From Victorianism Through Pollution To Future Paradigms

Futuristic sf is of its time. Thus, HG Wells projected Victorian social classes into two devolved human species in 802,701 A.D. whereas Poul Anderson imagined pollution and nuclear war destroying civilization in the Northern Hemisphere. (I know that both authors also imagined much more than that but we are still focusing on The Time Machine and There Will Be Time.)

James Blish's The Quincunx Of Time, also about time if not about time travel, is a genuine attempt to present contact with incomprehensible futures. Its protagonists intercept messages presupposing:

"'...many future paradigms, which not only conflict with ours but with each other. Wald's metalanguage simply shows that the very structure of science itself makes it impossible for us to choose among them, because that structure is in itself one of those paradigms. Follow?'"

-James Blish, The Quincunx Of Time (New York, 1973), AN EPILOGUE, pp. 124-125.

I would have thought that they were all scientific paradigms but what do I know? Wald's metamathematics also shows:

"'...that we'd have no more chance of understanding [whether the universe is truly deterministic or not] if we got [the answer] than a leaf understands the photosynthesis that's going on inside it.'"

-ibid., p. 123.

These passages take us way beyond nineteenth or twentieth century concerns.