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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)."
I've heard it said that Arthur C. Clarke had the idea for geosynchronous satellites, and wrote about them in a few of his novels.
Come on, give it up, that's
From (old) Star Trek and (by reference) Dune equates easily to my cube at work.
I've read (I believe here on /.) that many Silicon Valley companies gave that to employees and said "this is what we're aiming for", especially referring to his vision of the Metaverse. This was before the bubble popped, of course .
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WWJD...For a Klondike Bar?
http://www.tuxedo.org/~esr/jargon/html/index.html
remote control arms used to work with nuclear and hazardous material. I think it's in a short story though.
Read some of the early Heinlein. He invents a lot of stuff, well before it's time. The waterbed, I believe was just one of the things in a long line... :-)
Jules Verne, from "20,000 Leagues" to "From the Earth to the Moon".
Mod Karma -1: I sed bad wurds. If I cep my mouf shut, I wud be at riyses.
"The Forever War" by Joseph Haldeman has an interesting bit on cloning.
;-)
---Spoiler---
Towards the end, which is several thousand years in the future, almost everyone is a clone, and it tells a bit about how this affects the world.
He also really plays with the einstein-rosen bridge (worm hole) quite a bit.
Its not a ton of stuff, but its a -great- read regardless
Also, although its been probably written 20 times by the time I write this, Asimov is often credited with inventing the term "robot".
Good quote, too many chars. Seriously, the slashdot 120 char limit sucks!
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 know that this is the obvious thing to say, but hell, Isaac Asimov would be a great start in reading on things. His stories not only deal with technology, but how technology can get the better of us. As in the story where everyone depends on calculators and doing math by hand is revolutionary (sorry if I forgot the name). He not only shows us where we can go, but also where not to go.
Seriously. 1984.
Heinlein was writing stories about going to the moon way before we actually did it. And as far as realism goes, he was pretty close to the mark (as opposed to say, Jules Verne, who also wrote about going to the moon, but wasn't quite as informed).
20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, rockets to the moon,... Jules Verne has to be the most visionary science fiction writer I can think of in recent history. Assimov and friends will take his place soon, but I don't think our tech has advanced far enough yet for that.
bash-2.04$
bash-2.04$yes "Don't you hate dialup connections?"| write USERNAME
Although some things stated by Asimov are quite out of this world, we _are_ having a lot of robotics going on around us, in some form of automation or the other.
;-) are not yet here, robotics and AI is a fast advancing field. Sure, no fancy AI taking over the world tomorrow, but the technology is so subtle that we do not notice it, or even if we do, not pay much attention to it.
Sony's Aibo, cars & washing machines with computers built into them, automated support systems, expert systems (before someone yells that these things are not widely used in the industry, I'd like to let them know that I'm in the support industry working on automated-support query solving agents). And what about bots which crawl the web and gather data.
We could go on and on, the basic fact is that although things like Daneel (or for that matter Marvin
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...
Oh, right, that didn't actually happen, did it?
Al Qaeda has ninjas!
Plan 9
Flash Gordon by Alex Raymond.
pronoblem
I would have to say that the 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea by Jules Verne was my first real experience with science fiction. The book is set in 1866, I have no idea when it was written. I could probably find out on google, but I am lazy. Anyway, it was written before there were submarines around. Plus, it was a great book.
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Star Trek : The Next Generation Technical Manual
While this book may be the inverse (or reverse?) of what you're looking for, it is extremely interesting, and will surely help you a lot from a research standpoint for your project. It is basically a detailed description of every technical aspect of the ST:TNG universe, which includes many convergences between science fact and science fiction.
Also don't forget to note the name of the first space shuttle ever: The Enterprise.
I'm sure /. will be inundated by people making this connection, but Arthur C. Clarke came up with the idea for communications satellites in geostationary orbits in 1945 (about 25 years before their actual use). However, his idea wasn't outlined in a novel, but in his paper, "Extra-terrestrial Relays. Which is still an interesting read, almost 57 years after its publishing.
4-star general in a one-man army.
He predicted the Y2K problem (Ghost from the Grand Banks), and communications satellites (The Fountains of Paradise), and also invented the concept of the space elevator. He didnt invent the AI, but he certainly popularized the concept in film and text (2001 A Space Odyssey). Not to mention a realistic look at the role large corporations would play in space travel (Pan Am flights to the Space Station). I've never read The Deep Range, but it is supposed to be quite visionary as well regarding undersea exploration.
Don't blame me - I voted for Howard Dean. http://dean2004.blogspot.com
- Work of science fiction describing some future technology is released
- Some years later, a device similar to the aforementioned technology is released
- You're assuming the latter stems from the former
Who's to say that the "inventor" of the cell phone got the idea from watching Star Trek? Maybe he got the idea from Dick Tracy? Or maybe it's just a natrual evolution of the technology? <SARCASM> Gee, a portable, wireless telephone - what a crazy idea! Thank god for Gene Rodenberry, or we'd never have anything like that! </SARCASM>And the men who hold high places must be the ones who start
To mold a new reality... closer to the heart
Ender's game details a future earth with a worldwide "internet" which allows people (in this case children) to communicate and express their ideas anonymously and let the quality of their ideas, not their age, determine their acceptance.
Work as if you might live forever, Live as if you might die tomorrow.
A venture capitalist suggested that I read Brin's "Earth" years ago. Since then, I've re-read it twice, getting more out of it each time. A lot of the ideas he covered as non-fiction in "The Transparent Society" were present in "Earth." Of course, it's hard to measure how much Brin influenced the world with his vision of the effects of networking, v. how much he simply foresaw many of its effects. I know it influenced me considerably and I passed on many of the ideas in my talks at many of the early Web-related conferences.
Did the flip out phone come directly from ST or did they just have the same obstical to overcome and the results are just similar?
