Change Today And Tomorrow

Living in the second half of the twentieth century, and especially if reading sf then, we became used to the idea that we were experiencing a century of rapid technological advances which, barring a nuclear war, would continue through the twenty first century and beyond.

Poul Anderson summarizes relevant events from the twentieth century:

"We think it extraordinary that just sixty-six years elapsed between the first powered flight at Kitty Hawk and the first manned landing on the moon; yet my mother was around for both of them."

-Poul Anderson, "The Discovery of the Past" IN Anderson, Past Times (New York, 1984), pp. 182-206 AT p. 200.

 

The earlier twentieth century is continuous with Robert Heinlein's Future History. D.D. Harriman says:

 

"'You young fellows have grown up to rocket travel the way I grew up to aviation. I'm a great deal older than you are, at least fifty years older. When I was a kid practically nobody believed that men would ever reach the Moon. You've seen rockets all your lives, and the first to reach the Moon got there before you were a young boy. When I was a boy they laughed at the idea.

"'But I believed - I believed. I read Verne, and Wells, and Smith, and I believed that we could do it - that we would do it.'"

-Robert Heinlein, "Requiem" IN Heinlein, The Man Who Sold The Moon (London, 1963), pp. 222-238 AT p. 226.

 

And finally, for this post, an Isaac Asimov character sums up rapid progress in Asimov's equivalent of The Man Who Sold The Moon:

 

"'And that is all,' said Dr. Calvin, rising. 'I saw it from the beginning, when the poor robots couldn't speak, to the end, when they stand between mankind and destruction. I will see no more. My life is over. You will see what comes next.'

"I never saw Susan Calvin again. She died last month at the age of eighty-two."

-Isaac Asimov, "The Evitable Conflict" IN Asimov, I, Robot (London, 1986), pp. 183-206 AT p. 206.