"Heinlein, Robert A - Discovery of the Future" - читать интересную книгу автора (Heinlein Robert A)

GUEST OF HONOR SPEECH
AT THE THIRD WORLD
SCIENCE FICTION CONVENTION
DENVER, 1941





THE DISCOVERY OF THE FUTURE

Here in my hand is the manuscript of a speech. If it works out anything like the synopses I have used, this speech will still be left when I get through.
Before I start, I want to mention an idea that might be fun. It was an innovation in political speaking introduced in California by Upton Sinclair that raised Cain with the ordinary run of political speakers: answering questions from the platform. But I want to put one reservation on it, and that is that questions should be in writing, with names signed, so we can read them into the mike so that I can have clearly in mind what the questions are.
During the course of the last day or so, I have gathered the impression that quite a number of people are inter-ested in the background of my stories; and; in some cases, in my social and political ideas, economic ideas, etc.—some of which, but not all, shows in my stories. Some of them have evidenced an interest in my own personal background. So, if the question comes along, I will do my best to answer it, perhaps dodging the embarrassing ones a little.
To get to the talk itself: THE DISCOVERY OF THE FUTURE. I was told that there was no time limit, so I assumed that he wanted my usual three hour speech. Or, perhaps, we can just keep going until the hall is cleared.
Forry [Ackerman] told you that I have been reading science fiction for a longtime. I have. I have been reading it as long as I could get hold of it, and I probably experienced much the same process most of you did: parental disapproval, those funny looks you get from friends, for reading “that kind of junk.”
We here, the science fiction fans, are the lunatic fringe! We are the crazy fools who read that kind of stuff—who read those magazines with the outlandish machines and animals on the covers. You leave one around loose in your home and a friend will pick it up. Those who are not fans ask you if you really read that stuff, and from then on they look at you with suspicion.
Why do we do it? I think I know. This is an opinion, but it is probably why we like science fiction. It is not just for the adventure of the story itself—you can find that in other types of stories. To my mind it is because science fiction has as its strongest factor the single thing that separates the human race from other animals—I refer to a quality which has been termed “time-binding.” With a hyphen. It’s a term that may not have come to your attention. It is a technical term invented by Alfred Korzybski, and it refers to the fact that the human animal lives not only in the present, but also in the past and the future.
The human animal differs from all other animals only in this one respect. The definition includes both reading and writing. That is the primary technique whereby we are able to make records, to gather data and to look into the future. Other things we do that we think of as making us humans rather than animals—some animals have done at sometime. They form governments. They invent machines. Some animals even use money. I have not seen them doing it, but I have heard reports that I believe to be credible. But time-bind they do not do, to anything like the extent that the human race does.
Time-binding consists of making use of the multitudi-nous records of the past that we have. On the basis of those records, the data we have collected directly and the data that we get from others by means of time-binding techniques, including reading and writing, we are able to plan our future conduct. It means that we have lived mentally in the past and in the future, as well as in the present. That is certainly true of science fiction fans.
I like the term Future Fiction that Charlie Hornig gave it. It seems to me a little broader than Science Fiction because most of these stories are concerned with the future—what will happen.
In taking the future into account, trying to predict what it will be, and trying to make your plans according-ly, you are time-binding. The child-like person lives from day to day. The adult tries to plan for a year or two at least. Statesmen try to plan for perhaps twenty years or more. There are a few institutions which plan for longer than the lives of men, as for example, the Smithsonian Institution and the Catholic Church, that think not in terms of lifetimes, but in centuries. They make their plans that far ahead, and to some extent, make them work out.
Science fiction fans differ from most of the rest of the race by thinking in terms of racial magnitudes—not even centuries, but thousands of years. Stapledon thinks in terms of. . . how many years? How far does his time scale go? I don’t know: the figures mean nothing to me,
That is what science fiction consists of—trying to figure out from the past and from the present what the future may be. In that we are behaving like human beings.
