Society Marches On: Difference between revisions

Even if the technology is predicted perfectly, modern readers may lose [[Willing Suspension of Disbelief]] when reading a work written in [[The Fifties]], set in the present day, and assuming the attitudes of the present day will be exactly like those of [[The Fifties]]. They may even be severely bothered if a work from [[The Fifties]] assumes that attitudes in the far future will be just like those in [[The Fifties]]. (Even if the author had no way of knowing about [[The Beatles]], even if it is the far future, it just seems wrong to read that a lover of popular music in the future goes primarily for jazz quartets or big bands, with not an electric guitar or synthesizer to be seen even though the entire house runs on electricity right down to the windows and Muzak.) Sometimes the author will correctly predict some of the effects of a new technology, but completely miss others; many authors correctly foresaw the effect of automobiles on working habits and city design, but not one person foresaw the effect that access to automobiles would have on teen sexual activity.

 

 

This effect increases with the distance between when the work is written and the present day. The necessary distance to invoke this decreases as time passes, so far anyhow -- technology speeds communication up, and communication speeds change. For instance, if a film has been in production for long enough, it may fall under this trope the day it's released.

 

== Literature ==

** Apartheid-related predictions were often a bit off in this way, due mostly to outsiders imagining some sort of centuries-long, deep-seated race war. Whereas it was a recent and quickly dated policy which was mostly prolonged because it somehow wound up as part of Cold War politics. As soon as the policy was put up to vote, everyone rejected it.

* Minor but interesting aversion in [[Philip Jose Farmer]]'s ''Dayworld'', in which several male characters have traditionally female names (Dorothy, for instance), some female characters have traditionally male names (e.g., Anthony), and circumcision is next to unknown in the United States.

* The [[Robert A. Heinlein]] novel ''[[Podkayne Of Mars]]'', set in the distant spacefaring future, features a main character who would like to become the first ever female spaceship captain. The first instance of a woman (Eileen Collins [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eileen_Collins\]) captaining a spaceship occurred in July 1999.

** Pretty much all of Heinlein's work is prone to this. ''[[The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress]]'', for instance, despite showcasing many cultural differences in the lunar society (not the least of which is ubiquitous polyamories) portrays gender issues much as a 1950s writer would be expected to think of a post-feminist world: touching women without their permission is a major societal taboo... but it is up to the woman's ''male'' friends or relatives to protect her, and women are still generally considered unintelligent (or at least irrational or illogical) and unfit for many positions. The main reason the culture's attitudes towards women have changed at all is that women are a substantial minority on Luna. The rival Earth society, where the sexes are still 50/50 in numbers, shows female nurses giggling at having their rears pinched, rather than filing harassment lawsuits.

** Heinlein's short story "All You Zombies" again features a sex-segregated future in which astronauts and space pilots are always male, and the spaceship stewardess/prostitutes in skimpy outfits are all female.

** Heinlein often averted this trope as well. He frequently cast non-whites and people of mixed-race as protagonists in his works despite writing before the American Civil Rights era. Races were equal in his world, while the sexes tended to be different but enjoyed de facto legal equality. Readers of his era were not used to seeing a mixed-race or non-white protagonist. In his most famous work, [[Starship Troopers]], we also find a sympathetic portrayal of a minor Japanese character called Shujumi, who is praised for his mastery of Judo. World War II had ended only fourteen years prior, and Americans were hardly Japanophiles at the time.

** Zigzagged in his teen novel ''Tunnel In The Sky''. On the one hand, women make up their own (separate) military units and make up half the survival-course students in the story; on the other, sexual mores are such that a bunch of teenagers, isolated from their parents and all forms of authority, take time to stage their own ''marriage ceremonies'' in the middle of a hostile wilderness before daring to fool around. When the protagonist gets home, his parents' attitude is that of people who fully expect him to let them pick his friends for him. Oh, and when his military sister opts to get married, she ''has'' to leave the corps.

* In the [[Isaac Asimov]] short story "The Ugly Little Boy," they have a time machine that only works to Neanderthal times, collecting a small child and doing lots of experiments on him. The nurse/mother figure gets quite upset. The lack of any ethics, or any requirement for ethical approval is shocking.

** Isaac Asimov's ''[[Foundation]]'' series has gender roles that are completely identical to the 1950s United States, at least in the early books.

** A great example: In the short story ''Feminine Intuition'', the designers of a subtly [[FemBot|feminine-looking robot]] believe that everyone will assume it is mentally inferior to other robots. One character explicitly states that if there's ''anything'' the average person believes, it's that women are less intelligent than men. Upon saying this, he nervously glances around (Susan Calvin having recently retired). At the end, after Calvin comes back to save the day, the lesson is that men dismiss women's equal (if not superior) intelligence as mere "intuition."

