Science & Tech Quote by David Brin

Brin’s joke lands because it refuses the clean fantasy that futurists sell: that prediction is a glamorous superpower rather than a messy, morally compromised parlor trick. He opens with self-deprecation - “spotty record,” “failures” - the classic inoculation against the grandiose prophet pose. Then he snaps the frame into place: yes, writers guess wrong about gadgets, but they can be uncomfortably right about politics, collapse, and backlash.

The subtext is an argument about what science fiction is for. The genre gets marketed as a showroom of tomorrow’s tech, yet Brin points to the harder, less brand-friendly talent: extrapolating social stress fractures. The Berlin Wall and “the rise of fundamentalist Islam” function as cultural shorthand for tectonic shifts that felt inevitable only after they happened. By naming them, Brin claims a certain credibility, then undercuts it with an ethical wince: prediction isn’t triumph when the future you saw is a tragedy.

Context matters. Brin came up in late Cold War American SF, when “the future” was a battleground between liberal optimism, nuclear dread, and surveillance anxiety. His work often treats transparency, accountability, and the unintended consequences of systems as central themes. That background makes the final line do real work: it’s not humility as performance; it’s a warning about the seductions of being right. The quote smuggles in a critique of pundit culture, too: accuracy can be a kind of complicity if it becomes a scorecard instead of a responsibility.