Predictions
The best part of reading old speculative fiction is reading all the predictions about the current era, and seeing how close they came. I’m currently reading I Will Fear No Evil by Robert Heinlein, which I’m not too enamoured with. However, I did find one set of predictions he made interesting enough to comment on.
On pages 64-5 of my edition, the narrator talks about the political climate of the unspecified by clearly imminent time. In it, he identifies the major right-wing political parties as the SDS and the PLA, and their liberal opponents as the Constitutional Liberation Rally. The Democratic, Republican, and Socialist parties are labeled with the adjective “splinter.” While it is striking how he makes the three “major” political groups flip-flop political alignments (the SDS, for those who don’t know, were the fore-runner of the Weathermen; the PLA can only be assumed to mean People’s Liberation Army; and the Constitution Party that he knew was a conservative movement, to be differentiated from the paleoconservative former U.S. Taxpayers Party), it is also inconceivable to anyone in this day and age how any party could have dislodged the Democratic and Republican parties from thier traditional tyrannical dominance of the U.S. political process. Times of upheaval will tend to make one believe that things can actually happen.
Also, he got the average American’s short news-attention-span dead on.