Science fiction isn’t always so hot on the science part. Star Trek, for example, envisaged a civilisation in which spaceships hopped between galaxies, yet still had computers made up of blinking lights, like a 1970s lathe. Whereas in the shadow chancellor’s favourite sci-fi work Das Kapital (bookshops will persist in putting it on the wrong shelf) Karl Marx predicted a future in which humanity stopped working so hard because machines did it all instead. Which, according to an astonishing American study revealed this week, might suddenly turn out to have been nonsense, too.
We’ll come back to that study in a bit, and to Marx. First, though, let us speak of Red Dwarf, which is not — in case you were wondering —