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January 2007 Message from Dan
Greetings Readers, Friends, and Other Visitors:
As I write this on the first day of January, 2007, the future
is as blank and untrammeled as the fields of Colorado snow
I see outside my window. But since it will be a few days before
I can post this January message, I’m sure 2007 will
be sufficiently trammeled and marred, yellowed and stomped-on
before you read this.
I’d like to talk with you about the future in this
first week of January 2007. There’s a reason that this
month is named after the two-faced god Janus, one set of eyes
looking forward, the other set gazing backward.
 Speaking
as a sometimes science-fiction writer, I can say without any
doubt that SF writers make lousy prognosticators. For all
of the genre’s bragging about “predicting the
future,” science fiction and its creators are batting
about 000.000019 in terms of seeing and telling us about any
real future.
Some years ago, speculative fiction grand master Harlan Ellison
was chosen as a California TV spokesperson for some car company
specializing in tiny econoboxes that got 42 miles to the gallon
in exchange for no horsepower, safety, room, or quality, and
on Harlan’s TV commercial they had some trouble deciding
on a “super” – i.e. the superimposed white
caption to identify him as he started walking and talking
(both of which he did quite well, actually, and on the first
take.) They finally decided on HARLAN ELLISON – NOTED
FUTURIST.
Well . . . ahem. SF writers are SF writers and there’s
not a real futurist in our herd. But then, the entire idea
of “predicting the future” is a chump’s
game. All the Alvin Tofflers and Paul Erlich’s predictions
combined add up to “Sorry, but no cigar.” (Erlich,
a neo-Malthusian Prophet of Doom for decades, has not just
been wrong in his confident and outspoken predictions, but
absolutely and totally and ridiculously and absurdly wrong,
but that hasn’t stopped him from receiving every possible
award and accolade from every possible group that could agree
with his political stance. Prophets, it seems, never have
to be right to be lionized, only loud and sectarian.)
But after briefly discussing some of my disappointments about
this sorry “future” that we do have here on the
downward slope of the first decade of the 21st Century, I
will end by listing some predictions for 2007 that I guarantee
– a full moneyback guarantee – will be
accurate.
Calvin & Hobbes:
As I wrote in my 1997 speech titled “Science Fiction:
A Window on the Future” presented at Galaxiales ’97
in Nancy, France (and collected in NEGATIVE SPACES: TWO TALKS
published in 1999 by Subterrranean Press) –
“My favorite philosophical and epistemological commentary
on science fiction and the future appeared in the newspaper
on New Year’s Day 1990, but I suspect it will remain
just as valid on the first day of the new year of the next
millennium. This is from the comic strip ‘Calvin and
Hobbes:’”
There follows four panels from that strip that Subterranean
Press and I received permission to reprint for publication
– once – so I’ll have to quote the text
and allow your imagination to provide the perfect Bill Watterson
artwork for the following. (At least in Nancy, I got to stand
and act out Calvin’s and Hobbes’s movements, with
my translator Jean-Daniel then acting them out after me in
French body language . . .)
Panel One: (longshot of Calvin and Hobbes crossing a wide,
snowy field, bare trees far in the background . . .)
Hobbes: A new decade is coming up.
Calvin: Yeah. Big deal! Hmph.
Panel Two: (closeup of Calvin, gesticulating angrily, arms
outstretched, mittens and stocking cap on, kidney-bean-shaped
mouth wide open, little puffs in the cold air as he rants
. . .)
Calvin: Where are the flying cars? Where are the moon
colonies? Where are the personal robots and the zero gravity
boots, huh? You call this a new decade? You call this the
future?? HA!
Panel Three: (Medium shot of Hobbes, arms down at his sides,
expression blank, scarf around his tiger neck, watching impassively
as Calvin pounds his mittened palm and continues, little puffs
of warm air rising with the rhetoric . . .)
Calvin: Where are the rocket packs? Where are the disintegration
rays? Where are the floating cities?
Panel Four: (slightly longer shot of Calvin and Hobbes walking
away through the snow . . .)
Hobbes: Frankly, I’m not sure people have the brains
to manage the technology they’ve GOT.
Calvin: (ignoring his friend and still waving his arms and
ranting . . .) I mean, LOOK at this!
We still have WEATHER?! Give me a break!
