FOUND: Do dated ideas hurt your enjoyment of the story?

[Pickle]

im currently reading The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch and there is mention of 3D, which is technology here and now.

If i read this book in 5 years time when 4D or something else replaces 3D it wouldnt reduce my enjoyment. I find it excellent that some authors call it right with technology.

Another one is The Space Merchants where they mention Chicken Little which was basically meat grown in a vat for food. Amazing prediction.

[Miles]

It's honest just one of those things. Nearly every piece of fiction ever written will contain some aspect of the time its written in. Holmes and Watson still subscribe to the Victorian Values with which Conan Doyle was brought up with and Isaac Asimov is just as guilty as the great futuristic Galactic Empire of his Foundation stories still belongs to a Post-WW II, Nuclear Family, suit and hat mindset. I think that's why Utopian SF is not as common as it was because we exist in a Post 9-11/recession society (even though I despise that term)where we seem to have a more nihlistic view towards the future. In a way, we've gone back to the sort of SF that was coming out in the 70s just before Star Wars came out when the zeitgeist was suffering the Death of the Dream and Vietnam.

Also, by that same extent, I find Star Trek TNG outdated because the iPad, iPhone and the iPod are twenty times better than the stuff they seem to have.

[Jonathon]

Dated ideas don't bother me at all, I take them as simply being artifacts of the time period that the book was written. I look at it as a reflection of what authors and readers thought possible when the book was first published and that, in and of itself, is fascinating.

During the 40s and 50s, nuclear power was the big new thing, well before the likes of the Chernobyl disaster and it was going to be the power source of the future, so Asimov's use of nuclear power throughout the book doesn't bother me at all.

I have no problem that Asimov didn't predict modern data storage, or renewable energy, or mobile phones. When I was growing up, I never imagined things like wireless networks which we now take for granted, or digital media and online data storage. It's impossible to hold it against him that he didn't see coming what we couldn't see coming 20 years ago.

I also try to bear in mind that a lot of modern technology was inspired by the tech first introduced in the science fiction stories of the 1940s/50s/60s. Would we even have mobile phones if it weren't for the communicator in Star Trek? Or space flight without HG Wells' War of the Worlds? Or touchscreen devices like the iPad and co without Next Gen's PADD? Even Foundation presents some things which we're working on, in particular 3D imaging - there's a whole scene which features playback of a 3D hologram.

What, however, does bother me is dated attitudes. For all that the Galactic Empire is meant to be this 'utopian' society, it's still depicts a universe which is dominated by the white heterosexual male contingent of the population. There's no hint at all that Asimov even thought about how society might have moved on in the course of time.

Women are either receptionists or housewives and are portrayed as either the model image of an idealised 1940s housewife who happily cooks and cleans and does laundry for her husband and wants nothing more than that or is a screeching harpy who's only appeased by expensive gifts.

And as for non-white and non-heterosexual people, there's even less acknowledgement of their existence. I don't recall anyone ever being mentioned as being not of caucasian descent... admittedly I don't remember explicit mentions that everyone was white so maybe the assumption is that by this time everyone's just a nice warm beige and that race/nationality/skin colour aren't an issue.

And then there's Lord Dorwin, who may or may not have been gay (again, no explicit confirmation either way) but he's presented as the lisping, mincing stereotype of gay men which unfortunately still exists today. It was like being beaten over the head with every negative stereotype I've ever come across. The only things missing were a sequined cape and maybe some small cat or dog.

It's these same things that bothered be about The Moon is a Harsh Mistress. Heinlein dealt much better with the race/nationality/skin colour issue in so much that it was made clear that it was a non-issue, but women and homosexuality were still horribly subjected to stereotypes. Wyoh started out as a very promising and strong character but as the book progressed she ended up reduced to being a housewife.

I like 'utopian' sci-fi that shows us a universe where everyone is equal regardless of ethnicity/species/gender/sexual orientation. It's something that Gene Roddenberry did brilliantly with Star Trek, particularly with Uhura in the original series.

[Nathan]

So, you didn't mind that he didn't anticipate technological advances, but you hate that he didn't anticipate major social reform? I'm more inclined to give him a pass on both. In fact, I think he was somewhat progressive in the story. He had ample opportunities to insert caricatures of minorities as servants and such, but never did. It's been noted that race never actually entered the picture, which I find interesting. He describes physical features of different characters, but never once (that I recall) mentions skin color. As for Lord Dorwin, I didn't read him as homosexual, instead I read him as foppish. In fact that's one stereotype that Asimov did play on, the foppish courtier from the court of the emperor.

As for female characters, you really need to read the second book. I finished the first one very early in the month, so I went on to read Foundation and Empire. You'll find your strong female character there.

