Contrary to the breathless claims of legacy media journalists whose knowledge of Science Fiction begins and ends with Star Wars, SF rarely ‘predicts’ any particular technology. Jules Verne did not ‘predict television’ in 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea and Star Trek no more ‘predicted’ smartphones than Dick Tracy’s wristwatch TV. What good SF does is either extrapolate existing technological developments, or simply suppose future technologies, and then ponder how they will affect us.
For instance, Dan Simmons’ The Fall of Hyperion (1990), one-quarter of his magnificent Hyperion Cantos, in part ponders the social effects of ubiquitous, instantaneous communications mediated by AI (in this case, genuine ‘hard’ AI, not the LLMs we mistakenly call ‘AI’ now). A particularly remarkable passage reads as if he wrote the script for social media 14 years before Mark Zuckerberg was creeping on girls in his Harvard dorm room.
Humanity had become as blasé about sharing their lives with potential AI monitoring as pre-Civil War Old Earth USA-southern families had been about speaking in front of their human slaves. Nothing could be done about it—every human above the lowest Dregs’ Hive poverty class had a comlog with biomonitor, many had implants, and each of these was tuned to the music of the datasphere, monitored by elements of the datasphere, dependent upon functions of the datasphere—so humans accepted their lack of privacy. An artist on Esperance had once said to me, “Having sex or a domestic quarrel with the house monitors on is like undressing in front of a dog or cat … it gives you pause the first time, and then you forget about it.”
Cordwainer Smith was one of the most remarkable SF writers of his era. His output was relatively small and obscure, but it was not just literate in a way SF rarely was at the time, it was often remarkably insightful into the social effects of technology. If Dan Simmons ‘foresaw’ social media, Smith foresaw transgenderism in “The Crime and Glory of Commander Suzdal”.
Part of his Instrumentality of Mankind future history stories, it tells the story of Navy explorer Commander Suzdal, who happens upon a deep-space probe. The probe is a lie-in-a-bottle that convinces Suzdal of the plight of a group of settlers calling themselves the Arachosians. When he arrives at Arachosia, though, he discovers the shocking truth.
The Arachosians in fact narrowly survived a plague that rendered femaleness carcinogenic. The only way the Arachosians survived was by chemically and genetically making their women male.
However, the resulting society is deeply unbalanced by the lack of females and ordinary family structure. The Arachosians, not truly male or female and calling themselves “klopts”, realize on an instinctive level what they are missing and as a result, hate normal human beings with unbridled fervor and regard them as abominations to be destroyed (even though they have not seen one in many generations). To carry out this plan, they have dispatched traps in the form of messages, such as the one Suzdal encountered, throughout the galaxy.
Although he escapes the Arachosians and successfully conceals the location of Earth from them, his method is declared by the Instrumentality to be a crime, and he is banished to prison planet of Shayol. Officialdom declares all accounts of his story to be lies.
Make of that what you will.
Another remarkable SF book, and one which is (often wilfully) misunderstood, is Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451.
Bradbury’s firemen do not burn books because some jackbooted commissar ordered it. They burn them because the public demanded ever-faster, ever-shallower entertainment until the capacity for sustained thought simply withered. Captain Beatty lays it out with merciless clarity:
“Books cut shorter. Condensations. Digests, tabloids. Everything boils down to the gag, the snap ending. Classics cut to fit 15-minute radio shows, then cut again to fill a two-minute book column … Many were those whose sole knowledge of Hamlet was a one-page digest in a book that claimed, ‘Now at last you can read all the classics.’ … School is shortened, discipline relaxed, philosophies, histories, languages dropped, English and spelling gradually neglected, finally almost completely ignored. Life is immediate, the job counts, pleasure lies all about after work. Why learn anything save pressing buttons, pulling switches?”
That passage, written in 1953, maps onto the social media mediated world with unnerving precision. Fifteen-second clips have replaced the 15-minute radio cut. The ‘one-page digest’ is now the AI summary or the reaction video that pretends to have read the book. Attention is the currency, and anything that cannot be reduced to a punchline or a dopamine hit is discarded.
Educational standards have not merely relaxed – they have been actively dismantled in the name of equity and engagement. Bad spelling is not an inability to read or write, it’s ‘Ebonics’, and correcting it is ‘racism’. The result is a population that can scroll for hours yet cannot finish a paragraph.
The same cultural machinery is busy manufacturing its own klopts. Contemporary publishing, children’s literature and school curricula have spent years systematically thinning out male protagonists, male interests and any narrative that does not centre female or non-binary experience. At the same time the culture warriors insist on ‘representation’ for their intersectional pets, boys are told, sometimes explicitly, that the stories they once recognised themselves in are no longer for them. The shelves fill with “strong female leads” and therapy-speak while the ordinary male perspective is treated as a contaminant.
Like the Arachosians who chemically erased the female and then came to loathe every remnant of ordinary humanity, the industry erases the male and then regards ordinary masculinity as an abomination to be managed, medicalised or mocked.
The parallel is not exact – Smith’s klopts were desperate survivors, not ideological commissars – but the outcome is similar. A literature without boys produces readers who have never been invited to see the world through a male lens. When those readers later encounter actual men, the encounter is mediated by the same frantic hostility the klopts felt toward normal humans. Officialdom, of course, declares the whole business a triumph of inclusion and brands any objection a lie.
Bradbury saw the mechanism. Smith saw the psychological cost of abolishing one half of the species. Both wrote long before the smartphone or the diversity statement. The technology changed but the human material did not.
