Future culture

The culture we have 10 or 20 years down the road will not be the same we have now.
I’m not talking about the media or whether all the TV will be streaming over the Internet, but about the fact there will be different shows, hit characters, popular songs and so on.
Sometimes SF misses this.
Star Trek is particularly bad in this regard. Picard likes 1930s hardboiled detectives and Shakespeare; Riker likes classic jazz; Paris watches 1930s serials; and Janeway’s holonovel of choice appears to be a riff on Jane Eyre. I find this about as plausible as a TV show where nobody reads anything written since 1800 (overlooking that on most TV shows, nobody reads anything at all).
(The Star Trek Academy comic book of a couple of decades back did a little better. One character’s mother is introduced as a best-selling holonovel author, apparently the equivalent of Jackie Collins—”Oh, of course, I’ve never accessed her novels myself but I uh, hear they’re pretty steamy.”).
Sometimes SF gets it right. There’s a throwaway line in the novel FlashForward where one man’s desk—this being about 2010 holds figures of popular cartoon characters Bugs Bunny, Fred Flintstone and “Gaga from Yaga.” A nice touch, though I’m not so sure Fred has the legs Bugs does—as a friend of mine said recently, it may be only Baby Boom nostalgia that keeps Bedrock popular.
I was pleasantly surprised when Nora Roberts’ Fantasy in Death, which I blogged about briefly here, got it right. I was surprised because the book initially follows the Star Trek pattern, with the geek characters (the murder investigation involves a computer gaming company) referencing Star Wars and Battlestar Galactica. I can buy Star Wars still being popular in 2060, not so BG—and more to the point, weren’t there any geek hits produced after those two?
Then one of the supporting characters makes a references to one room being done up in the style of “the ship’s bridge in Star Quest“—and I’m pretty sure the Star Quest she describes doesn’t exist in the real world.
So props to Nora Roberts. For a romance writer, she does a remarkable job with SF.
In my own writing, one of the things I’m trying to do in the Applied Science series is suggest that constant alien invasions have changed popular culture as well as current events. Heinlein writes “space realism,” a kind of SF technothriller; James Dean (who lived past his death in our timeline) wins an Oscar for The Lonely Crowd; and the SF B-movies of our world have been replaced by SF A-movies, since science fiction is pretty much reality. It’s kind of fun, like one story down the road where I get to rewrite the lyrics to Teen Angel.