Prophets of Science Fiction
The Science Channel, 2006
Reviewed by William I. Lengeman III
(previously unpublished)
As the cable universe expands, those of us who don't care for reality shows, fluffy entertainment junk, or a vast number of sports channels can find solace in the likes of The History Channel, National Geographic Channel and The Science Channel.
The latter outlet recently presented that rarest of creatures - a reasonably "serious" television show dealing with printed science fiction.
Prophets of Science Fiction looks at Jules Verne and H.G. Wells, pioneers who worked in the genre before it had a name. The show purports to tell how "their predictions helped changed the course of history." Well now, maybe they did and maybe they didn't, but the producers make a fairly convincing case for the former.
Among the luminaries who weigh in on how "these prophets of science fiction [saw] the future with such uncanny vision" - physicist Michio Kaku, astrophysicist Gregory Benford (no mention is made of his SF writing alter-ego), SF writer Greg Bear and Wells biographer Robert Crossley.
According to Prophets, Verne was the first person to make a living from science fiction writing. His From the Earth to the Moon is examined, specifically with regard to its foreshadowing of the following century’s Apollo moon missions.
Earlier writers had tackled moon trips, but Verne was one of the first to treat the concept seriously. Even the space gun he posited turned out not to be so farfetched. Another device Verne foresaw, though he wasn't the first, was the submarine. The one he imagined shared features with the ones that actually came to pass.
Some of the other innovations Verne foresaw included airplanes, skyscrapers and elevated trains. As for why so many of his "predictions" came true, the thesis put forth is that he "obsessively" kept up with developments in science and technology and simply extrapolated from present to future.
Of Verne's considerable output, the only books really examined are From the Earth to the Moon and 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. In the case of that other founding father, H.G. Wells, only his The Time Machine and The War of the Worlds really come under the microscope here.
Many of Wells' most famous prophecies - time travel, alien invasions and invisibility – apparently haven’t come true yet. But Wells, who "saw the dark side of technology," did foresee such grim markers of what we might call progress as aerial bombing, a fate that he saw befalling London one day.
In 1914, in The World Set Free, Wells also predicted a device called an atomic bomb, some thirty years before the Manhattan Project made such a device a reality. Some of Wells' inspiration for this idea, according to Prophets, came from a non-fiction work, by Frederick Soddy, called The Interpretation of Radium, a book Wells probably read in 1909.
Wells predicted a nuclear war by 1955 and foresaw the atom being split in 1933. The latter is telling because his book supposedly served as inspiration, of sorts, for Leo Szilard, who patented the chain reaction process in 1934.
Perhaps the most frustrating thing about Prophets of Science Fiction was that there was so little of it. The program notes promised that it would look at similar prophecies in the works of Arthur C. Clark and Phillip K. Dick, but that turned out not to be the case.
It's a topic that could easily fill a few more hours of programming, though SF fans should probably be happy with what crumbs we can get and let it go at that. Anyone looking to explore the subject further might want to explore Robert Bly's 2005 book, The Science in Science Fiction: 83 SF Predictions that Became Scientific Reality.
Copyright 2007, William I. Lengeman III
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