Meteor Bumpers:
In 1957 I was nine years old and busy glueing meteor bumpers
to the tops of model space stations. I admit that I was curious
at first as to why only the top of the space station
(which was a torus, of course, meant to spin for simulated
gravity, which is the way God meant for space stations to
be designed) had to have a meteor bumper, but then I realized
that the station always kept its bottom oriented toward the
Earth below it, so it was safe from meteor strikes from that
direction. In 1957, space evidently still had an up and down.
 The
1950’s may have been one of the best decades of American
history in which to be a kid (the other being, oddly enough,
the turbulent ‘40’s.) Jean Shepherd’s A
Christmas Story has become a classic because it’s
that rarest of things, sentimentality without lies and distortion.
My memory of the ‘50’s reminds me of a great title
John Updike gave to one of his stories (set in the 1950’s,
of course) – “The Year When Everyone Was Pregnant.”
The 1950’s were pregnant with the future. At few times
before then and certainly at no time since then has this country
been so confident about itself and about the future. When
Disneyland opened in the mid-50’s, one of the most popular
areas was Tomorrowland and one of the most popular
rides was its “Trip to the Moon.” (Tomorrowland,
after going 50’s retro in recent years, has essentially
been abandoned as a concept by the Disney Imagineers . . .
it seems that no one is really interested in going to tomorrow
any more.)
The future was taller buildings and faster cars, most with
glass bubble tops (buildings and cars), but it was
also nuclear energy too cheap to meter, atomic power in planes,
ships, and maybe those bubble-top cars (and possibly exploding
near our schoolyards, but only possibly), and space travel.
Lots of space travel. The future in 1957, even before the
Russians put up their little Sputnik and scared the everloving
aspirations out of all of us, was all about hurling iron into
orbit. My model space station and the future in general were
designed by Willy Ley out of Wehrner von Braun.
About ten years later, when Stanley Kubrick’s 2001:
A Space Odyssey was released, the future was still about
space travel. The space station torus was a double wheel –
cool – and I could find no sign of a meteor bumper (an
obvious oversight) – but it was still a space station
the way God and Willy and Wehrner meant space stations to
be. And a huge moonbase called Clavius that must be home to
thousands (and only one big base of many, obviously, since
the Soviets had theirs somewhere nearby.) And it was a future
– that lost 2001 – where we could send an atomic-powered
spacecraft the size of a supertanker, carrying only two crewmen
conscious (and they had the requisite personalities of robots),
on a several-year mission out to Jupiter Space.
 That
was the future.
Oh, and one computer. A big honking mainframe AI named HAL
9000 who, at his first opportunity, tried to kill every human
being on the ship.
Well, that obviously wasn’t and isn’t our 2001-and-on
future.
What do we have in 2007, space-wise?
Instead of a noble torus space station rotating majestically
in orbit (with or without the Blue Danube Waltz playing in
the background) while a permanent crew of hundreds of civilian
scientists carry out experiments (when they’re not dining
in the Howard Johnson Earthlight Room), we have an orbiting
septic tank with big flappy solar panels that holds, at most,
a crew of . . . three. Usually it’s two Americans and
one surly Russian eating weird food (and not a real scientist
among ‘em), or two happy Russians and a surly American
e-mailing his or her family eleven times a day, or maybe a
Russian and an American and a European astronaut who looks
like he’s in pain all the time because he really
wants a smoke and the other two won’t let him and he
can’t even step outside to sneak a cigarette.
Or sometimes we have the Russian-American triage joined by
some dipshit millionaire or millionairess who’s spent
$25 million or so to be sent up by the money-grubbing Russian
space corporation and to float around with a big shit-eating
grin on his or her face, his or her spacesuited mass infinitely
more useless than a replacement valve for the chemical toilet
or his/her equivalent weight in peanut butter or borscht,
while the real astronauts and cosmonauts grit their teeth
and try not to fling the stupid fucker out the airlock.
This is our future in manned spaceflight in the
21st Century?? With Calvin, I have to say “Give me a
break!”
“ . . . and it never was!”:
A few years ago I was invited to give a talk at a local museum
as part of a traveling Smithsonian Exhibition called “Images
of the Future.”