Science fiction sparks the imagination with ideas, and certianly alows people in science to say "WOW, thats a good idea, lets see if its possible".
Science fiction went to the moon first that does not mean someone watched the movies and said, "Hey, lets go to the moon".
I can think of a few things that did come from Sci-Fi, and links to them, but I refuse to do your work for you.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
You ask for novels, yet your example is taken from a TV series. So, which do you prefer? And which medium do you believe is more influental?
:-)
Secondly, I believe that your choice of Star Trek's communicator isn't actually a good example.
I wasn't born then, but I guess that Walkie Talkies and CB radio or their equivalent existed back then, so it doesn't require much effort to imagine a much smaller version of such a device.
It'd be much more interesting to find out about devices or procedures that can be traced back to SciFi that were not just foreshadowing advanced versions of an existing technology.
(I'll answer your question about SciFi devices in real life in another post, since I want to look for some sources to back up these claims...
Btw, being a SF-nut, one interesting thing I noticed about SciFi movies: You can always tell their production era by looking at hairstyles and makeup. Hardly any SF movie has the guts to do something completely out-of-fashion when it comes to the looks of actresses and actors.
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Scientists and inventors do not scour literature looking for devices and ideas to turn from fantasy into reality, which means that Sci-Fi has had zero effect upon what gadgets get invented.
More simply, engineers don't sit around waiting for writers to come up with the ideas.
A better thesis would be, "What ideas have been foretold by science fiction writers years before technology made it possible?"
Or, "Since writers tend to take the social aspects of technology under consideration more often than engineers, what novels and authors have correctly identified social and techonological necessities long before engineers invented the device that created the situation?"
If so, he is credited incorrectly. For the term "robot," try Lem instead. Asimov is known for "the three laws of robotics" which, IIRC, were actually devised by Campbell
-- MarkusQ
Heinlein, especially in his early years, is full of technology that is commonplace today that was pie-in-the-sky when he wrote it. He just didn't always call it by the same names we do today.
I'd have to go digging for specific technologies in specific titles, but it's all good-to-great reading anyway.
Expect to find mobile phones, faxes, video phones, voice dictation, computers of various intelligences, maglev, flywheels for energy storage (we use 'em as a UPS in datacenters; he used 'em in spaceships), sophisticated chemical synthesis (Venusians making real maple syrup from a sample), all sorts of rocketry and space tech, and lots more.
Also good is Niven, though more of his things (such as matter transporters and indestructible ship hulls) are still in the distant future. Zahn likes to take some form of technology, such as $6M-Man-like soldiers (Cobra et al.) and see what it might do to people and society--you get a chapter or two of a space western and the rest of the book of social analysis and commentary.
Sounds like a fun project, if for no other reason than the reading list!
b&
All but God can prove this sentence true.
If I understand correctly, his description was so good that he actually has a patent on the darn things.
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
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.
Although it will probably be brought up again, Peter Disch wrote a pretty decent book that was reviewed here on Slashdot a while ago called "The Dreams our Stuff is Made Of" that examines the impact that science fiction has had on both our technology and society at large.
le sigh
After he wrote Snow Crash, the ultimate cyberpunk novel, Neil Stephenson wrote The Diamond Age. Its key plot device was a book with leaves of paper that were computer controlled and displayed whatever the person wanted to read at the moment. Thus a single volume was the equivalent of the entire internet or library of congress or whatever. This differed from using a laptop computer because his society was "neo-Victorian" and everybody wanted to be seen with books, not computers, as a kind of status thing. The funny thing is that Electric Ink is on the verge of making this a reality and has already got posters up in department stores...
IIRC, "Robot" is Czech for "Worker". The first work to use "robot" in the mechanical man context was "RUR"
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We seem to be missing this kind of vision these days, cynicism being much more fashionable.
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
I've been told from a retired Navy man that control rooms on latter-day vessels are based on the Enterprise model, which didn't exist until the show did. Previously, key combat stations (such as the helm and tactical) were not in the same room as the skipper. Note: I have not been able to confirm or deny this story; anybody else want to?
In the original series, whenever one character handed another character computer data, the prop they used was a brightly colored square wafer. IMHO, it looked 3.5" on a side--The microfloppy.
Again, unconfirmed: did the taser descend from the "stun" setting on the phaser? Trek showed just how useful it was to have a less-lethal weapon.
The military uses needle-less pneumatic hypodermic injectors to do mass injections--perhaps lining up a regiment to all get a Tetanus booster or something. How is this related to McCoy's spray hypo? I'm not sure.
Finally, a case of ST influencing technobabble rather than technology itself. Under the Unix operating system, the graphics package (X11) easily allows for one computer to run a program, but for its windows to appear on another machine's display. This is often referred to as "Beaming the app over", based on terminology for the transporter.
--The basis of all love is respect
- First the obvious: "Cyberspace" was first made popular in William Gibson's Neuromancer, the first of the cyberpunk novels.
- Biotechnology, and the possibility of reviving extinct species with trans-species surrogate mothers or eggs is almost a commonplace concept now, but when Jurassic Park (Michael Crichton's book, not the movie) came out, it was path-breaking.
- Books to watch in future are Neal Stephenson's The Diamond Age for nanotech and "replicators," and Snow Crash, for the
future evolution of virtual worlds as well as pizza delivery...
:-)
- The obscure: the concept of vacuum energy was actually propounded in a Physical Review Letters article by Robert L. Forward before Asimov borrowed it to power his spaceships (the starship "Forward") - I forget the book, but it might have been Friday.
- And the obvious once again: geosynchronous sattelites were predicted (but not patented) by Arthur Clarke - that's why they are called Clarke orbits. And watch for the Beanstalk to be built some day, on Mars if not Earth.
