Why didn’t (or did) Science Fiction Predict the Smartphone?

I’m not sure why I wrote this really. It’s been a kind of an occasional distraction for me. I’m not much of a technical person, so this is mostly written from a consumerist view, from someone who has read and watched some science fiction.

I’ve not read or seen every single work of science fiction, so a good example of the smartphone might be out there somewhere, but accuracy in science fiction’s predictions isn’t really what this blog post is about. It more an exploration into the thought processes of writers: how some things are dreamt up, while others completely missed.

One thing that dates a lot of science fiction is their missteps in predicting certain technology, which I do not see as failings. After all, we’re not all gifted with the art of foreseeing the future. It may be a little jarring, and it can break the illusion a little, but there’s something pleasing about reading about worlds of technological advancement yet they’re still doing crappy outdated things.

50s, 60s and 70s-era science fiction has a love affair with the exotic technology that is microfilm. And it’s funny that an incredibly small print of a book to be viewed under lenses was seen as the solution to transporting massive amounts of information. Science fiction often still uses tape to record sound – like in Escape from New York, which includes a top secret, very important speech recorded on cassette tape.

We live in a world of digital photography and ebooks, yet photographs are still printed (although perhaps more for artistic reasons rather than everyday) and people still prefer printed books. So science fiction showing people reading a book or looking through printed photos isn’t so much a failing, but it does become questionable on, say, a long haul space flight, or a space station where you’d imagine such things would be considered frivolous.

The smartphone doesn’t really appear in science fiction pre-2000, and this is interesting to me because the smartphone has become so prominent in most people’s lives. So why was it missed?

Star Trek

It is often said that the Communicator from the original Star Trek series is an example of mobile phone technology, and that it is an example of science fiction predicting the mobile phone. And, yes, while that might be true, they are not quite the same. I suppose they have more in common with the walkie talkie or radio communication than the mobile phone – something that existed at the time of the first Star Trek series.

And thinking about Communicators as “military field communication devices” takes away some of their prescient mystique. They become space walkie talkies and the imaginative leap to get there doesn’t seem all that impressive.

What stops them being mobile phones is that they are not generally used in private time for personal calls. This is for good reason. Star Trek is a show that follows a Starfleet crew around space; it’s not a show about futuristic leisure time, so the show aims to be more exciting and adventurous than being a show about characters phoning their mothers.

And if you’ve seen a photo of a Communicator – or seen one in real life – or even used one maybe – you will see they don’t have a screen, just speakers and buttons, making them very much space walkie-talkies, not smartphones. Even The Next Generation features many handheld devices but when the viewer is shown their display screens, they appear more like light-up LED displays rather than video screens. (I would say however, that the displays in Next Generation were probably there to be consistent with the original series, so are in some ways a deliberate style choice).

Portable telephony devices they are, but what they definitely are not, are smartphones. So where’s the smartphone? What stopped science fiction writers from predicting them?

Space is Big

One reason smartphones aren’t featured in science fiction is because a lot of science fiction is set in space and I’m pretty sure you wouldn’t get network coverage in some of it. So the idea of handheld communication devices doesn’t really work for movies like Star Wars – although that all happened a long, long time ago so smartphones weren’t invented then anyway. The idea of sending a message as a recording – i.e. a recorded holographic message – and sending it through space is perhaps the only way to safely send a message, so makes sense.

In this article the author, Sam Wigly, discusses Arthur C Clarke / Stanley Kubrick predicting the ebook or electronic tablet. In 2001: A Space Odyssey, the newspad is featured which, as Clarke described in his accompanying novel, can receive news updates every hour deep in space. And I have to say Clarke’s prescience for our media-saturated world and spending “an entire lifetime doing nothing but absorbing the ever-changing flow of information” is quite impressive.

In Wigly’s response to that, he fails to realise the internet doesn’t extend far out to space, saying, “Thanks to something called the internet, which neither Kubrick nor Clarke predicted, we can be grateful for news that updates more frequently than on the hour.” (I’m not an internet historian or anything, but I should also add that the internet in some kind of early version did exist in the 60s and Clarke could have been aware of it, thus had no need to predict it).

So while 2001 did predict something similar to our smartphones – or at least an ebook reader – the outer space narrative prevented it from being more like our smartphone, so it seems to be a device that doesn’t incorporate the telephone with the e-reader.