*** And, of course, ''everyone'' smokes.

** A notable aversion is to be found, however, whenever Asimov describes music, in that he predicted synthesizers and electric instruments in the Foundation and Empire stories at a time when sticking a microphone on an acoustic guitar was still cutting-edge.

* ''[http://www.webscription.net/10.1125/Baen/0743436067/0743436067__17.htm Cocoon]'', a short story by [[Keith Laumer]], has everyone living in virtual reality tanks a couple hundred years in the future. The husband "goes" to a virtual office and does virtual paperwork, while the wife sits at "home", does virtual housework and watches virtual soap operas all day. When the husband comes "home", he complains because the wife hasn't gotten around to punching the selector buttons for the evening nutripaste meal yet.

** Interestingly, when a comic book adaptation was being written (in the early '90s or so), Adams was approached about changing the line about "digital watches" to "cell phones", and he adamantly refused, insisting that the cartoonist was missing the point. So, what ''was'' the point? Well, um... er... ah! Cell phones are actually useful devices due to their mobility, while digital watches have no advantages over regular watches. So, Adams probably considered digital watches a pointless novelty while thinking that cell phones are actually useful. Uh, you know, probably.

** As shown in the television series, the watches he was talking about used power-consuming LED displays, and so you had to push a button to see the time. The joke is probably that Douglas Adams found those types of watches impractical.

** Depending on where the story is set, that was (and is) still possible. See [[wikipedia:Dry county|here]] for places where Prohibition lasted beyond the 20s.

* A less vintage example: In one of the [[Shadowrun]] short stories from ''Wolf & Raven'', a black baseball player accompanies Wolf to a virtual golf course, and all the white yuppie golfers give him dirty looks because of his skin color. The writer failed to anticipate how Tiger Woods' rise to fame would apply this trope to his story within ''just a few years''.

** Even sillier when taking into account that in the world of [[Shadowrun]], the [[The Magic Comes Back|Awakening]] added Metahuman types such as Elves and Orks, who have become the new [[Fantastic Racism|segregated minorities]] of the world, making the whole issue of skin color less than completely relevant.

** A fair number of private golf clubs in the United States have either implicit or explicit discriminatory membership policies: they tend to only get found out when a politician or other celebrity is associated with it and the nature of the club's membership becomes public. One of the candidates for chair of the Republican Party in 2008 was forced to resign from his golf club when it was revealed that it had a whites-only membership policy. And it's not just race: the Augusta Club, home of the Masters, doesn't allow women.

* The 1952 [[Ray Bradbury]] short story "The Wilderness" (later incorporated into ''[[The Martian Chronicles]]'') revolves around women sitting around being terrified about relocating (in this case, moving to Mars) just to get married (yet speaking as if they ''have to'' go), talking about being "old maids" if they don't go, and complaining about how "the men" make all their decisions for them...in 2003.

 

== [[Live Action TV]] ==

** In the episode "The Enemy Within", evil!Kirk tries to rape Yeoman Rand. She later recounts the incident for good!Kirk, Spock and McCoy, displaying a very '60s attitude about it ("I don't want to get you into trouble. I wouldn't even have mentioned it.") ''while being in tears''. And this is while she is unaware that there are two Kirks running around!

*** To be fair, they ''were'' right about that. Female test audiences of the time disliked the character, describing her as "pushy". And even then, they had Captain Pike make a (rather sexist) comment about how weird it was having a woman on the bridge. And there was some irritation among the executive meddlers that the role went to an unknown actress named Majel Barrett, for no other reason than that she was the [[Dungeonmaster's Girlfriend]].

*** Note that at the time, miniskirts were often regarded as a mark of ''female empowerment'', as it flaunted a woman's right to dress sexy if she felt like it.

** Somewhat averted as well: TOS is credited as having the very first (obvious, anyway) interracial kiss on US television. According to some accounts, it very, very nearly fell prey to those meddlesome executives, and was finally only allowed through when it was demonstrated that neither party involved really ''wanted'' to do it, but were being forced by alien mind control. The studio was horribly afraid they were going to be inundated with hate mail, that the entire country would be in an uproar over such an act and simply couldn't accept it; they got a ton of letters alright, with a distinct ''majority'' praising the scene. Nichelle Nichols even recounts reading a letter from a Southern man, who was "against the mixing of the races. However, any time a red-blooded American boy like Captain Kirk gets a beautiful dame in his arms that looks like Uhura, he ain't gonna fight it." Now THAT'S progress.

*** Plus, Shatner and Nichols were adamant about keeping the kiss (which if you've read either of their autobiographies seems to be the only thing they've ever agreed on), and deliberately screwed up every take of Kirk and Uhura not kissing, so the editors were forced to use a shot where they did.

* There was a ''[[Twilight Zone]]'' episode about a two soldiers, one male and one female, from opposite sides being the last survivors of their war. The female soldier's combat uniform included a pleated skirt.

** And her only line is the Russian for "Pretty", referring to a dress in a store window.