Coalescent

David Moles picks up on a suggestion in Judith Berman's essay 'Science Fiction Without the Future', that there may be a connection between people's feelings of alienation from the modern world and the popularity of backwards-looking sf, and runs with it:

Science fiction’s traditional core obsession is with the idea of social change driven by technological advancement over time. A lot of us in the SF world tend to take that as a given—even as an eternal verity. But it isn’t—for most of the world today technological change is spacelike, not timelike (advanced technology comes to Africa not from the future, but from the US or Europe; to the US not from the future but—increasingly—from Asia and, for some reason, Finland); for most of human history, technological change has been so slow as to be imperceptible. The idea of Progress began with the Enlightenment and (even if little-p progress has kept going) was over, as a Big Idea, by the end of the “short 20th century” in the 90s, if not by the late 60s.

Isn’t it possible—likely, even—that science fiction’s traditional forward-looking orientation is as much a product of the forward-looking Zeitgeist in which it originated as nostalgic SF is a reaction to a Zeitgeist of millenial alienation? That science fiction used to imagine the future because society used to imagine the future, and not the other way around?

Well, yes, sf reflects the concerns of the present, and the concerns of the people writing it, and Moles' suggestion that those are changing is as good an explanation for Pattern Recognition et al as any, I guess.

But though I love the phrase 'for most of the world today technological change is spacelike, not timelike' I have a slight problem with it, which is: hasn't it always been that way? Maybe we're more aware of that sort of technological colonialism these days, maybe it's faster these days (and I like those stories: obAir), but I think it's been around for quite a while.