I’ve not read 2001 and I tried to watch the movie a year or so ago but fell asleep. I’m familiar with much of the movie but the middle part is vague to me. But I have to say, the prescience in predicting an e-reader is very impressive, thinking about the practicalities of space travel. Perhaps what’s missing is the newspad having thousands of works of fiction and non-fiction stored on it, as well as the hourly news updates.

eBooks

While we’re on the subject of ebook readers, the book in The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy is a kind of ebook which can speak, play sound. However the book is described as having a black screen with green letters over it, much like the computer monitors of the time. This is confirmed by the TV show with the graphics being merely simple line drawings. While these graphics are kinda cool, it is not quite the multimedia experience that comes from the smartphone – and it isn’t a telephone. It’s also an ebook reader that contains only one ebook with the notion of updates meaning you buy a new copy.

In the novel Solaris, there is a huge library on the space station, filled with books on microfilm. This novel describes a world with interplanetary exploration, extra-terrestrial life, yet its a world where people have to transport books in physical form onto their space stations, rather than conveniently storing billions of books on the onboard computer to be downloaded at will onto a smaller handheld device.

There’s even a mention of a book where the main character “was seeing the engraving on the title-page of his classic work, and the close-hatched strokes against which the artist had made his head stand out.” Again, engravings and etchings are still printed today, but it would be particularly luxurious to go to the bother of using one for a book cover – a special edition, yes, or a scanned reproduction of one on a mass produced book, but an actual engraving is not so common nowadays.

Digital Photography and Video

In one of Red Dwarf’s best episodes Kryten is developing traditional photographs and finds the developing fluid has mutated. The notion a mining ship having a traditional darkroom is a bit unlikely in a world with digital photography. The ship could have a darkroom for artist or hobbyist use, sure, but it is questionable that they’d bother to take developing fluids onboard a mining ship.

I’d say many of these prediction failures would have been avoided if the smartphone had been predicted, which would a shame because the developing fluid idea from Red Dwarf is brilliant. So it is clear that accuracy or authenticity in fiction is not always best.

While we’re on Red Dwarf perhaps the closest example of a smartphone – or smartwatch – is found in the episode Stasis Leak where Lister communicates by videophone to Holly, using a watch device. As mentioned in the linked article, it is a device that was conceived to communicate with Holly while the crew are away from the ship.

There are probably other examples somewhere, but I can think of no other example of a small-screened portable device used for telephony. Having said that, the notion that the watch would be used by other crew members to talk to each other isn’t explored. As I mentioned with 2001, the narrative does call for a smartphone to feature, and so too does the premise of Red Dwarf. While he can video call Holly at any place on the ship, what use does Dave Lister have for a mobile phone?

Small TV and small cameras

Another thing I would say stopped many writers from envisaging the smartphone is them not being able to imagine both flat screen TVs (in particular, small TV screens), and small video cameras. If flat screen monitors had been commonplace in, say, the 70s, I think more writers would have predicted a portable multimedia device similar to the smartphone.

Much of science fiction pre-2000s is shaped by the technology that was available, so discrete video cameras are still pretty huge compared to what’s available now, and monitors and video screens are generally bulky in TV shows and films. It’s a bit of a mood killer when you see someone typing on an old style clunky keyboard whilst deep in space, like they do in Alien.

Stephen King’s The Running Man is hindered by old technology. Rather than it being a mass surveillance adventure, we have the protagonist making his own short film reports – on film. He literally has to stop and make a short piece of film, which compels him to point the camera at only nondescript locations to prevent him being tracked. The film has to then be mailed to the TV station every day so it can be developed and aired on TV.

In today’s world, a livestreamed chase is much more obvious to us. I think The Running Man shows how writers can focus on one idea – in this case a killing game show – but miss others completely. Video technology did exist at the time of writing, so the book could have been less clunky, but I don’t blame King for not predicting video streaming. Having said that, this book would be so much better with digital video and streaming, and in a world of smartphones, the runner would be in danger of being videoed by a member of public at any time.

Consumerism

I would say that writers’ lack of understanding of consumerism, or their lack of criticism for capitalism would also be an influence. Or perhaps it is the average science fiction writer’s lack of knowledge of computer coding and corporate influence of that technology – a lack of the concept of enshittification I suppose you could say.

