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Comment by vegetablepotpie | Hacker News Reader

I read Robert Heinlein's "I Will Fear No Evil". The book takes place in 2015. In one of the chapters there were characters who were looking for a freshly dead body and one of the characters suggested they could search computerized medical databases because "computers were growing increasingly interconnected".

I found that funny, I was reading that book close to 2015 and I thought, "we already have the Internet". Then I realized the book was published in 1970, before even the personal computer revolution. So then I realized the incredible foresight Heinlein must have had to anticipate that people would network computers.

In the "I Will Fear No Evil" universe computers are connected together in a slowly growing ad-hoc network. I think this was a reasonable prediction, most progress happens slowly and incrementally. "Revolutionary" change that happens quickly is the exception, rather than the rule.

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Computers have been networked since the late '50s-early '60s. SABRE, the airline reservation system, went online in 1960. Heinlein would have been well aware of networked computing.

yep. If anything, Henlein seeing the networking of computers as something that develops much more slowly than practical need for spaceflight has to go down as a big miss.

cf John Brunner writing in 1970 about computer-enabled surveillance, data theft and inventing the concept of the internet worm in 1970 (and yes, he also wrote books with near-omnipotent talking computers...)

In general, what science fiction authors tended to miss was the democratization of both access and content. See Encyclopedia Galactica. Knowledge is centralized and curated.

An even better example comes from Oath of Fealty (Jerry Pournelle). There's this central knowledge repository but only some people can access it--or at least have some sort of mental Tier 1 access. Wikipedia it ain't.

I think what a lot of people miss sometimes with science fiction is, it could have been that way. Wikipedia (and the early Internet) had a pretty intense open access culture, and I wouldn't be surprised if part of that was influenced by these stories directly.

> In general, what science fiction authors tended to miss was the democratization of both access and content. See Encyclopedia Galactica. Knowledge is centralized and curated.

Instead of Asimov’s Encyclopedia Galactica, OTOH, see Adams, and Encyclopedia Galactica vs. Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.

I think it's a bit of a stretch to be saying that Sci-fi writers were making accurate predictions of what would happen in the future and when. Heinlein doesn't write about space because he thought it would happen at a particular time, it's because it opened doors into interesting stories and new ways of thinking about things whilst relating back to what already exists. It's less about what is going to happen and more about what's interesting. Personally I think even today we struggle to write good stories with that cope with the existence of instant access to every other person on the planet and every fact known to man.

So many of Connie Willis' books over time have had a healthy dose of running around missed connections. With the exception of her WWII period books, a young reader would pick up one of those books today and wonder why the protagonist couldn't just text whoever she was looking for.

Sure, some sci-fi writers were openly disdainful about sci-fi as prophecy. Ursula Le Guin's famous "prediction is... not the business of novelists. A novelist's business is lying" foreword to The Left Hand of Darkness springs to mind. But some of them took their technology more seriously than others, and sometimes authors finding it easier to imagine a world a couple of decades away with space battles than one with ubiquitous mobile communication devices says things about their thought processes and the world they lived in beyond them simply needing characters to be uncontactable for the next event to happen.

And also, sometimes they were far more right about the details they threw in to be vaguely believable and less on the money about what they really cared about, like HG Wells' plot device for a world in which war was impossible which is believed to have been what inspired Szilard to create an actual atomic bomb (whilst the thrust of the book failed to convince enough of the right people of the merits of a World State). And Solution Unsatisfactory is uncannily closer still...

Heinlein has a preface to one of this story collections where he claims to not be making predictions about specific dates, but rather is aiming to put many of his stories on a shared timeline for the coherence of his imagined future.

That said, he was also obsessed with 'hard' science fiction and attempting to create plausible technological what-if scenarios.

I'm reminded of the Sector General series by James White, where in the first book he had wireless earbuds connected to a remote computer acting as real-time translators, but characters still had to go to a (video)phone on the wall to talk to each other remotely.

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