Now, all human beings time-bind to some extent when they try to discover the future. But most human beings—those who laugh at us for reading science fiction— time-bind, make their plans, make their predictions, only within the limits of their personal affairs. In that respect, they may try to predict for a year or two, make plans, even try to predict for their entire lifetimes, but they rarely try to predict in terms of the culture in which they live. In fact, most people, as compared with science fiction fans, have no conception whatsoever of the fact that the culture they live in does change, that it can change. Even though they may believe it with the top of their minds, they don’t believe it way back in the thalamus, in their emotions.
Our grandfathers thought the horse could never be replaced by the auto. Four years after the Wright brothers first flew, they were still trying to get the War Department to come out to look at the airplane. And when one Major General did take a look at an airplane flying, he remarked that it was a very interesting scientific toy, but, of course, it had no possible military application! That was just a short time ago, a very short time.
You will hear that sort of thing around you all the time. I made use, a while ago, of a quotation I would like to use again, from 0. B. Shaw. Referring to Brittanicus in Caesar and Cleopatra, he said, “he is an outlander and a barbarian and he believes that the customs of his tribe are the laws of nature.” That is what you are up against when you try to get most people to read science fiction. That is why they think you are crazy, because they believe that the customs of their tribe are the laws of nature, immutable and unchanging. They do not believe in changes.
Phrases like “There’ll always be an England” are pleasant and inspiring at the present time, but we know better. There won’t always be an England, nor a Germa-ny, nor a United States, a Baptist Church, nor monogamy, nor the Democratic Party, nor the modesty taboo, nor the superiority of the white race, nor airplanes. Nor automobiles. They will go. They will be gone—we’ll see them go. Any custom, institution, belief, or social struc-ture that we see around us today will change, will pass, and most of those we will see change and pass.
In science fiction, we try to envision what those changes might be. Our guesses are usually wrong; they are almost certain to be wrong. Some men, with a greater grasp on data than others, can do remarkably well. H. G. Wells, who probably knows more (on the order of ten times as much, or perhaps higher) than most science fiction writers, has been remarkably successful in some of his predictions. Most of us aren’t that lucky;
I do not expect my so-called History of the Future to come to pass. I think some of the trends in it may show up, but I do not think that my factual predictions as such are going to come to pass, even in their broad outlines.
You speak of this sort of thing to an ordinary man— tell him that things are going to change—he will admit it, but he does not believe it at all. He believes it just with the top of his mind. He believes in “progress.” He thinks things will get a little bit bigger, and louder, and brighter, a few more neon signs. But he does not believe that any actual change in the basic nature of the culture in which he lives, or its technology, will take place.
Airplanes he thinks are all right, but those crazy rocket ship things! Why, a rocket ship couldn’t possibly fly. It hasn’t got anything to PUSH on. That is the way he feels about it.
There will never be any rocket ships. That is all right for Buck Rogers in the funny papers. He does not believe that there could be rocket ships, nor does he believe that there will be things that will make rockets look like primitive gadgets that even the wildest of the science fiction writers have not been able to guess or think about. Rocket ships are about as far as I am willing to go be-cause I have not got data enough to think about, to make a reasonable guess about the other forms of transporta-tion or gadgets we may have.
But that same man did not believe in airplanes in 1910!
I have spoken primarily of mechanical changes because they are much easier to show, to point to, than the more subtle sociological changes, cultural changes, changes in our customs. Some of these can be pointed out. I would like to point out one of them right now. The word “syphilis” could not be used in public even as short a time as fifteen years ago.
Yet, as I used it here, I did not see any shock around the room—nobody minded it—even the Ladies’ Home Journal runs articles on it. We are getting a little more civilized in that respect than we were twenty years ago. Our grandfathers considered that word indecent. They believed that things that were decent and indecent were subject to absolute rules, that they were laws of nature. The majority of people around us now believe that their criteria of decency and indecency are absolute, that they won’t change, that there are some things that are right, and some things that are wrong. They do not know enough about past history to be able to make any predictions about the future.