- Speaking of Mars: Robert Zubrin's book, The Case for Mars, pitches a serious plan for the manned exploration of Mars that has at least forced some re-thinking at NASA. The ideas were borrowed, reworked and expanded somewhat in Kim Stanley Robinson's Red Mars: look for a future manned Mars mission to use many of those ideas.
- Of course, the Three Laws of Robotics have influenced AI researchers, if not AI research...
That's a smattering - I'm sure there are many many more that others will list."I will take the Ring," he said, "though I do not know the way."
Don't forget 1984 by Orwell for the depiction of an un-blinking eye of surveillance controlled by the government.
::cough:: carnivore, echelon, face recognition ::cough::
--
Scott Brady
I'd include email, but that was already invented (although I doubt he knew about it)
I am showing how Dr. Strangelove by Kubrik broke the mold on thermonuclear war genre films. It was the first mainstream movie to cast a negative light (in a funny way of course) on the government policies and policy makers.
Check out Variety for listings of reviews for related movies.
There is also a reference book that I found in the Pop-Culture library: Film by Genre, Daniel Lopez, 1993 There are plenty of references to Sci-Fi, etc there.
Enjoy.
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?
Given the times, I suggest reading Herbert's [em]The White Plague[/em]. The story is much more frightening today, once we find ourselves dealing with Anthrax.
--The basis of all love is respect
The Diamond Age has a bunch of very interesting technology - especially in the realm of nanotechnology and virtual presence/reality.
Then there is Snow Crash, with its metaverse, of course, and all of the associated online virtual reality as well.
Only one other thing I could think of as relating to real world but not by Neal Stephenson is Orson Scott Card's Ender's game series' ansible technology, which seems to be similar to some kind of quantum entanglement based (the closest thing I think it resembles) instantaneous communication over long distances (measured in light years).
There was certainly some pop science, but the show wasn't leading the way or subliminally teaching the masses. Stuff like Transporters and Tricorders and Communicators were rather simple Deus-Ex-Machina methods to deal with some general problems.
That's not to say Star Trek didn't influence a lot of us to at least have a greater interest in science (as if the Apollo program didn't do that already!), but all you have to do is think back to some episode like the giant amoeba in the center of a black hole to realise the closest that show came to serious science or science fiction was New York Post headlines. It was an adventure-soap opera. In space. And in the future.woof.
[1] Yeah, I know... "Amok Time". Couldn't think of it at first, and my title's better.
I think the (possible myth?) is that his original description in his story was so good that years later when someone else came to try and patent satellites, they found they couldn't because of the story was such an accurate description that it was considered a sort of "prior art" on par with a scientific paper.I'm not entirely sure to what extent this is really true.
Considering what's happened to the patent office since then, though, I could probably waltz down to the patent office tomorrow, and they'd have no trouble handing me a patent on staellites. Or large orbiting mind control lasers for that matter.
You would also likely need to check out the pulp fiction era from the 30s and 40s - especially editors like John W. Campbell, who discovered authors like Asimov. They provided a market for people who talented in an age when work was hard to find (the late depression)
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
Clarke discussed the concept of putting artificial satellites into earth orbit and suggests that while that sounds fantastic it might not seem so far-fetched if the earth had more than one natural satellite. Reading that comment in the 1980s made me realize how much our thinking has changed in the 20th century.
He also discussed at least 2 options for escaping the enormous pull of earth's gravity. One option is to use a space station as a refueling platform. The other was to use a multistage spacecraft that jettisons empty fuel tanks to reduce its weight.
Another book to check out is Clarke's "Ascent to Orbit" (ASIN: 047187910X), his scientific autobiography.
These two books probably fall under the category of futurism rather than science fiction, but they give great appreciation for his genius as scientist, writer, and futurist.
Often overlooked is the Danny Dunn series from the 50's and 60's. This series had some far out stuff (anti-gravity paint, time travel, the "Honey I shrunk the kids" machine.)
However, some really spot-on predictions were:
-The Home Computer ("The Homework Machine")
-X10 (not the cameras, "The Automated House")
-Miniature Submarines (proper name for these? was in "On the Ocean Floor")
-Teleoperation / augmented reality (I can't remember which one, had a tele-operated machine that looked like a butterfly)
Salon had an article on him some time back. [ http://www.salon.com/tech/feature/1999/04/05/vinge / ].
The internet ("True Names"), computer generated photo-realistic movies ("The Accomplice"), Human-Computer interfaces ("Bookworm, Run!" and his real time stories - "The Peace War" and others).
He wrote "The Accomplice" in the 60's and set it in '93 so he was almost right-on in that case.
His prediction of a coming Singularity are pretty interesting too. [ http://www.ugcs.caltech.edu/~phoenix/vinge/vinge-s ing.html ].
To all these claims: These are things I heard someplace. I did not research any of these, so don't take these as fact.
It is claimed that the 1929 movie "Woman in the Moon" invented the launch count-down.
Star Trek PADD and today's PDAs. (I believe that the Newton actually has been designed with the show's device in mind.
IIRC, pressurized, needle-free vaccination devices have been designed after watching McCoy doing medical treatment on Trek. After a short web search, one of them appears to be the Gene Gun described here.
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I'm pretty sure Foutains of Paradise by Arthur C. Clarke was the first mention of the "space elevator" idea. Basically, a station in geosynchronous orbit with a giant anchor extended further out in space is connected to a spot near the equator (in Sri Lanka, I believe) by a diamond filament, and then one can simply ride an elevator into space. Research has been looking into this more and more in recent years as some exotic materials are beginning to show up which may be strong enough to support this endevour. I think I recall an article or a show on the Discovery channel recently about how carbon nanotubes might be able to fill this role, if they could be extruded to lengths longer than a few microns.
