To the consternation of millions, scientific endeavor has yet to yield us a functional hoverboard (despite what these guys might tell you).
Science fiction writers, however, have done a decent job adumbrating humanity’s forward progress. By writing about instances of brilliance and dystopia, these scribblers have helped shine a light down the tunnel of time and have offered some fascinating revelations about the ways in which we interact with technology, privation and each other.
1. The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress by Robert A. Heinlein
Published in 1966, Robert A. Heinlein’s The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress had plenty of historical precedent to draw from in the formation of its themes. The novel relates the tale of a lunar rebellion, as organized by a hardscrabble colony of criminals and exiles — “Loonies” in the novel’s argot — that break free from an Earth-bound central government.
Though the fictional rebellion displays multiple similarities to the American Revolution, Heinlein, in describing a diffuse, citizen-led movement, gave insight into the workings of insurgency campaigns in nations ranging from 1950s Algeria to early twenty-first century Iraq.
2. The Children of Men by P.D. James
In a New York Times essay contrasting P.D. James’s novel The Children of Men to its cinematic adaptation, Caryn James insists that to describe the novel as science fiction is “sloppy.” However, for the purposes of this list, we’ll risk the ire of both Jameses in the interest of including this fascinating, literary outlier.
Published in 1992, James’s novel posits a world beset by the ostensible blight of species-wide infertility. From this starting premise, the novel goes on to investigate the way people interact in a world in which resources are running thin. As the “haves” retreat to islands of prosperity, shunning and imprisoning the “have-nots,” James’s fictional society tilts ever further in the direction of fascism, employing “security” as both its watchword and evergreen excuse. Like its cinematic adaptation, James’s novel raises discomforting questions about whether or not this fictional world differs in any essential respects from our own.
3. Neuromancer by William Gibson
William Gibson produced the charter document of the “cyberpunk” genre, his novel Neuromancer, in 1984 by combining noire sensibilities with a remarkable talent for presaging hacker culture. If the tropes of Gibson’s debut novel seem hoary at this point, it’s because subsequent authors, directors and artists have made constant reference to his electronic outlaws and their dystopian surroundings.
Neuromancer follows the exploits of Henry Case, a brilliant, drug-addicted hacker who gets drawn into a narrative far too complicated to summarize here. In addition to coining the term “cyberspace,” creating a template to which laptop renegades still aspire and predicting at least a half-dozen technologies, Neuromancer can take credit for having rendered a passable description of dubstep three decades before the genre achieved popularity.