The science of fiction

As well as writing books, I like to read a lot, not that I sometimes have time to read a lot, but that's another story. What I read is science fiction. Now, one of the themes of science fiction writing is looking (or at least attempting to look) into the future, trying to think what the world will be like in a few (or many) years time. I have a large library of paperback books going back to when I first got interested in reading such stuff way back in the 1960s and -70s. Reading some of the books written in the 1950s and -60s can make you laugh, despite the sometimes serious themes. For instance - everybody smoked, cigarettes or even pipes, even when the story is set hundreds of year into the future. Also, in said stories, the preferred method of data retrieval is usually an IBM punched card machine. You can't blame the writers, that was cutting edge technology when they were writing. The two way radio was a reality - but our ubiquitous mobile phone didn't feature at all. And as for cars - it seemed the only way to go forwards was to have a car that could fly as well as run on wheels. Can you imagine what that would like - today's volume of traffic in three dimensions, never mind two. There was one writer who liked to describe the car, the interior, not the exterior. When you actually visualise the vehicle, it would have been the size of a medium truck! And everyone had one of these monsters. Another problem is the writers use of the idioms of the day, the way people spoke in the 1950s, -60s, and -70s. Even now, 40 or 50 years later, the language seems archaic. This is a problem I'll face as I write books today. The only language I can use is that in use now, today. If people read my books in 40 or 50 years time they'll probably have a laugh, just as I do at my old paperbacks. Oh well, if it was easy, everybody'd do it.
Ian B