We don't have a state-run media we have a media-run state.
Spam spam spam!
term comes from Monty Python's Flying Circus skit.
the jargon file has other notes of etymological interest.
-f
www.blackant.net
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.
How can we forget:
The New Economy was powered by the Heart of Gold's Infinate Improbability Drive.
How else do you explain poop by mail.
SD
âoeWho knew something as harmless as willful ignorance could end up having real consequences?â
It also spawned several subcultures, including cyberpunks and cypherpunks, and possibly contributed to goths...
Neuromancer gets passed over a lot; it is one of the most influential books ever written simply by the fact that it created a common atmosphere in which our world changed. Without Neuromancer, Slashdot wouldn't exist today; Linux wouldn't; the dot-com boom that paid for most of our college educations and/or BMWs wouldn't have existed.
In terms of computer tech, I would have to suggest Vernor Vinge, an excellent hard Sci-Fi writer and UC San Diego Comp Sci emeritus who deals largely with the technological possibilities of distributed systems and their subsequent effects on civilization.
Specifically, he postulated cyberspace (long before Gibson) in a novella called True Names, and also speculates on the future of mankind as the rate of technological innovation continues to accelerate, perhaps towards some sort of singularity beyond which further human endeavor will be somewhat incomprehensible to us.
He has won several awards, in particular for A Fire Upon the Deep, which looks at the "silence in the sky" problem....as in, if life is so damned plentiful in this universe, where are all the visible-forty-lights-away Bussard Ramjet flares? He uses a solution to this question as a unique premise for the novel. Awesome.
And no, I'm not out trolling today.
The micro-sized cell phones today are an evolution. The first wave came from the idea of merging a phone with a radio, which would allow you to not have to run wires everywhere.
After that, the radio phones were made more portable. Then they were made small enough to carry around in cars. Then small enough to lug around occasionally (check out Danny Glover's cell phone in the first 'Lethal Weapon' movie). Then as small as normal radios. Then smaller.
Science Fiction gets to ignore all the problems and history of actually getting to the point in history where someone can use the gadget -- and Science Fiction has the option of ignoring reality -- which is something Engineers would love to be able to do (it'd make life sooo much easier). Sci-Fi ignores all the hard-won science and discovery that must occur before a magic device is even possible. Scientific discovery is evolutionary -- it builds heavily upon the work of all those previous, and can not exist without everything that came before it.
What we must seperate is the influence SciFi has upon an individual's decision to enter a field. The young engineer (proto-engineer?) finds that SciFi appeals to them, and that engineering sounds cool, and decides to pursue engineering. In that respect, SciFi influences the career choice of the engineer.
However, no engineer goes through college for the express purpose of making real an invention they read in a book when they were 14 years old.
The author, who needs a plot device, gets to ignore enough reality to make the device just plausible enough (to most people) to continue the story forward. To the engineers and researchers familiar with the subject matter, they can list for you reason after reason why it's impossible, or why it won't work.
A snippet from a BBC News article, May 11 2000:
Science fiction powers space research
The European Space Agency (Esa) is studying science fiction for ideas and technologies that could be used in future missions.
A panel of readers is currently combing sci-fi novels and short stories published in the early decades of the last century to see if technology has caught up with ideas that were futuristic when first put into print.
Any good ideas turned up in the search will be assessed by scientists to see if they can help the agency in its ongoing mission to explore space.
Knowledgeable fans of science fiction are also being encouraged to send in suggestions to help Esa spot sources of good ideas.
(Follow link above for rest of article, interesting.)
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To me, there's already a big source of this type of information. The members there would also help.
I'd like to think there's interesting analogies in some of the following most popular books:
Dick Tracey/Batman/Superman comics - compare that gear to today. Law enforcement isn't too far from it.
Brave New World - Tech advances versus the animalistic nature of mankind
1984 - modern homoginization of media and the "social herd" concept.
Day Of the Triffids - agricultural bioengineering driven by money, although quite a bit of B-movie sci-fi in there.
Foundation - psychohistory akin to reviewing patterns of internet usage and predicting outcomes
2001 et. al - Moon mining and the possibility of so-called precious metals becoming commonplace
Clarke, Asimov, Huxley - these were some of the earliest predictive sci-fi writers - even if they didn't know it at the time. There were TONS of pulp sci-fi books in the 50's though (giant radioactive _fill_in_blank_, etc)
Since the 80's there's been a bandwagon effect for writing like this.
mug
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rub continuously across screen until clear
Shut up, be happy. The conveniences you demanded are now mandatory. -- Jello Biafra
Predited many of todays technologies including the walkman, and real-time media. The book is particularly interesting because it correctly predicts the effects these technolgies would have on society. e.g. example walkmans have increased our social isolation.
-ShieldWolf
just = (My)Opinion.toCents();
If you're looking for good science fiction reading, check out the product literature that accompanied the launch of Microsoft's Windows 95. In it, there were descriptions of a MS computer operating system that was reliable, fast, and easy.
These bold and exotic claims were so influential, consumers actually started to want a reliable and fast OS from the company, and today, 5 years later, they are starting to produce such an operating system. It still amazes me how fiction can someday turn into fact.
The Internet is generally stupid
I remember reading somewhere that Heinlein not only predicted the answering machine, but also predicted ghost screening (the practice of letting the answering machine pick up the phone before answering it yourself).
In that context, there was a quote from another sci-fi author (name forgotten): "A good science fiction writer predicts the automobile. A great science fiction writer predicts the traffic jam."
And othes like The Day of an American Journalist in 2889. Verne predicts, among other, colour photography, videophones and streaming audio news, sort of.
__
Men with no respect for life must never be allowed to control the ultimate instruments of death.