We have seen how much of the electronic devices we use are so integrally linked to harvesting and profiting from personal data. I’d say a writer would have to be pretty damn clever to predict the data-harvesting influence on technology, particularly because it’s going on all the time without much public outrage. It’s hardly a paranoid conspiracy tale like in They Live. And there are other influences also, like obsolescence, for example – deliberately making products that will break eventually.

The heroic and optimistic advancements in technology science fiction writers often wrote about saw humanity’s future as a noble one, where technologies were created mostly for the greater good. So we end up with interstellar flight, robots and AI, and grandiose things like terraforming and Dyson spheres. But it is, oddly, the technology involving a more pedestrian, everyday media and communication that has been overlooked.

Really, when looking at predictions of the smartphone, we need to look at science fiction that remains mostly on one planet, or extensive amounts of time on a civilised planet. This is where Philip K Dick comes in, whose science fiction is largely based on inner city life in the future. Here is a writer who writes about characters getting up to go to work in the morning.

Writers like Dick did introduce a more capitalist-critical slant to his stories, but it is clear the societies he wrote about are based on those of the time of writing, with a few fantastical concepts thrown into the mix. So it’s all typewriters and public phone boxes mixed with flying cars.

In Minority Report the main character finds himself on the run and ends up using a public telephone to contact people. This novel even included video calls, but doesn’t include the mobile telephone. The movie Total Recall also includes videophone, but also has people still using public telephones.

Dystopian futures often depict future capitalism as fascist, militarised worlds, like Escape from New York and The Running Man. So the technology they predict is more about suppressing people rather than the (perhaps false) sense of liberation that comes from today’s technology. They rarely depicted the future like what we currently have: A supposed free world of plenty for people in the west, but with increasing job insecurity, increasing wealth inequality, in a increasingly militarised, increasingly authoritarian world, with increasing corporate influence over our lives, and a media-saturated technology that profits from collection people’s personal data. It’s a distinctly bland, covert kind of oppression, that is perhaps not interesting enough, or not overt enough for many fiction writers.

Robocop perhaps has the best depiction of this, and it’s pretty good for that, but as I’ve long said, Verhoevan’s movies tend to lack a clear message so are not necessarily critical of capitalism. Also: no smartphones.

In Need of A Jobs

The thing is, many of the elemental parts of the smartphone were predicted in science fiction. Many of the concepts were there but there was something stopping writers from envisaging the smartphone. Something stopped these individual technologies coalescing into something resembling the smartphone.

Handheld communication devices were predicted, video calls were predicted, ebooks were predicted, email was predicted, touchscreen was predicted, fingerprint/voice/facial recognition was predicted. Video and digital photography appears in science fiction too, although, as I’ve mentioned, writers tend towards writing about film and darkroom printed photography.

One reason why smartphones don’t feature it seems is partly due to writers not creatively combining different technologies into a neat multifunctional device. So what science fiction needed was a Steve Jobs who would take all these existing elemental pieces and put them together into one neat package.

Conceptual divisions within the minds of science fiction writers is fairly common. That’s why you end up with robots driving existing vehicles – like the Johnny cabs in Total Recall – rather than the vehicle having an integrated computer and the vehicle itself being a robot. Or you have the robots in Westworld (1973) being tinkered with in a similar way car mechanics fix cars, rather than needing a software update and reboot. Or C3PO in Star Wars using a handheld walkie talkie rather that it being integrated in his body.

The thing is about the smartphone is that it combines many different technologies, which came about from the hard work of many different people working in many different fields. There’s telephone networks, then there’s digital photography, then when phones became connected to the web, it turned them into devices that can be used them for banking and for turning the heating up in your homes. People now use smartphones more for anything but making phone calls. Who could predict such a thing?

The development of the smartphone merged with the development of computers, the only different between the two being: I don’t have mobile network coverage on my laptop. So it’s easy to see why writers missed such a device. You’d have to have been a real genius to have predicted such a thing. There have always been ‘everything’ devices in fiction, often for comedy purposes like that toothbrush/shaving thing Billy Peltzer’s dad invented in Gremlins.

And if that thing had mobile network coverage, that for sure would have been the first smartphone.

Over and out for now, guys!

Xxx