As a side-effect of my Women Writing as Women project, I’ve been reading a lot of old science fiction.
There’s an editorial in the September, 1960 Galaxy Science Fiction where editor H. L. Gold asks readers to stop writing the same old bad things… that you can’t ‘drop’ bombs from space any more than you can drop them from Mars, that you can’t see Alpha Centauri from New York… but science and research are providing so many new ideas! Including the “‘aqua-therm’ — a ‘pipeless pipe’ that conducts water through water in a way, and with a precision, that must be seen to be believed. It melts ice, it keeps fish alive… is there a story there? Probably a dozen of them — ranging from an ice-free Arctic to, perhaps, a whole new concept of underwater farming.”
The Aqua-Therm fascinates me. Googling the term just pulls up a dozen pipe and heating companies with that name. Aquatherm PVC, Aquatherm Solar Panels…
I find myself sitting here, in 2019, almost sixty years in the future, with no idea what uses the aqua-therm were put to, looking back on an editor asking writers to imagine futures for it. I have no doubt that the article H. L. Gold cites (from “the current issue of Industrial Research“) referred to a real breakthrough, and a technique that was used to refine and change other techniques. I have vague memories of articles on thermal transportation in fluids… though googling THAT mostly has articles on materials science, creating nanoparticle barriers and the like.
Wow. Science has scienced so hard, y’all.
So here I am, in 2019, doing just what H. L. Gold urged aspiring writers to do… reading all the science news, skimming for a story. And I’m imagining forward, but what am I missing? What is the “ice-free Arctic” that sounds neato to me and will scare and upset the future?
H. L. Gold ends his editorial with an exhortation that Science Fiction serves a vital role in scientific advance. “…science fiction writers are the logical pipeline between scientists and the public… [they] show us in human terms what these gifts from the laboratory will mean.”
And then, he says, “stay ahead of fact … extrapolate to the next big jump.”
No pressure. Thanks, Horace.
In Wired today there’s an article about a genetically-tweaked virus saving a sick teen. A group of scientists are running a simulation of an asteroid hitting the Earth. Science is running forward as fast as it felt in 1960, when they thought they might see a man standing on Mars by 1990. What would H. L. Gold think of the story I could write about that virus?
There’s a story by Margaret St. Claire in that Galaxy issue. In it a woman serves tea and toast to a visiting man who orders her about with impunity and wow… what woman today would put up with that? He’s a time-traveling salesmen trying to sell her future technology so that her housework will stop prematurely aging her. (Which line would be the point at which I dumped the tea on his head, myself.)
There’s a lot of these old sex roles in these stories… when women are present at all. Where are the articles on social change in Industrial Research? I imagine the story some reader would rush off to type after H. L. Gold’s editorial, and how the dashing Lance Jones wields his ice-melting water-jets while the pretty secretary watches. Would the wonders of nano-materials be easier for Gold to imagine than a world where a black woman invents them?
I digress. The past is a strange country, and few of its inhabitants are around to explain it. The future is a place we can only imagine, painting the parts we can’t imagine with today’s colors.
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