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Any Sufficiently Advanced Technology: Why Science Fiction Got the Future Backwards
Paperback
Literary CriticismGeneral ScienceHistory & Philosophy of Science
Publisher: Independently Published
Published: Sep 14 2026
Pages: 316
Weight: 0.93
Height: 0.66 Width: 6.00 Depth: 9.00
Language: English
In February 2025, a team in Philadelphia designed a medicine for a single baby. One child, one misspelled gene, six months from diagnosis to infusion. He went home.
Nobody on Earth has built a robot that can reliably fold a towel.
Science fiction got the future wrong - but it got it wrong in a direction. It consistently overestimated how hard it would be to move information, and consistently underestimated how hard it would be to move matter. Difficulty was assumed to scale with strangeness. It doesn't. It scales with thermodynamics.
ANY SUFFICIENTLY ADVANCED TECHNOLOGY takes ninety of the genre's best ideas and asks a harder question than will it happen? It asks what each one would actually cost, in watts and in bits, then places every one on a six-rung ladder from Forbidden to Shipping - with the reasoning shown, so you can disagree.
- Freeman Dyson never proposed a Dyson sphere - and a solid one couldn't hold together, by a theorem Newton proved in 1687.
- Larry Niven's Ringworld needs a material eighty-eight thousand times stronger than the strongest ever measured.
- You are roughly five times more power-dense than the core of the Sun.
- A lunar space elevator could be built today, from fibre you can order out of a catalogue. Nobody is building one.
- A Roman legionary carried nine kilograms of armour. A modern soldier carries about eleven. Two thousand years, same weight.
- A complete wiring diagram of a worm's 302 neurons has existed since 1986. It still doesn't crawl.
- Faster-than-light travel is time travel, and the proof takes one page of ordinary relativity.
The Turing test fell in 2025, in a peer-reviewed study, with the machine picked as the human more often than the actual human was. The coverage lasted four days.
This is a book for readers who grew up on Clarke and Le Guin and Banks, and who want to know which parts were prophecy, which were wishful thinking, and which were forbidden all along. For people who would rather have the arithmetic than the hand-waving.
The transporter is impossible. The warp drive is impossible. The cloaking device is impossible, and the theorem that kills it is beautiful.
The towel-folding robot is merely hard.
Fully referenced. 312 pages. No prior physics required.
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