Colvin took a bottle from the cabinet on the bulkhead of his patrol cabin and poured expertly despite the Coriolis forces. He carried his glass to his chair and sank into it. A packet of mail lay on his desk, the most recent letter from his wife already ripped open so that he could be sure there was nothing wrong at home.
– The Mote in God’s Eye, Epilogue
If you, like me, gritted your teeth through high-school physics class, your eye might have slid over “the Coriolis forces” as one of those things you don’t expect to understand. Maybe, like me, you don’t even want to understand it. Eyes front, Isabel. But unlike you, if the task is to see the anomaly in this passage, I have an advantage. I know that Colvin’s cabin is in a spaceship named Defiant.
Defiant lay nearly motionless in space at the outer fringes of the Murcheson System.
The award-winning “hard” science-fiction novel, The Mote in God’s Eye, was published in 1974, but the story starts in 3017. And buddy-in-a-spaceship is getting physical mail from home? I don’t think so, even leaving aside the whole interstellar-distance thing. I mean, is *anyone* getting physical mail in 3017?
I read the book sometime in the late 1970s and am sure I saw nothing amiss with this passage. Sure, a supply ship brought mail — in envelopes — to this deployed spaceship. Why not? To be fair, 1974 was about 20 years before companies like Yahoo came along, so email was hardly top-of-mind thinking for me. A recent re-reading was, of course, a different story.
A packet of mail lay on his desk,
the most recent letter from his wife already ripped open . . .
What?! I have no idea how mail will be happening in 3017, but it surely won’t be happening like this.
While my 1970’s lack of awareness of technology’s potential arc doesn’t surprise me, it does surprise me some that three years after the first email had been sent, two leading science-fiction writers (and their sounding board, Robert A. Heinlein, aeronautical engineer, dean of science fiction, futurist) either didn’t see this oddity or didn’t think it was worth dreaming up a technologically sensible communication option for interstellar travel a thousand years out.
And to the latter point, fair enough. At no time does the plot hinge on the realistic receipt of mail. Instead . . .
The novel explores themes of xenobiology, societal engineering, and the strategic imperatives of interstellar quarantine, portraying human naval officers and scientists grappling with the Moties’ deceptive adaptability and expansionist potential. It emphasizes realistic depictions of first contact, including military protocols and the risks of cultural contamination, rather than benevolent or anthropomorphic alien encounters common in the genre. – Grokipedia
So what’s the point? Two points, I guess.
First, guessing what the future will look like is hard, even for people whose work depends on predicting it, or on framing believable stories to happen in it. It’s just not possible to imagine all the ramifications of the technology you see in front of you, never mind the technology lurking around the next bend in the road.
Second, as we each imagine our own future and take action today to make aspects of it happen or to avoid other aspects, we’re going to get some things wrong, even laughably wrong. May those wrongs be as unimportant to our overall stories as “how that letter from the missus got into Colvin’s hands” was to this one.
My understanding of science fiction as a literary form is that it is an exploration of contemporaneous social, political and personal issues. Surprising really how precient the science is, based on then-extistant research. I agree that Robert Heinlein should have understood the concept of email, if not text, but perhaps he didn’t want to explain it to his readers at that point in the novel. In 3017, we should be well into mind-meld, if “we” exist at all.
Judith – I defer to your knowledge of literary forms, for sure – I just take the story at face value, thereby often (usually?) missing any underlying themes. And I agree that Heinlein might plausibly have recommended against adding yet another futuristic element to a story already laden with them!
Isabel
I’ve never quite understood science fiction. Maybe it’s because the future is so unpredictable.
Tom
A friend of mine had an old Aunt who always said when making plans, “… if the Lord’s willin’.” My friend thought her nephew had spent way too much time with this aunt because he took up saying it, too. He was 5 years old.
Another saying I heard was, “It’s easy to predict the future. More of the same — only worse.”
John said 30-35 years ago, “I just want things to hold together for 30 more years. He thinks the “fraying” has begun. I think in the Age of Communication, it’s the last thing we can do. I may have mentioned this already, but a telephone robot told me the other day, “Please hold. I will try to connect you.” Try!? Even the robots are losing hope.
Barbara – That’s a great saying for a 5-year-old! Re “fraying”, I can’t tell whether that’s what’s happening or whether it’s just my old-age reaction.
If you watched TV with the Bell FIBE Crave option, you’d understand. John wrestles with it… he thinks Bell is trying to get rid of TV subscribers. It took me 4 months to get my landline fixed. My Virus protection on my computer failed after 6 weeks… and to be rejigged (took hours). O well. Today I can call, I have internet, TV reception… heat, light, water, air, food, John… and friends like you.
. 😀
Barbara – Yeah, sometimes it feels like a company is trying to get rid of customers without having to take the step of shutting down their service. Who knows what’s really going on? Glad that things are stable at the moment. And let that not be the announcer’s curse!
I loved reading science fiction when I was in high school. Having studied just enough science to know it was trying to grow in the direction of space travel, it was fun to see how some authors could extrapolate from what was known into what might come next. A couple of years later, when my study of English literature became more analytical, I saw that “science” fiction was more a meme than a genre. The exploration of “evolving” human abilities rather than their technological ingenuity was actually more interesting and had links to many genres, even very ancient ones. Works like Star Trek and Dune attempt to weave both futures synchronously, but can hardly stand the same test you point to, of actual social developments eventually creating anachronisms in authors’ attempts to imagine the future. People who levitate without a jet pack on their back (e.g., Dune), people who mind-read or mind-meld (Spock on Star Trek), people who heal with something like a flattened harmonica (Doc in the first Star Trek movie), people who arrive here from the future with extraordinary abilities and learn to assimilate and teach their abilities to ordinary folks (Zenna Henderson’s The People: No Different Flesh) present the greatest challenges to the imagination because they are, in some sense, the least far removed from our reality.