Marriage and the Family in Modern Science Fiction

IT IS appropriate, I believe, to indicate briefly how I came to choose the subject Marriage and the Family in Modern Science Fiction for my presidential address. I was led to this topic by following two different routes which eventually converged. The first question I asked myself concerned the kind of general message I really wanted to get across; the answer that gradually emerged was that I would hope to reinforce the notion that all of you I am sure accept-namely, that imagination, innovation, and creativity are desirable human qualities and almost indispensable prerequisites for those who study families and work with families. The second route I traveled concerned the particular area of the family with which I wanted to deal. Wandering down this route I eventually concluded that I wanted most to talk about the future of marriage and the family. These two routes, my desire to encourage imagination and my interest in the future of the family, converged at an intersection labeled Marriage and the Family in Modern Science Fiction. Because of their consistent display of creative imagination on technological matters, I wanted to discover what science fiction writers had to say about marriage and the family on other planets and in distant times. I am not, of course, construing this kind of material as a source for scientific predictions of what will happen but, rather, an imaginative description of what could happen. In discussing the future of the family, I think we must remain aware of the concept of self-defeating prophecy and how this could affect predictions. Sociologists have for some time used the concept self-fulfilling prophecy, by which we mean that a false definition of a situation can produce behavior that will make the original false prediction come true precisely because it was made in the first place. It seems to me that there is an analogous concept of selfdefeating prophecy. What I mean here is that some predictions are bound to be wrong precisely because they are made. We see common

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