I could think of some rude words to use in that connection, words that are still rude now. I think it quite possible that twenty years from now on this same platform I could use those words and not produce any shock around the room.
For things do change. And words which we consider utterly indecent today may very possibly simply be used as tags, as terms with no emotional connotation to them, twenty years from now.
We happen to live in a period of sudden and drastic change in a good many of the things that happen to us. I think it is extremely important that we be prepared for that change and for that reason, I think that science fiction fans are better prepared to face the future than the ordinary run of people around them, because they believe in change.

To that extent, I think that science fiction, even the corniest of it, even the most outlandish of it, no matter how badly it’s written, has a distinct therapeutic value because all of it has as its primary postulate that the world does change. I cannot overemphasize the impor-tance of that idea.
Unless you believe that, unless you are prepared for it—as I know all of you are—you can’t retain your sanity these days. When a man makes predictions and they keep failing to come true, time and again, he goes insane, functionally insane. It has been proved in labora-tories time and again. It has been proved with respect to men, but I’ll give an illustration with respect to animals.
The well-known experiment was performed with rats, an experiment in which a rat was disappointed in his predictions time and again. He went crazy. It happens to work the same way with men. Things do not necessarily work the same way with animals as they do with men, but in this case, there is data to prove it. The inability to believe in change makes absolutely certain that your prediction will disappoint you. That does not apply to this group, but it does apply to a great many people.
For that reason, I believe we are in a period in which large portions of the human race will be in a condition of, if not insanity, at least un-sanity. We see that over a large portion of the world today. I think we have seen it crawling up on us for a number of years. In 1929 we had the market crash and people jumped out of the window as a result of not being able to predict things which were perfectly obvious, written on the face of the culture, something that would happen.
The Depression came along, and the madhouses filled up again. Other only slightly less slaphappy individuals proceeded to be a bit unsane by concocting the most wildly unscientific schemes for making everybody rich by playing musical chairs.. Not quite crazy—they could still find their way around and take street cars and not get lost, but not quite sane either. That can lead, if it goes on long enough, to a condition of mass insanity that none of us is going to like.
Nevertheless, we science fictionists, I think, are better prepared for it than others. During a period of racial insanity, mass psychoses, hysteria, manic depression, paranoia, it is possible for a man who believes in change to hold on, to arrest his judgment, to go slow, to take a look at the facts, and not be badly hurt. Things will probably happen to us, very unpleasant indeed, we can’t separate ourselves from the matrix in which we find ourselves. Nevertheless, WE stand a chance, for I am very much afraid that a great many people of the type who laugh at us for dealing with this stuff, will not be able to hang on.
The important thing is to hang on to your sanity, to preserve sanity while it happens—no matter what bad things happen to the world.. As individuals it may be difficult for us to do anything about it, even though all of us in our own ways, and according to our lights, are trying. But this series of wars that we find the world in now may go on for another five years, ten years, twenty years—it may go on for fifty years—you and I may not live to see the end of it.
I, personally, have hopes—wishful thinking—that it will terminate quickly enough so that I can pass the rest of my lifetime in comparative peace and comfort. But I’m not optimistic about it. During such a period, it is really difficult to keep a grip on yourself, but I think that we are better prepared to than some of the others.
I can speak more freely here than I could in a political. meeting, because it’s a highly selected group. I’ve known a good many science fiction fans, and I’ve observed, statistically, certain things about them. Most of them are young as compared with other groups, most of them are extremely precocious—quite brilliant. I’d be very much interested to see IQs run on a typical group of fans.
But, even without IQs I know that most of the people here are way above average in intelligence. I’ve had enough data on it to know. I’m not trying to flatter you, I’m not interested in that. I am interested in the fact that you have unusually keen minds. However, that lays us open, and I am including myself in this, lays us open to dangers that don’t hit the phlegmatic, the more stolid. Unless we are able to predict, we are even more likely to be subjected to functional unsanities than those around us.