Some people consider science fiction authors to have a very important role in the progress of human society. They consider the ideals and possible futures set forward by these authors to be necessary in widening the viewpoints of society, the idea being that this proliferation of dreaming combined with the actual advances made by science will more quickly advance not only the state of our technology, but also the state of our education and the improvement of our society. It's a noble idea, that knowledge and dreaming work together to make us all better.
I feel fairly confident in saying the H. G. Wells believed this to be true. I also feel fairly confident that he'd be disappointed in how our society has progressed in the last hundred years.
The World Set Free is an interesting read for anyone interested in how science and technology relate to society. Many of the problems, hurdles, and strange quirks identified by Wells in this book were prophetic in nature. He'd still be disappointed, as I said, because he had expected us as a collective whole to have worked through all of this stuff before the 80's were finished.
I guess we got distracted by disco and rock for a few years there.
One of the biggest reasons we haven't achieved all the Wells predicted, of course, is because he totally screwed up in understanding certain scientific advances. The advent of the nuclear age is central to the themes in The World Set Free. But Wells (like Asimov later) predicted that we'd all be zipping around in cars and helicopters powered through fission by the late 1960's (Asimov didn't predict that. He gave us till after we'd rendered Earth uninhabitable before we were using nuclear energy that way). Wells' understanding of how an atomic bomb would actually work was, while certainly thought out, dead wrong as well. Some of the things that were supposed to act as a catalyst in giving us a utopian society just didn't pan out like Wells thought they would.
But he did get some stuff eerily right. The prediction of his "last great war" wasn't too surprising, as rumblings of WWI were abounding when he wrote this book. And if you want an analogue for the war he describes in this book, WWII would be it. He even got the year almost right. And the prediction that we would be using atomic weaponry in that war was spot on. Even his descriptions of the horror associated with those weapons, while incorrect in their specifics, were oddly prescient in their scope. But they weren't used as widely as he'd predicted, considering only the US actually had them. And had the Cold War actually erupted like we feared it might, the destruction Wells described might have been the result. But the memory of those two bombs stuck with us. Not enough to drive society to the reforms Wells wanted, but instead just enough to prevent the destruction that might be necessary for such reforms.
All in all, there are some truly prophetic predictions in this book. The idea that technology would change more rapidly than the legal systems necessary to regulate our society. You can see ample evidence of this in how the internet is handled. The idea that the automation of manual jobs would cause necessary changes in the way the workforce exists. That happened, and we still haven't figured out exactly how we get around it. He even deals with sexism, with several of the characters talking wistfully of how, in the future, there will be no consideration of women's work and men's work.
You know, considering that last point, the book is surprisingly sexist in at least one place.
Anyway, the accuracy of a book's predictions is hardly the reason I read it (see: A Princess of Mars, Dracula, the fantasy genre). In the end, it's an interesting story of how a society moved from the early 20th century into a civilization that is one leap to the stars away from Star Trek.
Which could be exactly why I liked it so much.
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