In the classic comedy film Robin Hood: Men In Tights, there’s a scene where Blinkin, Robin’s blind servant, is at the top of a watchtower, pretending to look around, when Robin rides up.
Robin: Blinkin, what are you doing up there?
Blinkin: Guessing! I…guess no one’s coming.
Robin: Please come down from there…twit. <rides away>
Blinkin: Well, I guess there’s a ladder around here somewhere. <feels for the ladder> Oh…here we are! Right. <knocks the ladder down, then falls out of the tower>
(A clip of the scene is available here.)
As writers of science fiction, much like poor Blinkin, we do our fair share of guessing. Our blindness in this case isn’t physical, though; it’s temporal. That is, we can’t see the future–even though the future is perhaps the most common territory of science fiction.
Of course, that’s a good thing from the point of view of creativity; if we can’t see it, we’re free to imagine it any way we like. And if our visions are sufficiently far into the future, we’re unlikely to be called to account for our accuracy anytime soon. (Not, that is, that we should be called to account; this is, after all, fiction. But people do like to complain, and this is fertile ground for complaints.)
But, not every story is set hundreds (Star Trek) or thousands (Dune; Warhammer 40,000) of years down the road, or in some semi-mythical past (Star Wars), or even in a collection of all the above (Doctor Who–lest you think I won’t pick on any of my favorite franchises!). Some stories are within reach, if not at the time of writing, then during the time that the story remains popular. And what happens when that story gets something wildly wrong about the future?
The story that brought this topic to mind is an old and obscure novelette by well-known author and editor Damon Knight–and here I’m going to make an aside before we continue. Aside from having the greatest sci-fi author name I’ve ever heard, Damon Knight was greatly influential over the field of science fiction. If you don’t recognize his name, that’s understandable here in 2022, as he would have turned 100 two days ago, had he not died in 2002. He was known for his short stories far more than his novels, making him less of a household name than his novel-writing colleagues. It’s purely by coincidence that I’m writing this post so near the one hundredth anniversary of his birth–I had no idea until I sat down to research this post–but we can take a moment to acknowledge his achievements before we move on. His first publications were two issues of a sci-fi fanzine, Snide, at the ripe old age of eleven, before slipping away from the genre for several years; in his twenties he returned as a writer and, prominently, a reviewer. He published numerous short stories over the years, though he struggled to find popularity for his novels. As an editor he worked for several magazines, but his best known editorial work is the Orbit series of sci-fi anthologies, launched in 1966, which in turn helped establish later well-known author and editor Gardner Dozois. If you don’t know him for anything else, there’s a good chance you know him for one of the original Twilight Zone‘s most famous episodes: Season 3, Episode 24, To Serve Man, about a peaceful alien contact with a horrific twist.
The story in question for this post is titled “Thing of Beauty“, and was published first in the September 1958 issue of Galaxy magazine. You can download that issue at the Internet Archive, if you would like to read the story for yourself. (Spoilers ahead for a 64-year-old story, if that’s a concern for you!)
“Thing of Beauty” is the story of one Gordon Fish, a con artist and general slacker who stumbles into the chance of a lifetime. Due to a time slip–of which Fish is mostly unaware–a large machine is erroneously delivered to his home. Fish finds its controls to be written in a language he doesn’t recognize; but he puzzles out its use. The machine can create complex and beautiful drawings, with only minimal selections from the user. Fish, ever the con artist, finds a way to use this machine to pose as an artist himself, and becomes wildly successful, though he must portray himself as eccentric in order to keep from being caught out. It leads him to relationships (of which he takes advantage) and contracts (even more so), all of which are essentially a house of cards. Along the way he finally copies down the machine’s instructions, and sends them off to the Encyclopedia Britannica offices for translation–but of course this is 1958, or shortly thereafter, and the wheels turn slowly. In the end, it all comes crashing down, as Fish’s lies catch up to him, and he is challenged to prove himself with one last drawing. But, the machine has been running down; and as it finally stops, yielding nothing, he finds the translation from the Britannica offices, which tells him that he has been setting the machine to delete its templates after use.
I read this story as a child; but even then I was able to appreciate the horror Fish felt when he realized what he had done. There is, of course, a lesson in it–a lesson about carelessness and greed. After all, Fish had the instruction manual the entire time; he could have sent it off for translation before he started experimenting–and more to the point, before he started trying to cash in.
That lesson wasn’t wasted on me; but rereading “Thing of Beauty” as an adult gave me something else to consider, that wasn’t in place even in my childhood. We live, of course, in the age of the internet, and all of its apps. And among those, of course, are translator apps. Most of them will identify the language for you. Google Translate doesn’t even require that you type in the text you want to translate (which is wonderful, given the diversity of alphabets and scripts in existence). You can simply open the app, give it access to your phone’s camera, and point it at the text. And so, now, sixty years after this story was published, along comes a technology that renders its entire twist moot!
But, Damon Knight couldn’t have known. In 1958, no one had any real concept of what computers and related devices would look like today. A few years down the road, Star Trek would famously come up with a few concepts that have only recently become reality, such as handheld communication devices and computers that respond to voice commands–and remember that Star Trek was set three hundred years in the future from its era of production! (Indeed, there’s an argument to be made that those real-world inventions were inspired by Star Trek–but that’s a talk for another time.) Knight was already being a bit visionary in this story; his machine has no wires inside, no obvious moving parts, which perhaps foresees the existence of solid state electronics. There’s no way he could have foreseen instant translation software as well.
And that’s really the thing, isn’t it? Science fiction never predicts things the way they really turn out, because there’s a fundamental hurdle that has to be overcome: The hurdle of the unanticipated need. Science fiction tends to predict by extrapolation–that is, it looks at what currently exists, and projects the same realities out into the future. Think, for example, of Ray Bradbury’s Farenheit 451, where it’s noted that billboards are now two hundred feet long so that the passengers in speeding cars could read them–an extrapolation regarding the speed of traffic in that then-future era.
Real science doesn’t always work that way. While it’s true that science builds on itself, the progression comes just as much from taking that acquired knowledge and applying it to problems that were never expected at the time of the original research. Those translator apps may be a product of years of research, but they solve a problem that wasn’t even perceived to exist in the past. Translation required a trained translator, or a lengthy period of instruction, or a reference book, and that was that. Or, going back to Star Trek: The original series had buttons–actual physical, clicking buttons–on all its control panels. It all looked terribly futuristic at the time, but now it’s clearly dated, because no one anticipated the need for control panels to be variable–which, in turn, is the problem that led to the existence of touchscreens. And now we have them in our pockets and on our wrists, and Star Trek looks terribly primitive.
I didn’t come to this post with a lesson in mind, only an observation. However, there is a lesson to be had as a writer, and that lesson is: Don’t worry about it! And it’s a lesson especially applicable to me, because I love to be right. More than that, I love to be believable in my writing. I research things as thoroughly as I can. But there’s a degree to which that’s missing the point; because I’m never going to get it all right. I don’t need to get it all right. Just like everyone else, I can’t reliably anticipate the unanticipated need; and so my predictions, too, will be just extrapolations. It’s great when it lands correctly; but when it doesn’t, well, that’s just the nature of the craft.
For more reading on Damon Knight, visit Wikipedia or The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction. Galaxy Magazine can be found at the Internet Archive, or from various resellers. The September 1958 issue of Galaxy, including “Thing of Beauty”, can be found here. Robin Hood: Men In Tights can be viewed or purchased at many streaming services and retailers.
Timewalkerauthor 