Which science fiction writer best guessed the future? Six specialists explain the forecasts made by six great masters. Their respective works demonstrate that literature was ahead of phenomena such as the global pandemic, social distance, ecological concern, non-binary sex, robotization, artificial intelligence, screen civilization, augmented reality, aspiration to immortality, space travel, state control, or political dissent in the 21st century. As expected, almost none considered himself a genre author, but futures that closely resemble our present came from his imagination.
Ursula K. Le Guin
Opening the door to the universe
By Rosa Montero
When we speak of science fiction writers who divined the future, we are often referring to individuals who intuited technical advances and scientific innovations. Ursula K. Le Guin is not part of that group; she was never very technological in her work, but monumental and mythical. He is one of those few authors capable of capturing in his books both the smallest subtleties of the individual and the most vast yearnings of humanity. And from that eagle gaze he has been able to anticipate great social movements and even trips that we are just beginning.
For example, his novel The name of the world is Forest , published in 1972, offers a deep ecological reflection, a subject that at that time seemed hardly important to almost anyone, so we can say that Le Guin was part of the advance against the crisis climate (by the way the movie Avatar was inspired by this book, yes, without saying it). Similarly, The Left Hand of Darkness (1969), which speaks of a world where humans are hermaphrodites, neutral for three weeks and in the fourth male or female depending on the couple they have at that time, predicts the way in which genres are currently being dynamited. I am referring to the liquid and changeable sexuality of pansexuals, demisexuals or queers; of the trans and the bi; of the androgynous and the non-binary, all this glorious and slippery mess, anyway.
Finally, Le Guin's most ambitious narrative series are the novels of the Ekumen, a federation of human-inhabited worlds that left Earth thousands of years ago and that have shaped very different civilizations. And just now we are at the beginning of that colossal leap towards other planets. There is an exploratory frenzy in search of habitable exoplanets and there are various projects to colonize Mars, the most striking being that of Elon Musk, who intends to transport a million colonists to the red planet by 2050. That is (what a vertigo), we are in the beginning of the Ekumen. Le Guin opened the door to the universe for us.
A BOOK. The dispossessed , for being the best novel in the Ekumen, which teaches us that humans will have to colonize other planets.
Isaac Asimov
The Martians were us
By Javier Sampedro
Isaac Asimov (1920-1992) is best known for two collections of novels, one about robots and one called the Foundation, about a galactic civilization. Now that robotics has taken off forcefully fueled by advances in artificial intelligence, Asimov's predictions are beginning to be discussed not just in the colorful forums of genre fans, but even in the dim light of research labs. Scientists and engineers discuss, for example, whether their "three laws of robotics" (a robot will not harm a human; it will obey a human as long as this does not contradict the first law, and it will protect itself whenever this do not contradict the first two laws) can be applied as a kind of moral code for autonomous machines. The future will tell.
When his publishers encouraged him to write a galactic opera, thinking of a conflict between the human species and the strangest alien beings the author could imagine, Asimov reasoned that humanity had no chance of being victorious. Our technological civilization is just a newborn and most likely falls far short of any other technological civilization in the galaxy. So the author completely renounced any war of the worlds and imagined rather a future in which humans have spread throughout the galaxy.
In the Fundación series , we Martians are us. That series, which started out as a trilogy and ended up growing so much that it's not easy to say exactly how many books it comprises, is also a prediction about predictions. It foresees the development of a new science called "psychohistory" capable of auguring the great historical currents of the future. A metaprediction. In a story unrelated to the previous series, humanity is about to perish along with the universe that houses it, due to the simple thermodynamic degeneration that will end everything. Scientists ask the best supercomputer of the moment: how can the entropy of the cosmos be reversed? The computer works for billions of years and in the end, with humanity already extinct and forgotten, it responds: "Let there be light."
A BOOK. Dusk, for inventing a world with seven suns where nobody sees the stars, which prevents science from taking off.
Philip K. Dick
Technological dehumanization
By Laura Fernández
Philip K. Dick invented the dehumanized world of tricky little pills in which we live. No, these are not real pills, but reality pills. It was not only that he wrote about the excess of information, decontextualized, atomized and machine-gun that we live with, but he used it to deepen its effect on the implosive psyche of the person who received it. Yes, the world like a mirror broken into millions of pieces in which the individual is reflected in a confused and different way and, therefore, maddening.
Dick was paranoid — he was convinced, as a child, that everyone wanted to kill him — and that made him suspicious of everything and everyone. Especially from any existing authoritarian entity, that is, the States, but also the almighty companies —there is at least one of them in each of their novels— and, of course, the changing history. That is, the past as something to be played with by virtue of the interests of those who can play with it (for example, make the protagonist believe that he continues to live in the 1950s to use it as a weapon in the war that is being waged in the future where you live without knowing it).
That is, on the one hand the confusion, which is never collective but individual, and on the other, hundreds of little things, such as the increasingly playful aspect of society (think of war with an extraterrestrial society turned into games of one kind of Monopoly in The Titan Players), the dependence on new technologies (in Dick even the cars take care of us and give us conversation back home because there is nobody else there, we are surrounded by people but we are still disturbingly alone) and the precariousness (in The Crack in Space those who will not be able to afford a life in the present are offered sleep), culminating in the painful and desperate dehumanization that explains even the increasingly vigorous pet business in our day (¿ Androids dream of electric sheep? Anticipates the urgent need of the human being to feel human again taking care of something alive and innocent). No, Dick was not in favor of inexplicable catastrophes, but of everything that made human beings wrong (and evil).
A BOOK. Ubik, for turning reality into a mirage that leads us to a past that did not exist as we imagine.
