Star Wars (and to a lesser extent Star Trek) are products of their respective eras in regard to the futuristic technology then portray (or don't feature), but both are also probably beholden to their pulp antecedents and the imagine (and failures of imagination) of the authors that wrote them.
While I won't claim to have made an exhaustive study, here are some things I've noticed about the technology of the retro-future, supplemented by things noticed by Marcus L. Rowland in his excellent Forgotten Futures rpg Planets of Peril based on the works of Stanley Weinbaum, and by GURPS Ultratech 2.
- Radium: Radium seems almost sort of unobtanium in a lot of old stories, an is imbued with uses and properties it doesn't really possess in real life. This goes along with...
- Radiation: Various sorts of radiation (or even sometimes a vaguer property called "vibration" of matter or energy) can do almost magical things. This continues in science fiction, of course, but by the Atomic Age the language used to describe it much less mystical.
- Mechanical not Electronic: One can hardly fault writers of the 20s-40s for not including many (or often any) computers in their works, beyond the occasional mechanical brain, but it's interesting how even the electrical devices appear sparingly, outside of things like visiplates/visiphones (visual communication devices). Some more planetary romance leaning authors like Leigh Brackett, tend to describe virtually none of this sort of technology. This has implications we might not think of: Edmond Hamilton's stories for instance have no jail cells with coded keypads or even simply push button keypads like Star Trek. All his futuristic locks seem to require a hand held "vibratory key."
- Planet and ship based: Artificial satellites and space stations are very rare. In fact, I don't think I've read a story written before the 50s that had them.
- Acquired not Synthesized: Many more breakthrough materials or pharmaceuticals are harvested from alien worlds that made in the laboratory. Even breakthrough laboratory discovers often require some exotic "natural" material.
- Solitary Inventor: Great scientific leaps from space travel to super-weapons are typically the province of single geniuses or experimenters, not teams of government or industry-funded scientists. First space travel is almost always mentioned as a work of a sort of Wright Brothers instead of a NASA.
- Atomic Energy: Everything is atomic powered it seems like.
- No TV: I'm sure there are stories that make reference to something like television as an entertainment medium, but it appears in very few stories.
9 comments:
I would argue that in 'Star Kings' by E.Hamilton there was a DNA-locked passage, as anybody not specifically previously permitted to go into Destroyer chamber is killed.
Breckett most often wrote about the worlds which where definitely on different tech level then Earth. Even if computers existed, they would be very removed from the focus of the story.
That's possible! Hamilton talks a lot about auras and vibrations, though so I wonder if that detection mechanism he might not have envisioned as something other than genetic. I suppose it could even be measuring individual biorhythms or something.
To be fair, wifi is essentially a “vibratory” information transmission medium. All frequency-domain communication channels are “vibratory”. So a magnetic key card, which encodes (typically digital) regions of magnetic polarization on a strip, gets read by a lock that decides the vibratory frequency of an electric signal to read the value encoded on the card and matches it to the stored combination.
I think that's more than fair, it's generous! :) Yes, the descriptions are vague enough they can be interpreted in a way, particularly in capsule description I gave, that would fit a real world technology, but I don't think that implies it's what Hamilton or others had in mind, or that given the details in say the "The Three Planeteers" regarding the vibratory keys, that it's an ideal fit for the text.
Tied in to the "acquired, not synthesized" thing, there was also a bit of a trend toward discovering entirely new elements unknown on Earth, usually with some amazing property or another that made them vital to new technologies. Which is perfectly reasonable when you consider the periodic table was still having gaps filled and new elements added pretty regularly back then. Not that it's "finished" today - we added four new elements in 2016, all unstable superheavies up in the 112+ atomic number range.
There's also a fair amount of "science of the mind" stuff, in the form of teachable psionic abilities rather than prosaic psychology. Telepathic communication shows up a lot as something anyone can get the hang of after being exposed to it, for much the same reason that Star Trek has its universal translator.
Re: Hamilton
DNA was discovered before 'Star Kings' was written, but I am not claiming, of course, that Hamilton relied on precise understanding of DNA. But a person who was 'keyed' into the system years well beforehand and then, years later, passing through even when a different identity/mind resided in the same physical body says more DNA than biorhythms to me.
It is all very handwaved and brief, of course, but I guess I wanted to mention what little was there of non-physical locks.
About "acquired, not synthesized", I wonder if a more colonial attitude was also in place, at least up to some point. From this viewpoint it is might be easier to grab and harvest 'savage' planet as a pure resource then to synthesize, especially because shipping costs in FTL travel stories back then weren't much taken into account and environmental impact of such harvesting was rarely of concern in earlier stories especially. As RL situation changed with decades and people became more acute on such issues, the method shifted as well.
LOL, yes I'm sure I'm being quite generous re: "vibrations". Still, it's worth considering that the cutting edge in IT at the time of these stories was the "wireless", and that one would have to explain radio technology to a layman at the time as having something to do with the vibrations of electromagnetic fields at particular frequencies, and one can see how "vibrations" could become the shorthand for any kind of magical control-at-a-distance technology.
@Kyana "About "acquired, not synthesized", I wonder if a more colonial attitude was also in place, at least up to some point."
I would say definitely so, albeit not always in the "oppress/enslave/slaughter the locals" sense that colonialism has taken on in 2020. Unlike most real-world colonies, some scifi ones are places that really truly didn't have anyone living there before the colonists arrive.
Worlds inhabited by aliens though, yeah, all the colonial tropes are there, including the willful blindness to "these holding ares actually losing us money" realities that should apply. And amusingly, when the aliens are more advanced than we are they tend to behave just like human colonialists did and trample all over humanity - at least until Our Hero turns the table on them somehow.
Re: Picador, I was so very confused when I first encountered 'wireless' in something like 1930s or 1950s fiction, and had to stop imagining it being related to wireless as we know it now.
Re: Dick McGee, "some scifi ones are places that really truly didn't have anyone living there before the colonists arrive." Very true, but this is why I also mention environmental concerns that appeared later – strip mining, overhunting or deforestation equivalents were portrayed in much more heroic light and rarely (if ever in earlier works) the impact of such harvesting on a planet was taken into account.
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