 The
pictorial exhibition was wonderful, showing more than a century
and a half of Americans’ optimistic illustrations of
the future they were so eager to get to. I brought dozens
of my own examples as well, showing how certain iconic imagery
-- such as Chesley Bonestell’s fantastic paintings for
the 1949 book The Conquest of Space and his background
matte paintings for the 1950 movie “Destination Moon”
showing lunar mountains, craters, and ridges razor sharp since
“scientists point out that there’s obviously no
erosion on the moon, no wind or water” (they didn’t
think of the erosive power of billions of micrometeorites
over billions of years, or even of the effects of the solar
wind in vacuum) -- prejudiced our views of things for decades.
But the center of my talk amidst the Smithsonian images of
the glorious future was the quote often attributed to Will
Rogers (and sometimes to others) – “The future
ain’t what it used to be. And it never was.”
My focus was on not just wondrous sci-fi technologies that
never caught on, but also on existing technologies and trends
that once seemed to be the wave of the future but which, for
various reasons, disappeared. Here are a few of those along
with the reasons they never quite made it . . .
Corfam shoes: reason they disappeared – don’t
ask.
- Airships!: The most comfortable and luxurious and elegant
form of air travel ever devised, the equivalent of the QE2
versus the cattle trucks that are modern coach travel via
airlines. The reason they failed – May 16, 1937: “Oh,
the humanity!”
- Slidewalks: Our beloved sci-fi moving sidewalks, predicted
for American cities since the late 1800’s. Elaborately
described in novels by such writers as Isaac Asimov (he
had multiple bands of slidewalks in parallel, all moving
at different speeds, so stepping from one to the other became
an urban skill of the far future, such as 1980.) Reason
they never caught on in real life – they’re
a stupid idea. We need more exercise, not less, and moving
bands of
 slidewalks
would create stupid obstacles to most travel. Being a pedestrian
in New York is already an art form. (Caveat – we have
slidewalks, still clumsily called “moving walkways,”
at most major airports, especially in those concourses that
are several miles long, but most also have a recorded voice
near the end – “Warning! The moving walkway
is coming to an end! Warning!” Perhaps Hobbes
is right . . . we don’t have the brains to manage
the technology we’ve already got.)
- Nuclear power everywhere: Well, it seemed like a good
idea once and it may again, in a much more sober era. But
we can express what killed it for 30 years in four words
– Chernobyl, Three Mile Island.
- Flying Cars: Get serious. Besides technology letting us
down – I mean, airplanes are still airplanes and require
everything that airplanes 50 or 90 years ago needed, including
runways – Hobbes’s Law applies here: we barely
have the brains to manage the ground-based transportation
technology we have now. Can you imagine all those idiots
you see during your morning commute in the air?
The woman putting on her makeup while eating a Big Mac while
talking on her cellphone? The backwards-baseball cap yahoo
in the rusty pickup truck just looking for his daily catharsis
of road rage . . . in the air? Give me a break.
- Moon bases: Here the “failure” of the future
is not so much a failure as common sense. We went to the
moon, we planted a flag, we brought home rocks . . . why
go back permanently? At least while our chemical space transportation
systems are so primitive and expensive? Here I wasn’t
disappointed because I always suspected, even as a young
person enthralled with manned . . .er . . . humaned spaceflight,
that the exploration of the moon would most resemble the
exploration of Antarctica – i.e. an “Heroic
Age” of initial exploration that amounted to little
more than planting a flag and showing we could get there
much as the great Antarctic explorers did circa 1900-1914,
followed by 40 years or so of no one going back. (The permanent
Antarctic bases were set up during the International Geophysical
Year of 1957-58.) But even by that timetable, we’re
a bit behind schedule on setting up a permanent base on
the moon.
- You’ll note that these are all mid (or earlier)-20th
Century dreams of the future. We’ve not only abandoned
most of those, just as Disney abandoned Tomorrowland,
but we’ve abandoned many more recent “predictions”
– telecommuting (few people want to be left out of
actual human interaction on the job), electronic commons
(too many people have a vested interest in copyrights),
abandoned city centers ala Toffler (communications technology
may “free us” from having to live and work in
cities, but it turns out we like working in urban environments),
flight from the lilly-white suburbs to more “real”
communities (it turns out that the suburbs are the real,
and preferred, place to live, even for minorities that now
make up more than 50% of the population in suburbs) . .
. you name it.
As soon as noted futurists confidently predict something,
it starts becoming a falsehood.