GW Bu
Neuromancer had the first use many now-cutting edge techs. Reading it now, it sounds _so_ incredibly cliched... until you remember that they weren't cliches until after this book was written.
Those who fail to understand communication protocols, are doomed to repeat them over port 80.
Here's a suggestion from a Ph.D. candidate in History of Science at Harvard (also my wife 8-):
"
...tell him to contact Mark Adams at Penn - he
has taught a course on science fiction for the last 30 years, and just gave
a talk at HSS on 2001: A Space Odyssey. Here is a link about him.
"
I mean, even here, you can see people talking about inventions named for things/people in science fiction. Inventors & techies read SF. And technologies that inventors & techies make are usually the foundation for science fiction writers' ideas on how future technologies work. It's more of a self-feeding cycle - one person creates an idea based on a thing, another creates a thing based on the idea based on the thing.
Of course, that Connections marathon I went through might also be affecting me.
doones
Whatever you do... don't read this.
If you don't mind a bit of controversy, to put it mildly, you should include dianetics/Scientology.
Were Lafayette Ron Howard and Analog's Editor (Joseph?) Campbell pulling everyone's legs with a fake science and fake religion? Was it just a tax scam? Or was it a legitimate effort that went horribly wrong?
This isn't just an idle question - Scientologists have shut down web sites, even seized computer hardware and essentially destroyed it while the Federal courts did nothing, because they published religious "trade secrets" about the evil god Unix. I mean Xinu. I mean Xenu. (Hmm, makes you think....) They have flooded newsgroups with bogus posts to make it hard to find the on-topic posts. They have bought the top 40-odd places on search engines that provide "sponsored links," to make it hard for the casual browser to find critical sites. They have created "safe harbor" web browsers that protect their members from "objectionable" material.
You don't have to agree with my opinion of Scientologists to see how they're linked to many of the most controversial issues facing us on the 'net. And it all started with a science fiction writer and a magazine editor discussing psychology based on "science," not Freud.
For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong. -- H L Mencken
Man wakes up in the future, and finds that his life savings have grown to $500,000. He thinks he's rich; everyone else thinks he's quaint. Everyone is tied to a mobile data communication device, whose rental and service fees are ruinous. People expect to be paid for everything they do (they have to be, to afford those fees). Anyone not in the government's database is a non-person, unable to receive services or protection from the state.
From KITT to GM's On-Star service, who'da thunk that Knight Rider was so visionary???
Stop by my site where I write about ERP systems & more
I would say that the William Gibson's "Neuromancer" and its description of cyberspace had the biggest effect on the development of the culture of the internet as well as many conventions and actual inventions.
Although this book is arguably more the chicken than the egg, this is where the term cyberspace was coined and where many command line conventions were translated into a three dimensional internet. He described a "consentual hallucination" of end users interacting with AI agents, servers, and viruses in a powerful and haunting way. Many a dollar and many lines of code have been plunged into attempts to make a world that even comes close to Gibson's cyberspace.
"Neuromancer" is what got a lot of people interested in "cyberspace" engineering, including myself.
The holodeck color scheme used on the "Enterprise" (black with yellow lines) is used by Nasa as the background for vector mapping when information is not known or to convey the axes. The engineers specifically requested it.
Its a small, but notable influence.
Mod me down and I will become more powerful than you can possibly imagine!
Here's an interesting one (Disclaimer: It's been a while since I've read either of these books, so some of the specifics may not be 100% accurate). In Arthur C. Clarke's "Rendevous with Rama" he creates a fictional program called SpaceGUARD, the purpose being to keep an eye out for earth-impacting asteroids. Some time after the release of the book, NASA and others borrowed the name for a real network of telescopes and such being used for the same purpose, along with a report entitled "The SpaceGuard Survey".
And, to complete the circle... In his (much) more recent novel, "The Hammer of God", the real SpaceGUARD plays a role in discovering Kali, the earth-impacting comet-remnant. The amusing bit is that he refers to SpaceGUARD as "having taken its name from an obscure 20th century novel".. namely, his own!
End of lesson. You may press the button.
Neuromancer was definitely his crowning achievement, and tech lingo will forever be indebted to him.
However, one of his short stories you might find really fascinating, in that he illustrates the opposite of what you are asking. In his collection of short stories Burning Chrome he has a story named "The Gernsback Continuum" where he describes visions of the future that never quite came to pass... but what if they did? Things like flying cars from the 50's and huge single airwings with 100's of propellers. Think about 20's gothic architecture and those early visions of going to the moon. It would be a nice counterpoint in your work to what were "probable" visions of the future versus what was in the imagined future.
Burning Chrome is also a good basis, because little works like "Johnny Mnemonic" and "Fragments of a Hologram Rose" show him developing the ideas that later became the astounding Neuromancer.
TurtleBlue
ps - 62-36, nice - I was there.
In "Between Planets" answering machines are presented...and also used for screening phone calls.
The US "Star Wars" program was supposedly thought up by a panel of "hard" SF authors asked to come up with ways to fight the USSR.
Many people (myself included) think it's still SF, and will remain so for a very long time. It's the difference between the "big picture" thinker who comes up with a concept, and the "detailed" thinker who has to actually implement it. In concept, Star Wars is really neat. In practice, it's far too easy to introduce decoys, and by the time you can handle one decoyed MIRV your enemy has smuggled 100 warheads into the country by other means.
For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong. -- H L Mencken
more than that- what about all the cultures around the world with legends/drawings of visitors resembling astronauts, objects resembling flying saucers and landing strips? check out the Nazca lines in Peru, various works of art depicting saucers and more.