[Jonathon]

He did anticipate technological advances. He extrapolated nuclear power probably about as far as it could go with portable nuclear reactors replacing batteries, and 3D holography. Admittedly, what he predicted probably wasn't accurate but then again, we don't know what tech will look like that far into the future. That's why I'm willing to let the tech side of things slide - he was working with what he knows and making a best guess, which is really all any sci-fi author can do when trying to predict future technology.

He does, however, seem to have ignored societal issues which were playing out in the world around him. In particular the civil rights movement, which was gaining traction and womens rights, with women now able to serve in the military and not just as nurses.

If I'd enjoyed this book but still had these issues with it, I probably would check out other books in the series. But ultimately, I just didn't like it - it's not the book for me so I don't feel particularly inclined to read any more yet.

[Smyers]

Joe wrote: "Sean wrote: "Huh? Nothing in any of the Foundation books ever suggests that history has a direction as Marxism requires -- the fact that the story isn't set in an anarcho-socialist utopia in fact c..."

You dont understand what Hegelian thought actually is...

Nowhere in the series does Asimov discuss anything approaching the idea of anti-thesis, thesis, synthesis progression that is the foundation of Hegelian historical theory. Hegelian theory is based on necessity of contradiction and the eventual working out of this contradiction; in thought, history, science etc.

The term you're looking for is historical determinism which is more based on behaviorism then philosophy. This puts Asimov solidly in the dominate liberal philosophical tradition of the enlightenment that continued through the natural sciences until the late 1950's. This of course does not take into account Asimov's late evolution after the post-structural/modernist revolution pioneered by Foucault. His new attitude is displayed in the radical shift of Foundations edge and his later novels.

Philosophy is fun

[Steve]

@15. Rick - the debate is still open on whether or not an FTL drive is possible within the confines of special relativity. (Likewise for some forms of time travel). That trope is still alive and will remain so for quite some time - if not longer, lol.

@36. Sara - A lot of folks do fold James Bond into the outer boundaries of the genre; think of them as SF tales involving speculation about espionage. (Of course, Bond like agents will certainly be replaced with roach-sized ones (soon to be replaced by microbe-sized, replaced by nano-sized agents) in the relatively near future.

Where have most of you people been for the past 8 years? (Are most of you relatively young or relatively ancient?) I've been castigating fans who can't stretch their sense of wonder to include older works for at least that long - and then I run into a whole group over here who say "not an issue - let's talk about story!"
What a refreshing change!

[Firstname]

Keith wrote: "The problem with dated technology -- paper, storage mediums, capacity, etc -- is that calling it dated assumes we will always have what we have, only more of it. In other words, that we will keep m..."

We used to be able to cross the English Channel on a hovercraft. I now haz a sad.

[Firstname]

James wrote: "I'd rather err on the side of "painting every leaf on the tree," which seems to be a convention of fantasy. "

Wild applause.

[Firstname]

Ulmer Ian wrote: "This requires an unbroken hand-off between storage formats. So it's perfect..."

Really? Have you tried to find a reader for a 5 1/2 inch floppy, recently? How are your Betamax and Laserdisc collections coming along? One of the things I loved about Gateway is that the fans the humans regarded as garbage ended up being the alien file-storage medium.

[Thomas]

You cannot ding a dated work of science fiction for being dated. It is not the author who "gets the future wrong". Nowhere do they claim to be a prophet making predictions you can bank on and buy stock in.

Asimov also had no idea about microwave ovens, cell phones (let alone pocket calculators), social media, 3D printing, or UPC codes.

You know what the one thing that science fiction authors of the 30's and 40's all failed to predict when they wrote stories about going to the moon? That the world would be able to watch on a thing called television. They kicked themselves in the pants for missing that one.

Meanwhile we are still waiting for positronic brains... Some of us, more than others.

[George]

"Where have most of you people been for the past 8 years?"

World of Warcraft, Steve, World of Warcraft.

[Matthew]

Yes......I couldn't get through Stranger in a Strange Land because of how the women were treating in the story. The sort of 1950's, 1960's america was just too foreign for me.

I have the exact same problem when I first tried to watch "Mad Men". The social relationships were so foreign to me they just didn't seem real and felt comically fake and unbelievable.

[[deleted user]]

If it's dated but internally consistent, not a problem for me. I'm already suspending my disbelief.

[Rick]

Whereas, Matthew, I grew up in the 60s and so, though I was a kid, they didn't seem that foreign to me.

This isn't at any specific person here, but I always find it rather sad when SF fans are so limited in what they can imagine and accept. Time and again people who claim to love a literature that speculates on alien life and other wild concepts object to the mildest oddness in stories.

[Michael]

Doesn't bother me one iota. The problem with crtiquing sci-fi writers with the benefit of having seen the future that wasn't available for them to see is that it's like mocking stock brokers for not having foreseen the crash. It's unrealistic to expect a sci-fi writer to get even 10% of his predictions correct. Foundation is a great story that doesn't depend whatsoever on any futuristic views aside from psychohistory, and that's a science that may eventually come, given the power of today's computers.