All very well, shona, but most of the predictive stuff that you and the others have been talking about (Verne, early Clarke, etc.) is mere extrapolation of the present into the future. I'm not being critical of these authors; they were being pretty far-fetched at the time and it probably wouldn't have been obvious to their readers that they were actually extrapolating what was into what might be in certain areas, generally restricted to technology. Orwell, similarly, didn't have to invent Big Brother, he just had to take what was happening around him to an extreme. He was after all writing allegory.
Authors who invent different futures, or who project futures into the far distance have one strike going for them and one strike against. The strike for is that no one currently alive will ever be able to tell them that they were wrong. The strike against is that if they wish to be taken seriously by intelligent readers they can't posit basic changes in human nature or the way that society works. I point out as examples of this Herbert's Dune series and SJ Delany's Triton plus plenty of perhaps more Rabelaisian efforts. Often, much predictive fiction is pretty mundane and half-hearted. TV programmes such as Star Trek, flms such as Star Wars and novels such as Heinlein's Starship Troopers definitely fall into this category. They merely take current social structures and mores and impose a "superior" or "advanced" technology on them, calling it "the future". They don't ring true for me; they use predicted technology to entrench the way things work in the present.
Of course there are exceptions to this. One series that fascinated me because it tinkers with institutions is Greg Bear's Eon trilogy.
Yet we know, even using the past century as a short timescale for comparison, that institutions do change and can change rapidly as a response to technology, even if they appear outwardly similar. Think about the impact on the way we live of the telephone and latterly the computer. These two inventions, along with advances in personal and mass rapid transportation, have transformed life in ways that Verne and Orwell never imagined - or if they did, they didn't write about. I don't for a minute pretend to be able to do this myself, you understand.
Rereading what I've just written, I realise that I haven't made another point clear: Basic human nature won't change as a response to any technological or situational changes. We appear to have avoided this for millenia so far and I predict with confidence that this fact will hold good for the foreseeable - and pretty much, the unforseeable - future!
I'm bored by the mostly purely prescriptive futurisation of the present, I have to admit, and I'm buying less and less sci-fi as a result. The one thing I can say for sure is that whatever any writer predicts, I predict it won't happen that way if they are projecting more than 20 years into the future. If you think I'm being needlessly pessimistic, I suggest you re-read Toffler!