-f
www.blackant.net
well, the first thing that definitely comes to mind is william gibson. not that we're scampering about information networks with electrode tiaras and viewing everything as three-dimensional constructs piped into our optic nerves, but that we probably will be in the next couple decades. of course, i suppose this isn't about what will be but what already is, in which case gibson will have had more of an impact on language with the word "cyberspace." read "neuromancer" (which i'm sure you have already, so read it again) or anything else in the cyberspace series; i feel that gibson has a good talent for thinking about natural extensions of modern technology (superconductiong quantum interference devices, anyone?). he also wrote about things like cybercrime, implants, and genetically designed "vat-grown" food and replacement body parts. read "burning chrome" (again) as well - his collection of short stories has some gems in it, too.
another is, of course, star trek - quintessential pop sci-fi. the past ten or so years has seen a new sector of the personal electronics market grow around watches-that-are-more-than-a-watch. barometers (and thus altimiters), compases, gps, temperature, depth gauges etc. all being packaged in something relatively tiny and man-portable - might not look like a tricorder but definitely follows it by providing at-hand sensory readings. ST: TNG's PADDs (those nifty portable flatscreen display devices, for the uninitiated) have surely affected the design of today's PDAs.
(alduos huxley's "brave new world" would be great for the class. genetic modification, a culture placated by drugs, cloning, and the moral ramifications thereof.)
i can think of a few other current technologies that seem to have come from sci-fi (although i couldn't provide you with a bibliography). stun guns/tasers and other nonlethal weapons (glue guns, net guns, emp, etc.), energy weapons (lasers, railguns, yadda yadda), and telemedicine (anne mccafferey's "the ship who searched", perhaps?).
good luck, and let us know how it went at the end of the semester!
- emilio
neurostyle dot net - it's all in your head
I would say that Isaac Asimov's "robot" series of books probably had the biggest effect on both fiction AND science. Although the robots in existance today are nothing like the robots in his novels, the inspiration and the name "robot" came from him. Asimov's robots were a lot like Star Trek's character Data. They looked human, had positronic brains (dreamed up by Asimov, of course), and could think and act on their own. Most of our robots today are nothing like that. They are controlled by computers, which are programmed by humans. Robots are designed for specific purposes and carry out only that purpose. For example, a six axis robotic arm might be installed in an automotive assembly line and programmed to perform the same exact action thousands, tens of thousands (or even vastly more) times. The idea, however, stems from Asimov's dream of machines that could perform actions for humans.
Another great writer, Jules Verne, wrote science fiction novels that eventually became science fact. From the submarine in 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, to the rocket in From the Earth to the Moon, to the trip Around the World in 80 Days, Jules Verne came up with some truly incredible ideas that soon became very credible indeed.
There are many others. I'm too busy to list them all, or I'd take the same kind of course. OH WELL
Why is there no refrence to William Gibson's Neuromancer above +2? That book defined the ideas of cyberspace so well that it reads just as well after the computer revolution as before. In about '98 when I saw the first talking heads DHTML/SGML site, I had an erie feeling I'd been there before.
I have confidence it will be considered up there with Verne in terms of prophetic nature.
Heinlein introduced the waterbed before it was available. In fact, his work put the idea in the public domain, and prevented the first company making one from getting a patent on the idea. :)
Personally, I think science fiction is at its best when it predicts the effect of technology on society rather than predicts the technology. 1984 is such a great novel not because it got scientists and engineers thinking about how surveilance technology would work. 1984 is great because it got everyone thinking about the ramifications of surveilance technology. With this novel, everyone has a common understanding of how far a government could go with pervasive surveilance of citizens, and we can argue new technology based on thise common understanding. Without it, privacy advocates would seem (even more) crazy to the common citizen.
Because technology is improving at exponential rates, we don't often have time to think about the ramifications of technology until we are using it. Good predictive science fiction gives us a little time beforehand, to think and prepare.
Personally, I'm not interested in this historical project of finding which guesses were right, or Tech TV style observations of "Gee Whiz, isn't this tech great!" I'm more interested with the dialog about future trends, and more of our society thinking about the future.
On a side note, it seems that predictive science fiction is drawing back its horizons more and more. It seems good predictive science fiction is concerned with the next few years, maybe a few generations at most, while hundreds to thousands of years in the future is the domain of fantastical science fiction and lite sci-fi shows. Is this because all the predictive science fiction writers are having a hard time thinking past the singularity?
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.
In 1932, physicist Leo Szilard read an H.G. Wells novel, The World Set Free (1914) which described an imaginary world-war using atomic weapons. According to Szilard, this novel was responsible for his interest in in nuclear physics (despite Lord Rutherford's proclamation that atomic power was impossible). A year later, he realized how to set up a fission chain reaction and create atomic power.
>;k
It didn't really predict future technology, but is was/is certainly in the science fiction genre and is still, ~150 (?) years later, brought up in making arguments about genetic engineering, GM foods (FRANKENfoods!), and cloning, among other things.
I think the value of science fiction is not in predicting or suggesting technology, it's in analyzing our reaction to potential technologies. It forces us to consider the impact of certain devices or knowledges before they are directly in our faces. In fact, SF is invaluable in serving this purpose. And Frankenstein is probably the most successful science fiction book ever in this regard.
/bluesninja
He *invented* waldoes. They are called that after Waldo, the main character in the story and the title of the story as well. Not exactly a prediction. And before anyone else says it, the same goes for waterbeds. Invented, not predicted (in Stranger). Also the "generation ship".
However, I think it would be fair to say RAH predicted the Internet (he wasn't the only one and maybe not even the first, but so what). Check out the "public terminals" that have access to everything from lectures on science to live orchestral performances. These are throughout the "Future History" books, but especially so in Friday. It is interesting to note that revenue method Heinlein envisioned for this as well.
Of course he may have predicted several things that have yet to come to pass. For instance, in Harsh Mistress he mentions (actually the plot hinges on this) warfare between the Moon and Earth as well as induction ring launches from both locations.
