My introduction to flat-panel TVs came when I was in elementary school, in a beginner book called You Will Go to the Moon by Mae and Ira Freeman, and illustrated by Robert Patterson. Written in 1959, it describes a typical ’50-era scenario for how travelers (in this case, a young boy) would eventually go to the Moon, not on the first trip, but shortly after we’d established a permanent presence there.
Even if you’ve never seen the book, almost every Analog reader already knows the story. First comes the blast-off in the large multistage winged rocket, the description of the stages falling away, and the arrival of the top stage at the space station, a classic “big wheel” with four thick spokes connecting it to the hub. The top stage docks and you, the intended young reader, are treated to a discussion of weightlessness in the hub, and then an explanation of how the rotation of the station “keeps things down” inside the wheel.
Inside the station you see men (there are no women) reading, watching movies, even drinking coffee at a lunch counter, just like ordinary daily life on Earth. The Moon ship—a squat, blunt cone with four spindly legs—arrives to continue your journey. You transfer aboard, the engine fires, and you begin the three-day trip.
Inside the Moon ship there is no gravity. The men are floating, yet some are playing chess or reading a book. You are watching a baseball game on a flat-panel TV set that looks very much like the monitor I’m typing this article on (and at the moment, also watching a news channel).
Finally the ship reaches the Moon and lands. Moon buggies arrive to transport you and the other passengers to the base, going through a crater on the way. At the end of the story you and other men in thick rubber spacesuits are bounding about in the low surface gravity. You easily scale a rocky hill, and at the top, look down upon the Moon base.
Even at the time I first read this book in the mid ’60s, it was clear this particular futuristic vision was old-fashioned, that this was not how it was going to be. It was still possible to dream that, maybe in the far future of the 1980s and ’90s, journeys to the Moon for ordinary people might indeed take place. But as the years go by, it looks less and less likely that even my children, now a half century since the book was written, will get to go into space (unless they grow up to be astronauts).
A few years ago I came across a later edition of You Will Go to the Moon updated by the authors to recast the story in terms of the then-modern Apollo Moon mission scenario. I find it ironic that today the updated Apolloesque version of the story seems more old-fashioned than the original. Even though we’ve already been to the Moon, our current understanding of how we will eventually send ordinary people there is the older one. The Apollo approach, though successful, is now seen as an aberration, a means to a political end, but no way to conquer space.
The future unfolds in fits and starts, and sometimes doubles back on itself. The way things are trending today, it looks once again like future visitors to the Moon will first take a flight to an orbital station or hotel of some kind (at the cost of an arm and a leg), and then board a ship for passage to the Moon. I do doubt that they’ll get to low Earth orbit via multistage rockets. Indeed, though not prescient about the actual date, 2001: A Space Odyssey may still yield the best image of what our near future in space will look like. Despite the passing of decades, as long as we’re stuck with chemical rockets at the bottom of a gravity well as deep as the Earth’s, the old-fashioned and the modern views will never differ by anything other than cosmetic details. So science fiction writers should avoid becoming too obsessed with the up-to-date, or too quick to discard the outdated.
On the other hand, some old-fashioned ways and things are always going to remain outdated, and this brings me back to modern flat-panel HDTV.
How to do high-definition TV has been a no-brainer since the days of Farnsworth—you just add more scan lines. Half a century ago even the most amateur of futurists could predict that sooner or later HDTV would become available. Not so easy, though, was seeing how a picture tube (or CRT, for cathode ray tube) would eventually be made slim enough to hang on the wall like a painting. Illustrator Robert Patterson was projecting well beyond the state of the art when he put that flat-panel TV in the Moon ship.
Back in the ’80s, serious work was underway to produce an economical video screen that worked on some other principle than CRT technology. The research was soon successful, for by the ’90s the now ubiquitous laptop computer came on the scene. After that it was just a matter of scaling the technology up to TV size, and LCD screens joined high-definition CRTs and plasma-screen technology as HDTV options. You can see what happened next just by going to the nearest Best Buy or Circuit City.
But suppose Armageddon of some kind comes, and we find ourselves knocked back to a level of technology circa 1900? As we rebuild, could the classic black-and-white TV set of the 1950s ever make a comeback?
