Scouring our bookshelves for a novel to read with my soon-to-be-nine-year-old son Dietrich, I landed the other night upon The Mote in God’s Eye, a first-contact science fiction novel by Larry Niven & Jerry Pournelle that I’d read in 1976 when I was 13. I wondered if it was too advanced for him — and his almost-13-year-old sister flat-out said it was, even though she’s never read it — but I figured that it’s got lots of space battles, and aliens, and that ultimately we’d make our way through it as successfully as his older brother and I had done with Journey to the Center of the Earth when he was the same age. So we started reading it the other night.

When you’re reading old science fiction, you’re reading what I’ll call projected alternate futures, the sort of things that make up storylines on “Fringe.” The book is set in 3017, but it’s important to remember that in a way that isn’t just over a thousand years in the future — it’s more properly one thousand forty-three years since its writing. So the authors, writing four years before the introduction of the home computer,  and 11 years before the release of the first PDA, are commendably prescient when they write, “Rod Blaine scowled at the words flowing across the screen of his pocket computer” — although one could say that if we’ve got “pocket computers” already, a millennium before the setting of their novel, it follows that we’ll have something far more advanced in the far future. (Unless, paraphrasing Einstein, we’re fighting World War IV with rocks.) At the same time, if  Niven and Pournelle are thoughtful about technology (and weaponry and the military), here’s something they weren’t thinking through in 1974:

“Blaine was rushed down the elevator to the Governor General’s floor. There wasn’t a woman in the building, although Imperial government offices usually bristled with them, and Rod missed the girls. He’d been in space a long time.”

So, somehow, in the future the military returns to all-male service, despite 4,000 years, to date, of  women serving in various military capacities; or the current military service seen in Israel, the U.S., Russia and, I believe, most industrialized or post-industrialized nations; or the projected futures depicted in artifacts of popular culture such as the Halo and Mass Effect games and seemingly every James Cameron movie.  Acceptance is often driven by pop culture (by way of example, see:  interracial relationships, homosexuality, etc.). That very anachronistic point of view seems far more 1974 than 3017.

But then, the best perspective on the skewed time-reality of the book came from  Dietrich himself, who, when I told him that I’d read this book “in the 1970’s,” tittered and said, “The 1970’s? That’s like 300 years ago!”

This entry was posted on Monday, May 9th, 2011 at 10:14 pm and is filed under On reading, Politics, Thoughts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.