Outlandish

A New Scientist cartoon based on recent news about the SpudCell.

I'm not impressed by most futuristic predictions. It doesn't take a lot of brains or imagination to predict a new energy source, portable computer or communication device, or a large war. The only kind of scifi predictions that actually impress or shock me are those with a bizarre specificity. For example. how Star Trek: the Next Generation predicted that hypochondriacs would use the internet to diagnose themselves ("Realm of Fear"), or how Heinlein not only predicted the screensaver in Stranger in a Strange Land, but that it would also resemble aquarium fish, and finally, ghoulishly enough, how iCarly predicted that a member of the cast of Friends would die by drowning (though they said it would be David Schwimmer, which means in the Nickelodeon shared sitcom universe, David Schwimmer is dead).

It's interesting how almost no scifi predicted two major developments of the 1990s: the internet, or the fall of the Soviet Union. This, incidentally, is proof positive of something I spent the 80s arguing, that Kremlinology, and to a lesser extent, the entire discipline of International Relations, is a completely fraudulent field staffed by people who don't know what they're talking about. Imagine the side-eye you'd give to Marine Biologists if, one day, the Oceans evaporated and they failed to predict it!

But there was one person who predicted something like the internet: James H. Schmitz's Telzey Amberdon stories.

The Telzey Amberdon stories were published in Analog in the 1960s, and were about a girl genius and powerful psychic, a "xenotelepath" with the rare ability to communicate with vastly different forms of alien life. She often ran afoul of the Psychology Service, the Federation's internal police created to handle psionics, who often dispatched Psionic Cops to capture her, typically rated P12+ on the psi-scale. The Psychology Service started off as a means to handle telepaths, but ultimately became an unaccountable surveillance state-within-a-state (if all this sounds a bit familiar to Babylon 5 fans, it's because these stories are....clearly...a major inspiration for the psychic plot of that series, down to the fact a heroine's powers are activated/supercharged by mental contact with unknowable alien minds, and the weirdly specific detail of Psi being ranked 1-12). Lots of scifi writers predicted a surveillance state, but James H. Schmitz gets some credit for predicting how one would actually feel to live in: not oppressive at all, everything feels normal and it is all completely invisible...until one day, you cross an invisible line, and suddenly the Eye of Sauron that is the surveillance state fixes itself on you.

The Telzey stories (remember, this is the 60s) featured a ComWeb that used interstellar communications to instantly transmit data from linked computers. But as usual, scifi was too conservative: it took 30 minutes for the ComWeb to download and print a single scientific paper, and even Schmitz did not predict the ubiquity of the personal computer, as people had to go to phone booth-like structures to download anything off the ComWeb. What he got wrong was as interesting as what he got right.

What was extremely interesting about the Telzey stories is that it was so rare (at the time) for any main character in scifi to be female at all that they received a lot of letters that said something like "well, why couldn't this main character be male?" Which seems to strangely echo the insanely dumb and truly awful fights of today. The fandom of the 1960s viewed the Telzey stories as incredibly controversial, and there was as much discussion in xeroxed and mailed fanzines like Yandro and Science Fiction Review about Telzey Amberdon and other James H. Schmitz female heroines like secret agent Trigger Argee. The most common way the objection expressed itself was not quite "no girls should be in scifi" but one that attempted to sound more reasonable: "well, if a story could be changed to be about a man, it should be, so making her a girl is a distraction."

I have long said that Telzey Amberdon and James H. Schmitz inspired a lot of Japanimation, and my evidence for that is this: the stories existed in translation in Japan early on (as did his Witches of Karres), and were so enormously popular in Japan that they received covers from a certain Mr. Hayao Miyazaki.

Roger Dean, Floating Islands. In Dragon’s Dream (Harper Design, 2008).