Slashdot Mirror
Science Fiction into Science Fact?
Selanit asks: "I'm a student of English literature at the University of Colorado, in Boulder, with a pronounced interest in all things tech as well. Next term I'll be taking an Independent Study course which combines the two -- the topic will be 'Influences of Science Fiction on Real-World Tech.' The professor and I are still trying to assemble a reading list. So here's my question: what science-fiction novels have had a particularly noticeable effect on the development of technology? I'm mainly interested in books that have been written since World War II. The line of inquiry is not limited to computers; any kind of link between sci-fi and hard tech will do (e.g. Cap'n Kirk's communicator == prototype mobile phone). Books that have lent a name to a technology are also interesting (like the 'Little-Endian, Big-Endian' terms which were lifted from Gulliver's Travels, or 'Babel Fish' from Douglas Adams)."
http://www.tuxedo.org/~esr/jargon/html/index.html
Jules Verne wrote about nuclear submarines a long time before their invention. Even though this is not your typical "science fiction" book it did have an influence on people.
I think Sci-Fi has had less to do with bringing about certain technologies (still waiting on my ansible) than it has on coining terms that have been applied to technologies.
For instance, look at Neuromancer. It gave us the term "Cyberspace", which was cool, but then tried to convince us of a guy running around trying to fence one-megabyte ram sticks. Talk about dystopian...
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Bleah! Heh heh heh... BLEAH BLEAH!!! Ha ha ha ha...
From dictionary.com:
Word History: Robot is a word that is both a coinage by an individual person and a borrowing. It has been in English since 1923 when the Czech writer Karel Capek's play R.U.R. was translated into English and presented in London and New York. R.U.R., published in 1921, is an abbreviation of Rossum's
Universal Robots; robot itself comes from Czech robota, "servitude, forced labor," from rab, "slave." The Slavic root behind robota is orb-,
from the Indo-European root *orbh-, referring to separation from one's group or passing out of one sphere of ownership into another. This seems to be the sense that binds together its somewhat
diverse group of derivatives, which includes Greek orphanos, "orphan," Latin orbus, "orphaned," and German Erbe, "inheritance," in addition to the
Slavic word for slave mentioned above. Czech robota is also similar to another German derivative of this root, namely Arbeit, "work" (its Middle High German form arabeit
is even more like the Czech word).
Arbeit may be descended from a word that meant "slave labor," and later generalized to just "labor."
mahlen
If I want your opinion, I'll ask you to fill out the necessary form.
I thought the one clear prediction Star Trek made around e-books was their rejection. Starship captains always made such a big deal about having genuine leather-bound books for their pleasure reading. Sure, e-books are fine as a query interface to a computer system, or as a data capture device. But nobody wants to use them for reading. Thirty years later the e-book makers still don't get it. Just maybe there's more to "reading a book" than the viewing of text on a page-by-page basis?
How many scientists, engineers, and researchers were influenced by the books they read as kids? Asimov himself was one, though he ended up doing little research.
How much were the scientists who shot the moon influenced by Verne, Welles, and E. E. Doc Smith? If many of them were inspired by these authors' works, then the novels indeed had an impact and influence on technology.
Many authors directly and indirectly influenced our technosphere. Clarke calculated geosynchronous orbit; most satellites orbit in the belt named after him. Larry Niven's warnings about the effects of organ transplants has changed the way people approach the ethics of taking organs from executed criminals. (Incidently, the "Slashdot effect" is really nothing more than a virtual flash crowd, which Niven predicted as a result of easy teleportation.)
The early works about robots and sentient computers have influenced the direction of research in these fields. AI researchers talk earnestly about the three laws of robotics.
Terraforming was an idea first proposed in science fiction. The US First Contact Protocol is based on science fiction scenerios.
SF influences science and research because scientists tend to read science fiction. If that doesn't color our ideas of the world (which in turn influences our research), then our imagination has died.
Microsoft is to software what Budweiser is to beer.
But, I'll stick (stubbornly) by my original comments. The author thinks of what technology can do, and the engineer thinks of what to do with technology. A bit circular, and I'm feeling chatty....
The author throws the rules out the window, and does some What-If-ing.
The engineer, trained and bound by rules, but reporting to the demands of the Manager (who has read too much SciFi, and thus believes nothing is impossible), tries to find what technology can perform the task.
More simply, the author goes from task backward to technology, and the engineer goes from technology forward to task. In your post, they have the techology, and want to know what else to do with it. They are not trying to make SciFi come true. (am I nitpicking, here?)
I do think we need more dreamer-engineers, but the cirriculum and managers tend to conspire and weed them out.
George Lucas's first film, "THX-1138", introduced the concept of phone tech support based on obnoxious recorded messages. That was a very insightful film. Lucas later abandoned insight for popularity and became successful.