I recently listened to some Ray Bradbury stories in my car. Nearly all were written in the 1950s and set in the 21st Century. Yesterday, the Supreme Court issued a couple of rulings in support of gay marriage. It occurred to me how differently the future turned out from what Bradbury had imagined.
Bradbury’s stories feature working husbands, stay-at-home wives, and two respectful children who call their father “Sir”. The stories that I listened to did not include any single parents, gay people, gay couples, or heterosexual couples in which the woman was the primary earner.
What else did Bradbury get wrong? Telecommunications in 2050 looked just like telecommunications in 1950. Each house, home to a family of husband, wife, and two children, had a single wired telephone. It would ring and, as there was no caller ID, the call would begin with the person who answered asking who was calling and to whom the caller wished to speak.
Bradbury imagined a static future Earth population with roughly 2 billion people. If anything, the population would be on its way down due to nuclear wars. Those people would invest heavily in talk psychotherapy, which would reliably make them feel better about everything. Nobody in Bradbury’s stories takes mood-improving pills; if they are suffering from anxiety, a chat with a psychologist will put them right.
Bradbury’s workers of the future seemed to enjoy their jobs (unlike the 70 percent of Americans who are “not engaged” or “actively disengaged” according to this Gallup poll). Nobody in Bradbury’s stories is collecting welfare, unemployment, disability, or any other kind of taxpayer-funded payments unrelated to work. Other than soldiers and policemen (all men in both cases!), nobody seems to work for the government.
He was talking about 2050, not 2013. Just wait… 😉
don’t forget firemen
In one Philip K. Dick story, (I forget which story it was), the author imagined a futuristic world in which the characters were using flying personal vehicles to get around town. However, for duplicate copies of reports, they were still using carbon paper.
Hmm, it’s been a while, but if I remember right, Guy Montag of “Fahrenheit 451” was not particularly happy with his fireman’s job. And his wife was taking lots of pills, eventually almost dying of an overdose.
We will have rocket rides in the near future. Is east coast aero making any plans for rocket plane instruction? Are the neighbors in Concord going to like rocket take offs?
“An interesting idea every three months” – but this isn’t one of them. I’ve been waiting, Phil, for you to weigh in on the freshly revealed US surveillance state. Perhaps Fahrenheit 451 would have been a better choice for the car. Then Bradbury wouldn’t look like such a fool.
I don’t think Ray Bradbury intended to write social commentary, unlike George Orwell or Aldous Huxley. His idea of what society would look like was more or less an unconscious projection of the spirit of the times.
In the 1950s, most people were looking forward to a return to normality. After a decade of prohibition and gangsters, stock market rise and crash, another decade of depression and dust bowl, and then a world war, people just wanted to get back to normal. So that forms a more or less natural backdrop to Bradbury’s science fiction.
I don’t remember Bradbury that well, but I guess he was somewhat optimistic about the positive effects that new technology would have on human existence. Most people were.
Longleaf: I didn’t mean to imply that Bradbury was a fool! Only that it is hard to predict the future even when that is part of one’s job (as it is for a science fiction author).
Walter: Based on the stories in the collection and on Fahrenheit 451, I don’t think it is fair to say that Bradbury was an optimist regarding technology improving everyone’s life. His characters are not happily surfing an Internet-like thing, enjoying video conferences with relatives, and playing Xbox-style games (and certainly not while collecting 99 weeks of unemployment checks!).
As I remember Ray Bradbury was pretty much a luddite. He still used a manual typewriter when writing his stories, thought e-book readers were awful pieces of crap, and was generally old-man like around most technology. Beyond that, it’s been said the only science fiction writer who ever predicted anything completely novel was Arthur C Clarke and geosynchronous satellites. Most science fiction is laughably dated in technology, but I tend to think they focus on bigger picture, universal theme-type stuff that itself ages quite well.
http://techland.time.com/2012/06/06/ray-bradbury-didnt-love-all-tech-but-he-loved-what-mattered-most/
My Bad. Bradbury was no optimist. Fahrenheit 451 is mostly about a dystopia. It ends on a poistive note, with people memorizing books. But that’s an anti-technology note as well. That’s not only pre-PC, it’s pre-Gutenberg.
I think HG Wells can be said to have introduced a completely novel device with the time machine. Oh yeah, that’s right. A time machine hasn’t been built. Yet. There’s always time for that.
I like revisiting visions of the future from way back when. It’s amusing how much they get wrong, but it’s surprising how much they get right.
One of my favotites is “As We May Think”. This was an article by Vannevar Bush published in Atlantic Magazine sometime in the 1940s. It’s worth reading. Bush was one of the last champions of analog computing, so you can imagine how much he gets wrong. But his description of a world wide information reference system presages the world wide web with remarkable accuracy.
On the other hand, “The Goon Show”, the crazy British comedy radio show in the 1950’s (Peter Sellers, Harry Secombe and Spike Milligan), sometimes hit the mark without even trying. In one episode, Neddy Seagoon uses his vest pocket telephone.