancer), describing it with unmatched prescience. Yet even he forces his protagonists to chase down a ROM construct - a piece of hardware - as his novel's McGuffin. In Snow Crash (one of my favorite SF novels ever), Neal Stephenson can't help himself when a library's worth of information is transferred from one computer to another via virtual reality interface:

My UK first edition – with stock photos from 

Max Headroom, apparently

"The world freezes and grows dim for a second... Clearly, his computer has taken a major hit; all of its circuits are busy processing a huge bolus of data - the contents of the hypercard."

How clumsy this sounds today, downloading terabytes when it's all in the cloud. Will the average household be saving anything on a hard drive at all in five years? (Many don't now thanks to Spotify, YouTube, Wikipedia, Dropbox, etc.) I think it's difficult for anyone born before 1980 to let go of the diskette, the disk, the chip (including the ubiquitous “credit chip” - the universal monetary unit throughout the galaxy in numerous books!), the tape, the coins, the cards, the medium.

It's a guilty pleasure seeing Stephenson get it wrong - especially since he's always so damned right. His most trenchant observation in Snow Crash is one of human nature and technology, namely, our willingness to give up hours and days and weeks - and for some, the rest of their lives, to hang out in virtual reality. People are doing this already using only boring "flatland" applications (using Stephenson's parlance) like Facebook rather than the 3D VR Matrix.

The (living) Red Planet

Starting in 1912, Edgar Rice Burroughs wrote and published the adventures of John Carter, a Civil War veteran mysteriously transported to Mars. The red planet he describes has the canals and breathable air. We know today that the canals we thought we saw on Mars in 1912 aren’t canals at all, and that everything else Burroughs posited about Mars is bunk. The thing is, Burroughs’ Mars was ten times better than the real thing, with warring aliens having at it with 1912 (or is it 1865?) technology, leaping at each other from wooden-decked airships wielding swords and long rifles. As a 13 year-old walking hormone in the 1980s, those Frank Frazetta covers pulled me in and the swordplay and outrageous racial (as in human) chauvinism of the hero that kept me there. The inaccuracies didn't matter. That a nine-figure film has been produced suggests that I'm not the only one with this opinion.  

The Soviet Union

For amber waves of - uh oh...

America's bogey man for five decades, it goes without saying that a raft of exploitative SF novels were written (especially in the 1980s) where the Soviet Union - godless, monolithic, and populated with sinister men all named Dragonov – challenged America’s sovereignty, invaded its shores, took control outer space, and tried to destroy democracy. These writers were addressing what so many of us felt was an inevitable showdown. For years, the Soviet Union was unbeatable on the field of battle or sport, so it seemed logical they’d eventually triumph. Only they didn’t.

The worst of these books can now exclusively be found in the bargain bin at a garage sale, yet even “good” SF novels sometimes can’t resist citing some eventual triumph by the USSR in their pages. In Arthur C. Clarke's 2010: Odyssey Two, the Soviet (and Chinese) space programs rival those of America, and Clarke can’t help but sprinkle the names of prominent Soviet political dissidents like physicists Andrei Sakharov and Yuri Orlov into the pages.It’s less intrusive in other books (e.g., Orson Scott Card's Ender's Game), but it doesn’t take much to make an otherwise good story hopelessly quaint.

World War III 


The study of Apocalypse literature is worthy of a blog entry (or a book) of its own, but WW III goes hand-in-hand with the Soviet Union as an anxiety that was at the front of everyone’s brain for decades.

Hint: We’re doomed to repeat ourselves

If you did duck and cover drills in the 1960s, or watched a television “event” like The Day After in the 1980s, you were anxious about it; and how we would deal with the war and its aftermath have been the subject of countless books and movies. The literature on the subject ranged from real “literature” to fair-to-poor pop culture-ready Road Warrior rehashes.

The “literature” of this genre (A Canticle for Liebowitz, by Walter M. Miller, Jr., On the Beach, by Nevil Shute) focused on literary themes like the nature of man and the role of hope while following the survivors.

The action-oriented Road Warrior rehashes (Damnation Alley, by Roger Zelazny, the Traveler series, the Survivalist series) were exactly that: action, violence, and plain fanboy fun. As a young teenager, my favorite was by far and away Traveler series. 

Those who wrote the series under the pseudonym D.B. Drumm had the acumen to include absolutely everything: a deadly loner with a dark past (natch), awesome vehicles with crossbows and flame throwers, hot damsels in distress who have sex with the hero, punked out, road marauding enemies (who always get their just desserts), mutants, outposts of civilization and hope, and remnants of the U.S. military pursuing the hero (but who always got their just desserts); like I said, they left out nothing.

Allohistorical, antiquated, or just plain awesome?

The “trashier” books are probably lying in the bargain bin with the “Soviet domination” books, but the “literature” end of the spectrum still holds up. In Liebowitz, the initial nuclear conflict (whoops, spoiler!) is the launching point of the novel, which is far greater than the sum of its three parts.

I would love to hear of any other entertaining examples if you’ve got ‘em. I would distinguish anachronistic SF from the now-popular allohistorical fiction (AKA, alternative history), which are deliberate “what if” studies.

The lesson here is that the more existential the SF author keeps the science and future events, the longer a shelf life the story will have. Easier said than done. We know the keyboard won’t last much longer (the QWERTY array is almost 125 years old), and Moore’s Law says supercomputers shouldn’t take up a whole room like the HAL 9000 did (or real supercomputers do), but if you know a credible way to describe what will replace them, there may be better money for you as a futurist than an SF writer.

 - Chris