AST 389- 2nd Paper on Prognosticators PDF

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Professor Frederick Walter's class...

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How Good are SF Authors as Prognosticators?

Science fiction is a category of literature that surrounds the future and the technological as well as societal changes that can occur. The goal of the science fiction authors is to provide the readers with an understanding that anything can be possible. The hard part is for their prediction to become plausible. The readers have to believe that their scenario and “made up” circumstances are things to watch out for. Two very interesting texts to analyze in terms of the prognosticating of the authors are “A Sound of Thunder”, by Ray Bradbury and “The Underdweller”, by William F. Nolan. In the short story, “ A Sound of Thunder”, Bradbury surrounds his predictions around a character that goes by the name Eckels. The story takes place in the year 2055 dwelling in the idea of time travel. Throughout the short story, Eckels pays a company named Time Safari to take him to the dinosaur era to kill dinosaurs. Even though we are currently in the year 2018 and not 2055, there are some aspects of the story that are accurate to our current society. If time travel was something that we had today for example, there would be a company for it, or some sort of representation for it. Along with this, the fact that there are still presidential elections going on is still pretty accurate. The character also expressed their opinions towards not wanting a dictator as president, as in today’s society, a majority of the population still feel the same way. The political aspect of the story does correlate to the present. In today’s society, the hunters are still known for wanting to catch the biggest game possible for the trophy. For this reason, the idea behind Eckels wanting to go back and time and catch dinosaur, specifically a T-Rex is plausible, except for the actual catching of a T-rex part. This leads me to the part of the story that does not match up with the reality of how the world works today. Bradbury accounts for the creation of a time machine and how it is represented by the Time Safari company. Based on the way that society works today, and I am assuming will

still be working in the near future, company's don’t just get to take ownership of a weapon and resource so powerful as a time machine and use it to get money so that they can take savilians on joy rides. Time machines are weapons that can cause a multitude of problems if anything goes wrong. You can literally, if the power of time travel is accurate, go back in time and choose to mess anything up out of pure spite of the world. Which leads me to my third argument. At the beginning of the short story, there is no account for there being a background check on Eckles. He just entered and gave the front desk a check for $10,000. In today’s society that would never work. We’re talking about time travel here, not renting a private plane. If the story was accurately predicted, then Eckles would have a background check made on him in case he had any mental disabilities or any wrong intentions for going to the past instead of wanting to hunt. The past is a very delicate thing to revisit, especially since it has already happened and anything you do can impact the future in a tremendous way. Towards the end of the short story, Eckels accidentally steps outside of the path that was created for them to walk on, above the ground so that they do not accidentally step on and kill any species of life that may be important for the development and evolution of that species and the ecosystem for the many years to come. Because of his actions, the guide who is supposed to make sure that everything runs smoothly and the past isn't disrupted threatens to kill him if anything does change. When they return to the present, things have changed, and the dictator was elected president. The guide, Travis, then aims at Eckels and kills him right there and then. With the way that the world works, no one has the right to threaten to kill someone for a mistake that they made and then carry on their threat and actually kill them. It seems that Travis felt very comfortable with threatening Eckels and pulling the trigger, which leads me to assume that he was not given a background check with, just enough information to make him qualify for his position. This story didn’t seem to well supported, leaving a great deal of holes in the reasons and explanations of how this all started. In terms of the technology, not only is there no

existence of a time machine known to the public, but there also hasn’t been an introduction for floating paths, which is what the company uses to make sure that the clients would not step on the actual ground. This all seemed really illegal actually. Therefore, I claim that Bradbury as a prognosticator is not that good. The only thing that we can do is wait until the year 2055 and see for ourselves how things turn out. But according to how things are happening now, a lot of what he claims has not happened yet, and probably won’t happen either. In terms of “The Underdweller”, Nolan does a good job depicting the mental state of the main character. Nolan writes a story of the end of the world as we know it, in the sense that there is only one man left in San Francisco, and potentially the world, who has to survive a population of mutant children who would kill him if they had the chance and who at the end of the story actually get a chance to do so. The accurate parts of the story is how Nolan predicted that there would still be an existing sewage system that the main character was hiding in for years. The part with the alien invasion cannot be spoken for since we have not yet experienced that. In terms of that, there is no real way of knowing what the repercussions of an invasion would be. If an alien attack were to happen tomorrow, I feel as though they would succeed because as far as we know, the US and even worldwide military isn’t prepared for an extraterrestrial invasion. It would catch everyone off guard, leading to the end of the human race is there is no adequate defense system put into place. Especially since there was probably no warning given to the people. A good example would be on college campus. If an alien race was to come down and attack us, we would all surely die because we have no training and no defense resource. The only reason that the main character survived is because during the invasion, he was already in the sewage system. The part of the story that was very inaccurate to our present society was the fact the the aliens killed off everyone over the age of six and let everyone else live. There is no explanation given as to why they did this instead of just extinguishing the entire race, but the point is that the

children were expected to survive on their own and mutate. The reason why this is an implausible prognostication is because six year olds are helpless. A great deal of them can’t even feed themselves entirely or even defend for themselves. They cry off of the slightest sense of danger and nervousness. Nolan made the story so that the children survive and somehow learn to fend for themselves. If the children were actually left to exist with having only themselves as company, hundreds of them would die. They are careless and have no independent training on how to survive in their own. The aggression part where they wanted to kill the main character also does not make any sense. In today’s society, if an abandoned group of children encounter an adult after losing their parents and everyone they knew that loved them, they would be left vulnerable and emotional. Thy would cling on to the person, whether they are man or woman, not attack them and potentially kill him on purpose. Six year olds are not killers. How they even learned to kill and their reason for attack is beyond the comprehension of the reader. I think that Nolan’s story would have been more plausible if he made it so that some aliens would stay back on Earth and train the six year olds to be aggressive and defensive in case of any interaction with the older population, like that of the main character. As far as the reader knows, they literally just attack him because he was not a child. Society and even the mental capacity of six year olds would not have let this be possible. For science fiction authors to be good prognosticators, they need to have some scientific background and some sense of reality so that they can plan accordingly when writing their short stories and even novels. When they choose to write about, for example, the survival of savage six year olds, they should take into account the actual chances of these things actually happening even though it takes place in the future; otherwise, their writing can no longer be taken seriously as science fiction and stretches onto fantasy. Even in the story about the time machine; there’s no saying that a time machine is impossible, but the way that Bradbury incorporated it into his story just doesn’t seem realistic. In today’s society, companies don’t have

as much leisure as Time Safari does. A time machine would be used as government property, not for sport, and definitely not something that you would need to pay $10,000 for. His story made it so that Time Safari, in terms of the society we live in today, sound corrupt, along with the government. It gives off that impression because in the story, the guide mentions how they need to pay a great deal of the money to the government to keep their business running. In reality, science fiction writers are not that good at prognosticating. They start off with one idea, like time travel in “A Sound of Thunder” or with an alien invasion in “The Underdweller”, which are all plausible things that may happen in the future and can very well happen today, but after that, they go off on another course and let their imaginations get the better of them. Today’s technology is not as advanced enough to be able to produce a time machine, we have just recently come out with self driving cars, time travel is still a long way ahead of us. As for the children, that will surely never happen. Not unless the children were bred in a laboratory to be geniuses and survive on their own, but even then, we are not there yet. Either our society is not the time period that these science fiction authors were targeting, or the future has a great deal coming for us....