Temporal Skeumorphs
The division between sci-fi and fantasy is extrapolation
When I first saw Minority Report I wasn't captivated by the classic Tom Cruise over-the-top action or the plot's weird ethical dilemmas. What I loved was the vision of its computer interfaces. I wanted that glove and a giant curved display that could replay a bunch of real time movies all at once. Years later, District 9 hit me the same way. I was bored by the stranded aliens in South Africa but captivated by the fast, beautiful intuitive interface powering the alien craft. These interfaces were so sleek and intuitive they made our everyday computers look like the stuff of Neanderthals.
Sci-fi can sometimes ask very interesting questions about human nature, but this is a higher bar and not everything gets there. In fact, I'd argue almost all dystopian big-screen sci-fi fails on the high-minded ideas and just gives us some beautiful tech. And yet, if you watch these movies now, their future visions will seem strangely dated. They extended the new ideas of their time — clicks became hand gestures and keyboards became voice commands — but it was still shackled by their date in history.
When I look back at much of the sci-fi I watched or read, the call of future technology was the big reason I loved it. Every episode of Star Trek was a glimpse at a beautiful future. The tricorder, the automatic doors, the voice interface to an all-knowing computer (I was a The Next Generation devotee). It was great for a 10 year old, but watch it now and it all seems horribly slow.
This pattern reveals a fundamental critique of how we imagine the future: we can only extend what we already know. Like designers creating familiar touchpoints in new technology, science fiction writers build futures that reflect and amplify the present. When Asimov wrote The Last Question, he didn't imagine quantum computing or neural networks, he envisioned a massive analog computer because that's what technology looked like in his present. The military tech in Heinlein's Starship Troopers mirrors World War II weaponry scaled up to space.
Heinlein knew exactly what he was doing. Science fiction is more than just vague ideas about the future. It is, he wrote, "realistic speculation about possible future events, based solidly on adequate knowledge of the real world, past and present, and on a thorough understanding of the nature and significance of the scientific method."
It's extrapolation: taking the familiar elements of present-day technology and extending them into tomorrow. Just as early electric lights mimicked candles to seem less alien, science fiction uses today's technological metaphors to make its future comprehensible. These are 'temporal skeumorphs' — design patterns stretched across time rather than medium.
What's A Skeumorph?
A skeumorph bridges the unfamiliar and the familiar in design. Those early electric lights mimicked wax candles complete with fake wax dripping details to gain familiarity and comfort. Skeumorphs match a new design to something that's older and familiar. This pattern repeated itself during the computer revolution, especially in graphical user interfaces. Designers created terms and "feel" for user controls. And so our screens are filled with buttons that seem to press, sliders that appear to slide, and icons that reference the physical world — an envelope for "share", and a waste bin for "trash."
The fascinating thing about skeumorphs is how they evolve. As technologies become familiar, these design crutches often fade away, or at least fade into the background. Computer interfaces have shifted from highly skeuomorphic designs that mimicked physical objects to flat, minimal interfaces that embrace their digital nature. Yet new skeumorphs are emerging: modern apps deliberately mimic old CRT displays or Matrix-style terminals. And some of our LLM chat interactions — like using CAPS LOCK FOR PROMPTS — are effectively skeumorphs drawn from comfortable patterns of internet conversation.
All of this is exactly what sci-fi does with technology, just projected decades and centuries into the future. Even the most innovative sci-fi needs to operate based on the ideas that are available to the audience. The BrainPal of Scalzi's Old Man's War universe has none of the physical characteristics of Tom Cruise's ridiculous gloves, but it builds on our current understanding of neural networks and brain-computer interface. Even Stephenson's Snow Crash, renowned for predicting the internet age, clearly built on network and computer primitives that existed in the 90s. Wildly creative and inventive for sure, but still skeumorphic: constructed futures from the building blocks of the present. Temporal skeumorphs use the ideas that the audience understands to make the world of tomorrow comprehensible.
A Fantasy World
This is actually one of the ways we can separate the sci-fi and fantasy genres, aside from elves, dwarves, dragons and other Tolkien-derived creatures. Arthur C. Clarke recognized something profound about this limitation when he wrote his famous Third Law:
"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."
When technology truly advances beyond our current understanding, our careful extrapolations and temporal skeumorphs become useless. At that point, we enter the realm of magic.
Look at what we take for granted today: AI systems that can engage in fluid conversation, generate art, and solve complex problems. Smartphones that connect us to virtually unlimited knowledge with a touch. A couple dozen GPS satellites in the sky to know our exact location at all times and build real-time maps for efficient directions anywhere. Neural interfaces now let paralyzed people control computers with thought alone. None of these technologies evolved from the button-pushing tricorders of Star Trek or the gestural interfaces of Minority Report. They would appear as magic to the world just a few decades ago. They operate in ways that previous generations couldn't have imagined because they had no patterns to understand them.
This is where fantasy might be our better prophet. Fantasy doesn't constrain itself to building from existing technological metaphors. Consider the Palantiri of Tolkien — the celestial seeing-stones that let users witness distant events and communicate across the world. They weren't explained from the telegram or phone wires of the 1930s, when Tolkien was writing. They were simply magical tools that worked in ways not totally understood, more similar to how most people today use smartphones and FaceTime.
The Palantiri are just one of the fantasy ideas we can apply to the future's wonders. Dumbledore's magical Pensieve serves as a better guide for the future of the shared storage and replay of memories than any of the hard drives and videos we have today. Conjuring spells, Marauder's Map (Harry Potter), dream walking (Wheel of Time), allomancy (Mistborn), soulcasting (Stormlight), all of these sound magical, fanciful, and untethered to the reality of our technology today. They are inexplicable; they simply work, and that's exactly why they might better prepare us for more revolutionary change.
Humans are very bad at understanding exponential curves. A generation ago we could not have imagined the sorts of breakthroughs that are commonplace today. Peter Thiel famously said that "we asked for flying cars and got 140 characters." But his disappointment proves the point — we were so busy imagining the future of a world dominated by cars that we missed how the internet could reshape society. We extrapolated, and missed the real revolutionary change.
The exponential curves of progress aren't slowing down. We have no idea what's coming. We can't even imagine it. Science fiction won't tell us either — it's too bound by its need to extend from what we already know.
If you want a better guess at what's coming, look to the magic of fantasy novels instead. There's probably more truth there about our technological future than in any carefully reasoned extrapolation.