Nice to read a thoughtful piece based on science fiction; a pity not to see a reference to my bellwether, Analog magazine. One way or another it has influenced my thinking. An abiding irritation with time travel stories that ignore the underlying paradox led me to to discover the same explanation of time as the physicist Julian Barbour, admittedly 20 years after him, but by the same sort of epiphany. Mine usually occur in the shower where I do my best thinking.

The incredible rate of change in the 20th century is another issue that science fiction highlights. I got to comparing it to other centuries, notably the the 16th, in the immediate aftermath of the voyages of Bartholomew Diaz and Christopher Columbus. The change was enormous - the discovery of and travel to the whole world, printed books, the Reformation and the start of modern science in the hands of Galileo. Perhaps his greatest discovery was to distinguish between acceleration and velocity. It is not the volume of change over the 20th century that is important, it is the rate of change and it seems to me that this has been constant over the centuries.

Another is the question of world population. Dispassionately, I can't decide whether there were too many people in the world or not enough! It seems to depend on what issue one looks at. Some 20 (or was it 30) years ago the late Harry Stein published a piece in Analog describing how he flew coast to coast across America in his light aircraft and how his abiding impression was of a vast and empty land. Current prediction seem to favour 10 billion as the number at which world population will stabilise. That is probably about double when Harry wrote but still comfortable.

Perhaps the greatest failure of science fiction is to predict how earth's biota, humans included, will evolve when it moves permanently into interplanetary space. Evolution had no problem adapting marine life to life on dry land. It should have no problem adapting to life in vacuum and zero gravity.

Fair enough, I guess. Perhaps Asimov and others might simply have assumed that good governance was a technology with the details settled, even if the broad brushstrokes were different at different times.There might be democracy or aristocracy but the municipal services worked.

Heinlein made a good shot at some predictions that were accurate. mobile communications, telecommerce, ATMs and "Working Girl" automated vacuum cleaners to mention a few doodads. He also tried to address societal issues, investigating through parody the drives of a militaristic culture in "Starship troopers" that seems oddly less parodic as time goes by. In "beyond this horizon" and "for us the living" the imposibility of actually restricting electronic surveillance was acknowledged, and countered by a cultural taboo that made invasion of privacy socially unacceptable, capable of ostracising even a journalist who was crass enough to photograph a private moment. This without preventing surveillance from investigating crime. Setting aside the almost steampunk depictions of computer hardware, "the moon is a harsh mistress" examines the foment of revolution in the only remaining site for a penal colony.

Frederick Pohl's depiction of enforced consumption seems a chilling prediction of even current difficulties in getting out of the rat race, yes, carried to absurdity. Don's mention of A.E van Vogt also recalls to mind the "weapon shops of Isher" - how would law enforcement and commerce respond to freely available weapons that could only be fired in self-defence? Where coersion by force was not practical?

The mistake that many writers may have made including my favourites is that they expected people and culture and civil administration to advance as sensibly as technology, assuming a better society of better people, urbane civilisations of polite people to match our star trek communicators, exquisite surgery and convenient online shopping.

Rusty

Rusty wrote:
"The mistake that many writers may have made including my favourites is that they expected people and culture and civil administration to advance as sensibly as technology, assuming a better society of better people, urbane civilisations of polite people to match our star trek communicators, exquisite surgery and convenient online shopping."

This is very true, and it irritates me now that age and experience is making me increasingly misanthropic. It's the mindset of current aficionados of technology and progress and is leading us into dystopia, not utopia.

Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451 was pretty spot on; in this age of facebook and all these other electronic digital gadgets that demand our attention, who bothers to read, and to ponder?

Sure, we can all get our news instantly from a number of feeds, and newspapers in print will probably become obsolete by 2020, but we need people to interpret what's happening, and try to make some sense of it all, so that life is not just one damn thing after another.

What an interesting set of comments! Each one made me think again, Asimov shows many different societies and all of them have problems. It is indeed as though humanity does not advance in the way technology does. Nonetheless, today's developed societies offer a vastly better life for the average man or woman than was the case when I was a boy, let alone when my parents were children. Yes, there is still greed, and over-mighty people and powers, and we haven't learn how to deal with them.

Many thanks to all who have commented.