JG Ballard
The disease of the future (and vice versa)
By Jordi Costa
As if he had already been there, JG Ballard wrote about the future with the dispassionate notation of a coroner who was performing the meticulous autopsy of a new millennium that had already been born a corpse. The so-called Shepperton oracle (1930-2009) could have declared yesterday that "the disease has provided us with a kind of underpinning to all the processes of alienation that have taken place in our culture in the last 10 years." In fact, he said it in the eighties, in the context of that AIDS crisis that would infect one of his stories, Love in a colder climate , a dystopian miniature that imagined a society where sex would be a mandatory practice legislated by governments and managed for the Churches.
With the legacies of surrealism and psychoanalysis defining a unique perspective, capable of detecting the perverse logics that underlie the fabric of the everyday, Ballard's literature marked a radical turning point in science fiction in the 1960s by shifting the focus from outer space —the territory of space-opera— to inner space - that instinctive subjectivity, bombarded and at the same time activated by apocalyptic disasters, mutations in the media landscape or disturbing derivations of social engineering. His work followed a rigorous path from the imaginative overflow - those heterodox novels of catastrophes (The Submerged World, The Drought, The Crystal World), whose characters were not governed by the instinct of survival, but by the death drive - to the aseptic hyperrealism of his latest works - from Fierce Fury to Welcome to Metrocenter - , which certified that we had already inhabited a dystopian present for a long time. Between one extreme and the other, the works that would make it possible to understand the autobiographical grounds of the ensemble —The Empire of the Sun, The Kindness of Women— and, above all, the rupture opened by the revolutionary The Atrocities Exhibition and Crash , the most violent pieces transgressors of her career, set in a universe, governed by the fusion of the sadean and the technological, which functioned as a mirror, chrome and distorting, of a society illuminated by the black sun of the death of affection.
A BOOK. Skyscraper , for abyssing itself in the potential barbarism that lies under the fragile foundations of the welfare society
Ray Bradbury
See you on Mars in 2026
By Jacinto Antón
Having to defend Ray Bradbury (1920-2012) in a competition over who better guessed the future may seem like a chore. Because Bradbury is not and never considered himself a science fiction writer. At least not science fiction to use. His creative terrain was fantasy, a fantasy full of metaphors, tinged with a deep lyricism with moving melancholic, faeric notes and with a propensity also, in many of his creations, for the dark and even the macabre. In fact, works such as the shocking stories of The Country of October —with those peaks of the chill that are "The Scythe", "The Crowd", "The Wind" or "The Little Assassin" - make him a master of terror, with influence on the genre recognized by Stephen King himself. Two of his great novels, the beautiful and nostalgic The Wine of Summer and The Fair of Darkness, have nothing to do with science fiction, but with the experiences and dreams of his childhood in his Illinois hometown, that renamed Arcadia like Green Town.
The two most science-fiction books, Martian Chronicles and especially Fahrenheit 451, are not limited to the strict canon of the genre, although in one narrates the conquest of Mars by Earthlings and the other is a dystopia in which one specialized fire department is dedicated to burning books. Certainly in the first one there are rockets and Martians, and in the second one it could be considered that some devices such as flat television and airpods ("snails", "thimble radios") that get into the ears and plunge you into "an electronic ocean of sound"). But everything is always subordinated to a poetic and wonderful dimension: the adventure of the firefighter Montag is above all a song of love for reading (the libraries were Bradbury's paradise) and the chronicles another, an elegy to the red planet of the pulp magazines , Edgar Rice Burroughs and HG Welles.
Does all this mean that Bradbury cannot win the competition? Not at all: he has encouraged us like no other to think the unthinkable, he has predicted that traveling to space will make us immortal and he has anticipated that one day in 2026 on Mars we will recognize ourselves as the true Martians.
A BOOK. Martian Chronicles, for predicting that going to another planet will not free us from our fears or our sins.
Stanisław Lem
A world of exclusions
By Patricio Pron
There is not much science in Stanisław Lem's work, but there is very good fiction, as well as the conceptual breakdown and the “cognitive estrangement” that are the most salient features of the genre. Lem (1921-2006) reproached a science fiction in which he preferred not to be read, his fixation on technology and his inability to anticipate the future: in particular, to admit that nothing ever changes because human nature conditions individual responses and collective to all dangerous situations and these tend to look alike.
This is what happens in Solaris (1972), perhaps his best-known work. When Kris Kelvin arrives at the observation station around that planet, he discovers that one of its crew members has committed suicide and that the other two are not the only occupants of the module: one day he sees a naked black woman walking down the hall; another meets his wife. But this one has also killed itself, years before.
Naturally, the problem here is how to know that what we think we observe is real. Lem confronts his characters with their deepest fears and longings while criticizing the project of understanding the universe through supposedly objective methods. For someone who like him wrote under a totalitarian regime that was protected by a certain "scientific socialism", the problem was not minor, of course. But neither is it for us. According to the German philosopher Markus Gabriel, there is little difference between science's denial of religious and political extremism and its recent transformation into a tool of control by governments only seemingly less radical: both are "morally reprehensible" responses to an exceptional situation instrumentalized to reinforce control either through "immunity passports", geolocation, "social distance" or forced confinement. We live in a present "built with exclusions, denials and various assumptions, each more opaque than the last," observes Lem in Mascara (1976), and we cannot really know, except, perhaps, that the "light at the end of the tunnel ”will be another opacity, perhaps even darker than the previous one.
A BOOK. The investigation, because it speaks, with a police mold, about the uselessness of the evidence in an absurd and fallacious world.