Bill Gibson’s Cute Little Turntable Disk Drive:
Some of you may have noted that I’m not being fair
to science fiction and speculative fiction in saying that
it never really “predicts” the future, and while
I’ll stand by my opinion that SF and writings by “noted
futurists” have a miserable record – as in always
missing the most important aspects of the real future when
it arrives – it’s true that SF has prepared the
general populace to new ideas in some important ways.
Star Trek was, in my opinion (and I watched all
three seasons of the original series with my college pals)
a silly program – with a few notable exceptions –
but there’s no doubt that it popularized the idea of
spaceflight for several generations, just as the silly 1950
Destination Moon with its far-off-the-mark Bonestell
matte paintings did for the first generation of NASA engineers.
 But
our genre has to confess that throughout the 30’s, 40’s,
50’s, 60’s, and – incredibly – the
1970’s, computers were, except for the usual Frankenstein
tale of the thinking machine turning on its creators, a minor
theme in SF. There were almost no computers in the classics
of the ‘50’s – such odd masterpieces as
Asimov’s Foundation Trilogy – and those
few mentions of computers reeked of huge mainframes and vacuum
tubes. It wasn’t until the 1980’s that SF really
began to speculate about the transformative possibilities
of networked computers, but to our credit, SF writers made
the paradigm breakthrough of thinking of cyberspace as
a place long before such technogurus as Bill Gates or
Steve Jobs ever did.
In 2001: A Space Odyssey, Dr. Heywood Floyd, up
in the double-torus space station, steps into a Bell Telephone
phonebooth (they had the old Bell logo on the telephone videoscreen
. . . even Arthur C. Clarke couldn’t predict that Ma
Bell would be broken up into smaller companies long before
the year 2001 . . . but then again, the spaceplane that carried
Floyd up to orbit belonged to Pan Am!) . . .
Where was I before I parenthesized my thoughts?
Oh, yes . . . Haywood Floyd calling home from orbit on a
videophone was right in the mainstream of predictive SF, but
neither Clarke nor Kubrick nor any SF writer of the day (and
this was the late ‘60’s!) imagined that our astronauts
in orbit in the real 2001 (or 2007) would be sending e-mails
home via a planetary proto-datasphere called the Internet.
[Author’s note here – I saw some reference to
me being the first SF writer to use the term “World
Wide Web,” the reference referring to my 1989 Hyperion
novel, written from 1987 on, but actually that was just “World
Web” and referred to the silly idea of a web of teleportation
devices called farcasters – an old (and almost certainly
impossible) SF idea. What I may have contributed
to the lexicon (and any writer is lucky if he or she contributes
one new word or idea to the language – Catch-22
is a great example) is the word “datasphere.”
In Hyperion I wanted to convey the idea of an Internet
that had grown so pervasive that it became a planetary information
environment analogous to the term “biosphere.”
I have seen at least one citation crediting my 1989 novel
as the source of that term now in wider use. I suggested that
interplanetary datasphere connections would be a megasphere
and a near-galactic amalgam of dataspheres and megadataspheres,
an information environment that would take on a life and purpose
of its own, might be called a metasphere.]
Not too long ago, I had to smile when reading a synopsis
of a NASA study suggesting that it would be useful to create
an Internet on Mars long before human beings landed
there.
 I’m
honored to have made the acquaintance of such writers as William
Gibson and Bruce Sterling, some of our earliest cyberspace
prognosticators. I remember about 1984 – I’d just
begun publishing in earnest – when my friend Ed Bryant
came back from some convention and told me about these radical
new writers who were calling themselves cyberpunks
and who rattled on about a virtual computer environment called
cyberspace. Ed said that these guys dressed in black
leather, wore dark shades even in dim rooms, and that their
attitudes tended to arrive twenty minutes before they did.
He also said that they were cool – an adjective
I’d never before heard used to modify an SF writer –
and they called their cyberpunky predilections The Movement.
“If they’re cyberpunks, who are we?” I
asked Ed. As I mentioned, I’d only been publishing short
fiction for a year or two and even though I was in my 30’s,
some reviewers (who obviously hadn’t met me) were referring
to me as a “hot, young writer.”
“We’re BOFs,” said Ed.
“BOF?”
“Boring Old Farts,” said Ed in his usual flat-affect
Martin-Mull delivery. And so we’ve been ever since.
