The Way The Future Was

Posted by Colin Harvey Apr 24, 2009

Re-reading Greg Bear's Eon over the last week, it struck me as how alien Bear's 2005 felt.

As I alluded to in the review, Eon was written at a time when the world felt as if was at times on the brink of a nuclear abyss, and Eon's contemporaries are John Badham's film War Games, which --until it pulled some fictional rabbits out of hats-- felt as grim a film as was ever made, and Frankie Goes To Hollywood's Two Tribes.

None of them could know just how close to collapse the Soviet Union was, nor that even before the book was published the Russians would appoint a young reformer who would change the political landscape beyond recognition.

It's easy to mock such prophecies, but we should stop seeing science fictional visions of futures as 'wrong guesses,' or something to be derided - after all, how much better would we do at predicting the future?

SF's history is strewn with wrong guesses. Perhaps the wildest is Rober A. Heinlein's 'The Roads Must Roll' which featured an America covered by moving beltways; in James Blish's magnificent Cities in Flight the cities' fly by slide rule, without more than a hint of a computer; and of course no one saw the internet coming, or the cellphone.

So what?

One of the most popular sub-genres is that of the alternate universe. All of the stories above simply feature alternate futures, where computers or cellphones were never invented. SF is a literature of reflection, rather than prophecy, and these stories are simply reflections at a different angle.

But it's still a little chilling that to think that in Bear's alternate universe of Eon, Colin Harvey was either vaporized in the wave of fire that swept the world four years ago, or died in the nuclear winter that followed. His is a ghost separated from me by the thinnest of membranes.