A Secret And The Future

"The Big Rain."

"There was always a secret sworn in his eyes." (V, p. 239)

I could have just read past that sentence. It reads a bit odd but does that matter? We might think that it could have been better phrased. There was always a secret in his eyes...? A sworn secret...? Still a bit odd. However, I took the opportunity to reread the passage in a later edition:

"There was always a secret scorn in his eyes."

-Poul Anderson, "The Big Rain" IN Anderson, The Complete Psychotechnic League, Volume I (Riverdale, NY, October 2017), pp. 161-225 AT V, p. 192.

Suddenly all is clear and we are glad that we checked - also that we were able to. This "...secret..." is an adjective, not a noun.

The later edition also has a new Preface by David Afsharirad who writes:

"...it is not really the job of science fiction to accurately predict the future." (p. 2)

(It is not at all the job of sf to predict.)

"In truth, science fiction is always about the time in which it was written..." (ibid.)

Is it? Sf reflects the time in which it was written but so does everything else. Sf that is about the present is about one special aspect of the present, namely that the present is the threshold of the future, that it always interacts with the future, as it also does with the past, of course.

Some sf characters travel into the future and return in, e.g.:

The Time Machine by HG Wells;

There Will Be Time by Poul Anderson.

Characters receive messages from the future in James Blish's The Quincunx of Time.

Characters can start in the present but live into a very different future, e.g., in Poul Anderson's Brain Wave.

Discoveries and decisions made the day after tomorrow can determine the much further future, e.g., in That Hideous Strength by CS Lewis.

Afsharirad continues:

"...and great science fiction is about the always changing yet eternally constant human condition." (ibid.)

It is about that condition in its cosmic context. Other fiction just assumes a Terrestrial setting.

Afsharirad adds that some timeless universal truths are at the centre of these stories but does not tell us what those truths are. Human resilience must be one.