In later years, I was lucky enough to make the acquaintance
of most of the original cyberpunks and found most of them
to be thoughtful, quiet people – although “talking
to” (i.e. listening to) Bruce Sterling in an hour’s
conversation gives one precisely the kind of expanding-brain
migraine that interlocutors used to report after listening
to Buckminster Fuller.
 Bill
Gibson (Neuromancer) was actively
shy and I doubt if I’ll ever forget the first time I
heard him talking about his early stories and cyberspace novels.
He wrote Neuromancer, almost certainly the great
breakthrough cyberspace novel, on a typewriter. Quite a bit
later, when some admirers – I believe they were in Japan,
where they revere Bill as a minor god, much as they did the
stolidly ineffable Herman Kahn a generation earlier –
gave Gibson his first computer, he did what any of us BOFs
would have done. He took it home and then took it apart.
“I was surprised to find that it was mostly empty space
in the case,” said Bill. “But I liked the disk
drive. It reminded me of my record turntable.”
Of such stuff are our cyber-prophets made.
Dan’s Ten Absolutely Infallible Predictions
for 2007:
I promised you these, so here goes . . .
- Microsoft’s new operating system, VISTA, will become
available in January. Hackers will have already found weaknesses
in it and are licking their chops to show you their new
tricks. Patches will be forthcoming from Microsoft in the
spring.
- Flatscreen TVs and high-definition will continue to be
the buying craze in 2007, forcing a lot more fuzzy long
shots in TV shows with older actors and actresses, causing
directors to abandon the entrenched TV tradition of close-ups
and medium shots. Several current network news anchors will
get too fuzzy-filtered to be visible and will be replaced
by younger, HD-tolerant faces who will have reading difficulties
and will say “like” a lot.
- Iraq and Iraqis will continue to redefine the word “obscenity”
but Americans will not become hardened to it. Rather, our
national gorge will finally become buoyant.
- Democratic candidates for president will work hard to
appear centrist even while appeasing their party’s
militant left wing, which has veto power over their nomination.
Republican candidates for president will work hard to appear
centrist even while appeasing their party’s militant
right wing, which has veto power over their nomination.
The he or she who simultaneously appears and appeases most
successfully will win the nomination and probably the 2008
election.
- Hollywood and theater chains, with their shoddy films,
$8 popcorn, and cheesy commercials will continue treating
movie-goers as if they were captives in the Middle Passage
whom they can pee on without fear of consequence. When high-def
widescreen TVs and home theater systems reach 68% saturation
in the States, there will be an L.A.-aimed raspberry that
will be heard round the world.
- Cell phones will continue to absorb more features and
duties from every other medium and technology around them,
giving us our first indication that computers, at least
as we know them, may be a museum curiosity within not so
many years.
- Internecine Muslim wars will continue and metastasize
in 2007, making the idea of “nation state” obsolete
in at least three places that are now foolishly considered
countries.
- After a blizzard of legislation in their first few months
of power, House and Senate Democrats will remember that
they can do more damage to Republican hopes through investigation
and interrogation than through legislation. The next blizzard
– and one that will continue through 2008 –
will be a blizzard of subpoenaes.
- The 2007 Nobel Prize for Literature will go to someone
who uses the occasion to excoriate the United States and
its policies.
- The most important event of 2007, as is true of the most
important event most years, will be one that no puny punditing
pseudo-prophet could begin to foresee.
As I mentioned above, I did once seek and receive permission
from Bill Watterson's people to reprint the quoted Calvin
& Hobbes strip for a Subterranean Press publication of
my Galaxiales '97 speech about the future, but I'm not sure
if that copyright reprint permission still applies. I'm one
of those Luddite BOFs who still respects copyright and I respect
Bill Watterson even more (especially after he's passed up
so many opportunities to cash in on Calvin & Hobbes merchandising.)
But for all of us who loved Calvin and Hobbes and who daily
(especially when perusing the sad, cynical doodles that too
often pass for comic strips nowadays) mourn their leaving
us, I can't think of a better gift for the New Year than a
final glimpse of this disappointed, grouchy kid who's still
waiting for the same unreachable future we are, and of his
Stoic philosopher of a tiger-friend. Sometimes I think that
they were our only true prophets.
The future ain't what it used to be. But then again, it never
was.
Sincerely,
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