Otherways- Fiction Fanatics

One of the coolest things about old science fiction, is reading those passages that predict something. Jules Verne comes to mind almost immediately. Sure, some of his works, like Journey to the Center of the Earth, are just good fiction. Others contain submarines, diving apparatus, and electric lights, none of which were in vogue, or even really feasible, when he was writing.

While the esteemed Leonardo DaVinci isn’t exactly an author, he too was a big one for predictive works. We’ve seen his drawings of helicopters and tanks, which given the warfare of the time had just entered the cannon stage is pretty impressive.

The question here is really whether life imitates art, or art imitates life.

Did these people, more sensitive than most to the directions society was heading, simply extrapolate the next most logical invention? This seems likely enough. After all, every one of us spends a good deal of our unconscious brain power running through scenarios in our heads, at least according to psychologists. We rehash old experiences, predict new ones, and evaluate current conditions against past events without even being aware of it. This is a very good thing, otherwise nothing would ever get any easier.

Perhaps these innovators were simply gifted in this area. It isn’t an area of intelligence that we have any tests for, naturally, since the fruits predicted often don’t appear until after the person’s death. In fact, spending so much time and energy on innovations that seem impossible in the light of current technology might well seem like an unhealthy obsession to less forward-thinking folks.

So, I’d like to propose a slightly different point of view. Someone like Jules Verne sees a world they desperately want to explore, like the ocean. Limited by a frail human body, and the highly questionable technology of the time, he isn’t able to actually satisfy that desire. Instead, he turns to his imagination, solving the issues that prevent exploration on paper. He creates submarines, lit with electric light, to take us where our bodies won’t go, along with dozens of other inventions that let the characters he creates do in his place what he simply cannot.

Now, skip forward a bit. Young children, their minds open to possibility and their technology perhaps slightly advanced read these stories. Not only are they excited by what they read, some part of them accepts it as possible. Sports psychologists have been telling us for decades to beware what images you put in front of your subconscious, because whatever images you dwell on, your subconscious will strive to make real. With enough children reading something like this, and inspired to actually explore the ocean, odds are that eventually one of them will come up with a solution that gets the job done, especially if time isn’t an issue.

Looking backwards, it seems that the writer predicted the future. I don’t really see it that way. To me, it looks like the writer shaped the future. Perhaps the innovations they foresaw would have come to pass anyway, and perhaps not, or at least not in the same way. He had an idea, one that for whatever reason, he was unable to take out of the dream stage and into reality before his life ended. So he passed that idea on, until someone, or several someones, took up the spark and made it real.

Now that is a beautiful thing, don’t you think?

Cheers,

Michelle