[ExI] Huxley or Orwell - who got it right?

[spike]

From: extropy-chat [mailto:extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org] On Behalf Of spike
Sent: Saturday, February 04, 2017 8:44 PM
To: 'ExI chat list' <extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org>
Subject: Re: [ExI] Huxley or Orwell - who got it right?

 

 

 

From: extropy-chat [mailto:extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org] On Behalf Of William Flynn Wallace
Sent: Saturday, February 04, 2017 5:03 PM
To: ExI chat list <extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org <mailto:extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> >
Subject: Re: [ExI] Huxley or Orwell - who got it right?

 

On Sat, Feb 4, 2017 at 6:26 PM, spike <spike66 at att.net <mailto:spike66 at att.net> > wrote:

The job of the SF writer is not so much to predict the future as to prevent it.  

 

​Now just what the hell does that mean?  Are you stealing a quote?  Many tech advances have been predicted by SF writers.  bill w​





 

Ja, I was stealing a quote but I don’t know who it is from and only vaguely remember where I heard it, perhaps 30 or 40 yrs ago…spike

 

 

 

OK now I remember, I heard this quote in high school in 1978, and it was Ted Sturgeon, who was quoting Ray Bradbury who may have heard it from Frank Herbert:

 

 

Dear Quote Investigator: I once read an interview with a science fiction writer in which he was asked about predicting the future. The interviewer was disappointed that some of the technological developments heralded in science fiction never seemed to actually happen. The response from the author was unexpected and haunting:

I don’t try to predict the future. I try to prevent it.

I think this answer confused the interviewer, but I understood it. The dystopian stories like Brave New World, 1984, Fahrenheit 451, The Sheep Look Up, and The Machine Stops are not attempting to predict the future. They are trying to prevent the futures that they describe. The identity of the interviewee is fuzzy in my mind and so is the exact wording. Could you look into this quote?

Quote Investigator: The earliest expression found by QI appears in 1977 from the typewriter of the SF great Theodore Sturgeon who credits the remark to another SF luminary Ray Bradbury, the author of Fahrenheit 451 and the Martian Chronicles. In 1978 the idea is attributed to another famed SF writer, Frank Herbert, the author of Dune…

 

http://quoteinvestigator.com/2010/10/19/prevent-the-future/

 

 

I was really into dystopian future fiction in those years, but back to the original thought: I never really saw Brave New World as all that dark.  OK so the guy dies, there is that.  In 1984, one of them disappears, but it isn’t clear he perished, and the others live to copulate, which is way cool when one is a teenager who never gets any attention.

 

spike 

 

 

 


 

 

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