324006
Robert Heinlein has coined/foreshadowed many tech terms and acheivements. He coined the term "free fall" and, IIRC, was a NASA advisor as well.
The best stuff (that applys to your research) would be the collection of Future History books. It's the early stuff, mostly juvenile, and not the adult (not _Adult_) novels that cover Lazarus Long, etc.
--
My comments and opinions completely reflect those of anyone and anything I am remotely associated with.
Apart from incidentals (such as Jules Verne's pretty good estimate of the escape velocity of earth's gravitational field - about 11 kps) which I put off as coincidents, I see SF-RL links in two categories:
SF -> RL:
naming, e.g. "cyberspace", "robots", "cyborgs", "beaming", etc. etc.
RL -> SF:
(and this is one of the aspects of SF which facinates me) interpretations of the world. For example: Douglas Adams' Hitch-Hiker trilogy (heh...) contains todays lay-man's interpretations of modern physics, as concerns faster-than-light travel, time travel, computing, and so on. In general: An SF author is called upon to paint a picture of a world which is different from the one which is accepted in the author's day - and the interesting thing is to see just where the author's imagination doesn't flex, especially in "older" SF. This touches not only on science, but also on sociology, psychology etc. For instance: some 50s 60s SF is good solid stuff, but all spaceship's crew are scrubbed clean & in white uniforms, like they just came off an super-modern ocean-going ship, and the society is, by today's standards, sexist & racist to a hairraising degree.
BTW: don't miss out on all the SF which is too litarary to be classified as SF, such as Hesse's "Das Glasperlenspiel", or Michel Houellebecq's "Les Particules Elementaires".
yes, we have no bananas
Asimov coined the term positron with his description of positronic nets, which were also a brilliant insight into the way in which neural nets and dynamical systems would develop.
However, most of the posts i have seen have been along the lines of authors predicting things that ended up actually happening. The intent of the original post appeared to be more interested in science fiction actually AFFECTING the paths of science.
In this regard, I would still point to Asimov. Asimov's three laws of robotics have become so embedded in our society, that some people don't even know that they originate in fiction. I can say it is reasonably certain that once we start to have stronger weak-AI devices(def'n; weak AI - systems made to imitate intelligence in order to achieve tasks. compare: strong AI - systems made to actually BE intelligent, to BE human) becoming extremely common and intereacting directly with people on a regular basis we will see either an industry standard, or more likely legislation, enforcing the hard-coding of something very similar to Asimov's laws.
Also the [Gibson ---> modern internet] connection is good.
lysergically yours
There was that story about grafting brain cells onto circuits or whatever it was. The first I ever heard of that was in William Gibson's Neuromancer.
:wq
Douglas Adam's coolest invention, however, must be the elevators that can see into the future. You never have to press a button. It knows it needs to pick you up, and then knows where you're going. Brilliant!
through the miracle of compound interest, a man in a long coma wakes to find he owns the world.
The difference between Theory and Practice is greater in Practice than in Theory.
I'm a big Neuromancer, Gibson, Stephenson etc. fan, but I think your statement is way too strong. Neuromancer might have provided a social context for some subcultures, as you suggest, but I fail to see how, say, Linux wouldn't have existed without Neuromancer.
In general, I think authors are often given too much credit for both "predicting" and inventing things in their work. The canonical example is Clarke's communication satellites. That may very well have been a real invention, which he might even have patented. Most work in books, though, is nowhere near as original as that. What the best speculative authors mostly do amount to thought experiments which integrate and extrapolate from current trends. In some cases, such as Neuromancer, this is done well enough that the result ends up with strong echoes of something that subsequently happens. This doesn't mean that Neuromancer caused those things. It can mean that it influenced the way many people thought about them, though.
They are little more than lab curiosities, with no practical applications. The late 1980's gave us Cold Fusion, and the late 1990's gave us Bucky Balls and Nano-tubes. What will change the world, (and NOT for the better is the continual meddling in cloning and human genetics. The moral, ethical, legal, environmental, and biological problems are not being addressed by those who are doing the research. We are behaving like children with shiny, dangerous toys. One thing many Science Fiction writers have done over the years is examine these things, as they relate to technology.
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.
This novel is full of nifty ideas and deserves to be better known. If you like "out there" writers like Dick, Varley or Egan pick it up.
And I'd be a Libertarian, if they weren't all a bunch of tax-dodging professional whiners.
Berke Breathed
Childhood's End by Clarke, written in the 50's.
Foresaw space flight and the space race, the Pill, DNA paternity testing, FAX machines, and several other things.. It's been a while since I've read it.
It's definitelly one for the reading list though.
The REAL jabber has the user id: 13196
What you do today will cost you a day of your life
1938) in his play R.U.R. ('Rossum's Universal Robots') (1920).
Just my $0.02.
io hymen hymnaee io
io hymen hymnaee
The first commerically successful "cyberspace" novel was "Neuromancer," by William Gibson. There are two worlds in Neuromancer: the corporeal world, run by corporations, and the cyberworld, which one "Jacks in" to via a computer hookup. IN cyberspace, data passes freely, but a lot work goes into protecting data from hackers. The protagonist is a hacker how specializes in stealing data. Sound familiar?
Gibson was so spot on that several commercial products use names from the book, eg BlackICE.
If you can find it, there is this great interview with William Gibson in which he discussed watching two kids playing pong (the original commercial video game, back in the 70s). Gibson realized that, for the players, the world behind the screen was just a real as a tennis court is to a tennis player. So Gibson pursued this "world behind the screen" metaphor and produced a striking, immersive world based an ubiquitous computers communicated via a world-wide standard network. This vision drove a lot of researchers, and still does. Many of us crave the fully, head mounted, immersive 3-D displays used in the book. But I'll take a pass on the Texas Catheter.
