Which Predictions Did Golden Age Science Fiction Get Right & Wrong?
I’m one of the participant’s in this week’s Mind-Meld feature over at www.sfsignal.com where a bunch of sf writers/commentators respond to the same question. The topic is the predictions of “Golden Age” science fiction. Here was my answer: There’s a t-shirt that Threadless.com offered a few years ago that says: “they lied to us — this was supposed to be the future — where is my jetpack, where is my robotic companion, where is my dinner in pill form, where is my hydrogen fueled automobile, where is my nuclear-powered levitating house, where is my cure for this disease” I’ll take a slightly different list of Golden Age SF predictions: ray guns, robots, flying cars, jet packs, nuclear powered everything, and world government. Although the military does use lasers as weapons, as well as microwave emitting devices, the concept of a hand-held ray gun seems to be a bust. Robots have been around in one form or another, and will get closer and closer to humanoid forms in coming years, so I thin
