By David Kubicek
Most science fiction writers will tell you that they don’t try to predict the future; the futures they create are there to serve their characters and their stories.
Many SF writers, however, do get some things right about the future. Ray Bradbury, for example, describes interactive TV in his 1953 novel Fahrenheit 451–it’s a clunky, primitive version of today’s interactive TV, but interactive TV it is, nonetheless.
SF writers miss other things completely. For instance, SF writers have always predicted the dominance of computers in their future worlds, but I don’t know of any who predicted the digital revolution–in the original Star Trek series, for instance, inhabitants of that distant future must still insert cartridges to read a book or synthesize food.
I’ve had brushes with predicting things that came true or are coming true as I write this. In an unpublished 1985 novel, I predicted the internet for public use. I didn’t have to take such a big leap for that. The internet had been used by the military for years; I just envisioned the next logical step (and to be perfectly honest, I may have read an article about what was coming). It was a clunky version of the internet compared to what we have today, but it was still the internet.
In that same unpublished novel, 20 years before Kindle, I predicted e-readers and e-books. In one way it was a clunky version of e-reading technology. The e-reader didn’t have a hard drive for storing books; books were on discs the size of hearing aid batteries that you inserted into the reader. You didn’t have to push a button or sensor to turn the page, however. With my e-readers, the words scrolled up the screen as you read; they automatically adjusted to your reading speed, and if you paused or looked away, the scrolling would stop and wait for your attention to return to the page. Another cool thing about my e-readers was that they collapsed into a cylinder about the size of a pen that you could carry in your pocket.
About that time, I wrote a novelette called A Friend of the Family, which was first published in Space and Time magazine in 1987. This story was set in a dystopian future world where practicing medicine was illegal. Health care providers were Healers who relied on such rituals as chanting, bleeding their patients, and binding their patients’ chest tightly with strips of cloth to squeeze out demons.
In 2012 I published the story as a stand-alone book in both digital and paperback (it is currently available in my collections Prospect Street, The Moaning Rocks and Other Stories, and as a paperback). The week of its release, A Friend of the Family broke into the top 30 of two Amazon best seller lists, peaking at #26 on the Science Fiction List and #21 on the Literary Fiction List. The premise of medicine having been replaced by magic was a device I used to explore relationships between my characters, but my vision is well on the way to coming true.
A perfect example is the nonsense being spread by antivaxxers who are sowing distrust about the COVID-19 vaccines. They are calling for the criminal investigation, of Dr. Anthony Fauci, one of our foremost authorities on infectious diseases, simply because he gave sound health care advice about COVID. They are championing all sorts of oddball remedies, such as Ivermectin (a horse de-wormer), drinking dirt from a landfill, and drinking urine.
One fellow who espouses urine therapy has said that people who take the COVID vaccine are foolish. Well, with all due respect to that fellow, we vaccinated folks aren’t the ones who are drinking our own piss.
But COVID is not the only target of anti-medical nonsense. One practitioner has claimed that alien DNA and having dream sex with witches and demons causes all sorts of maladies.
These are not just isolated incidents; these movements have a lot more followers than they should have in a civilized society with easy access to education. The world depicted in A Friend of the Family seems to be coming true a lot more quickly than I’d expected.
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