abstract
| - This is the social equivalent to Zeerust. Many works set in the future presume that people in the future will have the same basic social mores and morals as they do in the present, with only a few exceptions to facilitate the plot or create Author Appeal. This is a natural thing to do -- it's a lot easier to observe the society you have than to predict which way it's going to go. Unfortunately, it's often a wrong assumption. Even if the technology is predicted perfectly, modern readers may lose Willing Suspension of Disbelief when reading a work written in The Fifties, set in the present day, and assuming the attitudes of the present day will be exactly like those of The Fifties. They may even be severely bothered if a work from The Fifties assumes that attitudes in the far future will be just like those in The Fifties. (Even if the author had no way of knowing about The Beatles, even if it is the far future, it just seems wrong to read that a lover of popular music in the future goes primarily for jazz quartets or big bands, with not an electric guitar or synthesizer to be seen even though the entire house runs on electricity right down to the windows and Muzak.) Sometimes the author will correctly predict some of the effects of a new technology, but completely miss others; many authors correctly foresaw the effect of automobiles on working habits and city design, but not one person foresaw the effect that access to automobiles would have on teen sexual activity. The most disturbing instances from our future point of view are those that miss more important social changes. To continue the '50s example, there are plenty of examples that failed to expect the civil rights movement. The schools may be futuristic and electronic, but they're still segregated. The other two big changes that older works miss are greater gender equality (even on the space colonies, women Stay in the Kitchen) and the end of the Cold War (still wrangling with the Commies in the 22nd Century). This effect increases with the distance between when the work is written and the present day. The necessary distance to invoke this decreases as time passes, so far anyhow -- technology speeds communication up, and communication speeds change. For instance, if a film has been in production for long enough, it may fall under this trope the day it's released. This will no doubt apply to modern works set Twenty Minutes Into the Future as well. Unfortunately, we won't know how until the social changes have at least started. The inverse of this, when the social mores of the present are presumed to apply to the past, is Politically-Correct History. Related to Values Dissonance, Science Marches On and The Great Politics Mess-Up. Eternal Prohibition and Everybody Smokes are specific cases. Examples of Society Marches On include:
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