I don’t think so. Vacuum tube technology had its start in an era that didn’t even know about electrons. Even after it was recognized that cathode rays were electrons, the explosion in electronics that followed the invention of radio consisted mainly of improvements and refinements in ways to manipulate cathode rays. The CRT, in principle, had a fairly straightforward evolution from the Fleming valve. But today we do know what electrons are, and we have a tremendous knowledge base involving solid-state electronics. Sometime in the last fifty years or so, our deeper knowledge of the physics underlying electronics reached a point where recapitulating the pioneering techniques of the past in the event of a civilization-wide disaster became unnecessary. We wouldn’t start over with vacuum tubes; we’d start over with transistors. We wouldn’t make TVs with picture tubes. Even if we had to settle for low-definition black and white, we’d go straight to a crude flat panel with light-emitting diodes.
Hopefully, sometime in the next fifty years or so, a deeper knowledge of physics will make jaunts to the Moon on a Sunday afternoon in the family RV a possibility. Maybe by then we will have reached the point where chemical rocket technology will also become forever obsolete.
Now let us consider a piece of technology that has changed how we go about our daily lives and that looks like it will be with us forever, and ask if it really will be. I’m talking about the cell phone.
SF essentially missed the development of the cell phone. I don’t mean that we missed the idea of a portable communication device—wrist radios certainly go back at least as far as Dick Tracy. And when I was a kid, transistorized walkie-talkies were all the rage. So the idea that eventually people would be carrying telephones along with them was no great stretch. Still, a lot of SF stories set in the near future, even those written in the ’90s, mine included, neglected cell phones altogether. In my case, it was simply a matter of a general unfamiliarity with them. I just didn’t think about cell phones when writing my stories. It wasn’t until 2000, on a trip to San Francisco, that I first encountered an environment where the cell phone was as common as it has become countrywide now.
What is particularly amusing, and should give pause to any writer of SF, is how rapidly the development of the typical feature-rich cell phone of today outstripped our imaginations. Maybe somebody predicted it in a story a decade or two back, but I don’t think we writers generally accepted as likely the idea that cell phones would also come with cameras, both still and video, TV screens, music players, calculators, qwerty keyboards, organizers, games, and internet access. If Kirk and Spock (or Picard, if you wish) had beamed down to a planet with communicators as feature-rich as a cell phone or Blackberry, we wouldn’t have bought it. Warp drive and the transporter seemed as likely.
What SF also missed is the change to everyday society brought by the cell phone. Did any writers predict that along with the cell phone would come the “need” to use it constantly to stay in touch with friends and family and coworkers even while driving? If there is a scene in any SF story pre-1995 or so where the protagonist of the twenty-first century pulls up to a stop light, notices that half the drivers in the cars around him are using cell phones, and thinks nothing of it, I missed it. I never would have written that scene and I would have criticized anyone who did. I would have wondered whom these people were talking to, and why.
Call me old-fashioned, but I wonder that today. I do own a cell phone, but I seldom use it. I like to have it with me if I’m driving in bad weather “just in case.” And now, unfortunately, I feel like I’m tempting fate if I don’t. And I think that’s the most insidious change wrought by the cell phone—that so many of us feel like we’re being negligent and foolhardy if we leave the damn thing home when we go out.
There’s also the matter of privacy. Isn’t it ironic that in a society that gets all up in arms at the idea of the government inspecting our reading habits, we willingly accept that absolutely anyone can photograph us with their cell phone whenever we walk out the door? A picture is worth a thousand words, but the right picture can be supporting evidence to sustain a million lies. Also with the ability to be instantly available comes the notion that we all should be so. Sure, we can turn the phone off, but then there will be messages to wade through when we turn it back on.
Call me a curmudgeonly iconoclast, but I think it’s possible, and hope likely, that this excess of capabilities will lead to an excess of nuisance and annoyance; that the assault on our privacy and liberty brought by the cell phone may eventually prove too much to bear. Maybe then the old-fashioned idea of leaving the phone at home will make a comeback.
The inspiration for this column came from a rejection letter I got from Stanley Schmidt, in which he said of my story: “(T)he human relationships had a very 1950ish flavor, with little feeling of the cultural differences that would surely develop between now and then.” That got me to thinking about what makes some ideas and technologies permanently old-fashioned, while others only temporarily so.
However, I do not think human cultures ever become permanently old-fashioned. That “1950ish flavor” was deliberate, and I will justify it in my next column with a discussion of a book called The Fourth Turning by William Strauss and Neil Howe.
