Contents
Forecast: The Worlds Modeler
Escape!
A Slight Miscalculation
Vince’s Dragon
The Last Decision
Men of Good Will
Blood of Tyrants
The Next Logical Step
The Shining Ones
Sword Play
A Long Way Back
Stars, Won’t You Hide Me?
FORECAST: THE WORLDS MODELER
It is called FORECASTS. It was created for the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the generals and admiral who head the U.S. Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marine Corps. It has cost more than a million dollars to develop, and will cost still more before it is fully tested and operational.
FORECASTS is a computer model of the whole world. It is a highly complex program that contains enormous amounts of data about global political trends, natural resources, and social and economic factors, The Joint Chiefs will use FORECASTS to help them make the predictions that go into their Joint Long Range Strategic Appraisal, in which the JCS evaluate what the world in general, and certain nations in particular, will look like over the next thirty years.
Science fiction writers have been making such predictions for generations now, and because the accuracy of the forecast is only as good as the quality of the information being used, the predictions of science fiction writers have generally been better than those of anyone else’s—including the complex computerized “world models” of the scientists who call themselves futurists.
For example, futurists such as the late Herman Kahn have consistently missed the major turning points in recent history. No futurist predicted the Arab oil embargo of and the resulting panic of the energy crises which depressed the economies of the industrialized nations for a decade. The Club of Rome’s much-heralded study, The Limits to Growth, failed utterly to understand that the Earth is not the only body in the universe from which the human race can extract energy and natural resources. The Presidential commission which produced Report on the Year 2000 was equally medieval in its view, and failed even to see the vigorous growth of living standards in the small industrializing nations of the Far East, nations such as Taiwan, South Korea, Malaysia, and Singapore.
Science fiction’s record of predicting the future is much better. Atomic power, space flight, organ transplants, population explosions, the changes in social mores that we now call “the sexual revolution,” genetic engineering—all these changes in human capabilities were described in science fiction stories at least thirty years before they took place in reality. What is more important, science fiction writers also predicted the social consequences of such changes: the Cold War stalemate that has resulted from atomic weapons; the urban sprawl that came from increased mobility and growing population; the breakdown of traditional family values and morality that has accompanied the new sexual freedoms.
Why is it that science fiction writers have seen farther into the future than all others—and more clearly? Is it because they are trained in the sciences? Hardly. Although many writers of science fiction have degrees in the physical or social sciences, very few of them are actually practicing scientists. Isaac Asimov, for example, has not engaged in scientific research for nearly three decades, despite his doctorate in chemistry and his title of professor of biochemistry at Boston University School of Medicine. Ray Bradbury, on the other hand, has no scientific training at all. Yet both Asimov and Bradbury are world-class science fiction writers, and both have graced the literature with scores of powerful and predictive stories.
The thing that makes a science fiction writer better at predicting the future than anyone else is not scientific knowledge, although an understanding of science is very helpful, even necessary. Nor is it a mystical, arcane extrasensory perception of the future. No writer that I know of claims to be in contact with the Spirit of Christmas Yet To Come.
The science fiction writer’s secret can be told in two words: freedom and imagination.
The professional scientists who try to predict the future with computerized accuracy always fail because they are required to stick to the facts. No futurist is going to predict that a semi-accidental discovery will transform the entire world. Yet the invention of the transistor did just that: without the transistor and its microchip descendants, today’s world of computers and communications satellites simply would not exist. Yet a futurist’s forecast of improvements in electronics technology, made around 1950, would have concentrated on bigger and more complicated vacuum tubes and missed entirely the microminiaturization that transistors have made possible. Science fiction writers, circa 1950, “predicted” marvels such as wrist-radios and pocket-sized computers, not because they foresaw the invention of the transistor but because they intuitively felt that some kind of improvement would come along to shrink the bulky computers and radios of that day.