Anti-anachronisms

My sister and I were discussing this earlier: One of the reasons old science fiction seems dated is that it lacks certain things we logically expect to be present, given our perspective on technological developments. For example, you might wonder why Star Trek and Asimov missed the idea of email and spam so completely. Yet Niel Stephenson really caught on, long before it ever appeared. It's pretty cool. You might also get annoyed at how people misinterpret black holes, even well after they are understood (for your information, when a star collapses into a black hole, its mass does not change. It just gets compacted. That means the gravitational pull on any orbiting planets wouldn't change. That means that the orbiting planets don't fall in--they keep orbiting). You might also notice little annoyances, like the fact that in Star Wars episode IV, the radios have static for no apparent reason during the fight to destroy the death star. Fans will argue--email somehow became obsolete, those various black holes were special cases, and there was an effort to jam or interfere with radio communications of the resistance. But those who understand how email could work, how black holes must work, and how digital transmission and error correction work, know this is all just silliness. It's just a misinterpretation of what the future might be like based on the time when the fiction was written. And yet, some writers do amazing jobs at predicting stuff. Read The Machine Stops, or note how Niel Stephenson predicts problems of spam and nanobot security in his books (or so I've heard). Even Star Trek did a pretty good job of predicting how communicators might work and how small they'd become, even if it got some other stuff wrong.

All these problems are roughly like anachronisms in historical fiction. An anachronism is something that appears out of place for its time period. An obvious example would be if you read a book where Julius Caesar had a digital wristwatch, or if Henry VIII were using an iPod. You would spot this being out of place at once. But when something is missing, you might just as easily notice it. Sometimes, these missing things are intentional. In Battlestar Galactica (2006) you will notice a complete lack of cordless phones and communicators. Why? Because in their super digital age, networks are no longer safe. They have an explanation of why things seem to have regressed: by choice, for security. Stargate SG-1 basically claims that gunpowder is more effective than energy weapons during the fight against the Replicators, though not necessarily against the Goa'uld. Yet we still wonder, why didn't Star Trek ever mention email; why didn't Babylon 5 explore the benefits of digital paper like Firefly (we can see this kind of technology is on its way). And we notice awkwardly how wrong early sci-fi writers got nuclear explosions, how unrealistic the original conception of Spiderman becoming a superhero from radiation was (later versions of the story use DNA viruses or somesuch, which is equally far-fetched), and so forth. All of these illustrate these sorts of reverse anachronisms. They're inevitable. There's something missing, perhaps even obvious, that ought to be there that makes the whole story look a bit...fudged.

Yet despite this, older science fiction is still interesting to read, because other writers have successfully tried to explain these throwbacks, these faults in advancement. My sister was telling me of a story she'd read where humans had simply missed an obvious scientific principle which enabled interstellar travel, until another species tried to conquer them. Firefly and Serenity simply point out that sometimes people lack obvious technology because of a lack of finances, manpower, or other resources (the central planets are much better off than the rim planets). Doctor Who styles much of these things as futuristic attempts at being "retro", or oversights stemming from pride or a lack of education or a conspiracy. Battlestar Galactica explains away some things (or even introduces them) by noting how they turned out to be unsafe, outmoded, impractical, or otherwise dangerous or unusable in the futuristic context.

Frankly, it might not matter that science fiction gets outdated, as long as the music doesn't drive you crazy. What matters are the characters. Science fiction that centers entirely on trying to show cool technology and concepts will probably date the worst, because it lacks anything to carry it into the decades that will come. On the other hand, sometimes these reverse anachronisms can give a story charm, if the story has real character and interest.