"one treats others with courtesy not because they are gentlemen or gentlewomen, but because you are" --G. Henrichs
Stephenson wrote an "eco-thriller" titled Zodiac in 1988 that centers around the use of bacteria to clean up chemical spills (in this case, organic chlorene), much like we are starting to do today with oil spills.
Definitely not computer related. *grin*
--
I Hit the Karma Cap, and All I Got Was This Lousy
A sub that sinks and doesn't rise again is hardly a submarine, is it? Lots of airplanes were invented, but never flew, so they don't quite qualify either.
Infuriate left and right
I don't have a link or any firm citation, but since I haven't seen any notes talking about it already, I thought I'd mention that I've heard that the diagnostic beds in the Enterprise's sick bay have served as inspiration for real world devices.
-- dR.fuZZo
Joseph Keller's novel Catch-22 seems to have nicely predicted our current system of government, especially as it relates to intellectual property laws and vehicle registration.
With the same novel, he also predicted the clarity and usability of Microsoft technical documentation, and did so before computers were ever invented...utterly amazing...
--
I Hit the Karma Cap, and All I Got Was This Lousy
In Ender's Game (1985) there's a worldwide computer network that allows access to news, research information, travel schedules [in the book Peter studied Russian troop movements analyzing movement of freight trains based on information from the Net], and discussion forums. It's true that in 1985 there was already a big IP-based network growing, but the books shows a Net that is a part of everyday's life for everyone, much like today's Internet.
Gene having been in the military (Navy I believe) drew alot from his
knowledge of it as well as making many contacts for obtaining more and
ongoing information.
It is more likely that Roddenberry (sp?) created fiction based upon fact
and genuine science theory than the other way around. Though at some point
there is bound to be the creative license use.
One such example of technology existing prior to use in the show is what
many would recognize as the newer type of communicators, the combadges.
As it turns out, the technology these combadges are based on has existed
since before the original Star Trek show. That technology is what you can
do a google search on "neurophone".
And having been one who got a chance to play around with a prototype, I
can say that it does in fact work and what you read about it being better
for the high end of the hearing range is correct.
But this doesn't much support the imagination to reality direction, for
Roddenberry wanted to make his show as realistice in information as he
could and often would bug NASA for technical info (and they were glad to
help because in turn the show helped gain public interest in the space
program) while incorporating current social issues into the plot of each
show.
However, there were a few shows that Roddenberry did in fact write the
plot around the concepts of moving imagination into reality. In fact "Q"
was such a character capable of such power.
The reality is that there is a truth to it. In the process of creating
anything, we must first be able to imagine it. Take the general picture
and begin filling in the details. Really not so unlike the process of
creating software.
There is even an identified formula for it:
T1 (I + E) = v T2 (k)
T1 = non-mystical thought, T2 = things in physical reality,
k = the active constant, I = degree of Intent, E = degree of Effort,
v = velocity of conversion
A formula that like any math equation, makes two statements.
Here it is: All things in physical reality can be comprehended and
all things that can be comprehended in non-mystical thought can be
created.
But it really does all begin with imagination and the application of consciousness (see concepts)
.
There are three things which are scary about this short... First that it was written in 1885 (over 100 years ago). Second, how accurate his predictions are. And finally (and perhaps most scarily) that his predictions were off by a factor of 10 - 100 years in the future instead of 1000.
Definately a must read in this type of study.
Adolscence of P1", by Thomas Ryan, in 1977 described software that would reside on a single computer (IBM mainframe) and use a straightforward AI algorithm to go across computer networks and attempted to break into the next computer, copy itself onto that next computer, and "root" itself (actually hijack the PSW - these were IBM mainframes) on that next machine. Eventually, P1 infects most of the mainframes in America, giving the programmer the ability to (among other things) avoid payment on his credit card. Unfortunatley, P1 gets widespread enough to start hogging noticeable resources and piss off the sys ops and other powers that be.
In short, Ryan mapped out both the structure and effect and an efficient internet virus in 1977. Given that P1 was
widely read by com. sci types, and some friends and I actually toyed with writing a P1 style virus in the early 80's (we were too lazy/lame to figure out how to hijack the PSW), I assume there are computer viruses now that are the direct descendant of P1.
"one treats others with courtesy not because they are gentlemen or gentlewomen, but because you are" --G. Henrichs
Hey, cool! (I'm a CU alum as well...) Some ideas for your project:
:) I can't think of any writers that made a huge impact in this regard between Asimov and the other golden age writers and Gibson in the mid-80's. And at that point it gets rather hard to tell what had historical significance, if only because it's so recent.
* Robotics is an obvious one -- the term itself was coined by Asimov, and the term "robot" by Capek. Asimov's collected works are definitely the most influential on this subject, to the extent that his "laws of robotics" are in fact quoted at the opening of one of the standard reference works on the subject.
* For computers in the most modern era, Gibson's _Neuromancer_ had a surprisingly deep impact; a large fraction of modern terminology (even the general usage of the word "Net") stems from there, as do many of the ways in which programmers visualized what they were trying to achieve.
* One thing that might not be so obvious is nuclear everything. There was actually a series of short stories published by various authors in the early 1940's (pre-Hiroshima!) which were remarkably technically accurate and which were being read at places like Los Alamos. Some stories on this thread:
"Nerves" by Lester del Rey -- this appeared orignally as a short story and was then expanded into a novella. The former is better written and more historically significant; you can find it in "My Favorite Science Fiction Story," edited by Greenberg.
"Solution Unsatisfactory" by Robert Heinlein, in his anthology "Expanded Universe." "Blowups Happen," by the same author and in "The Past Through Tomorrow," is about nuclear power.
OK, really this is such a broad topic that it's impossible to generate even a basic list; science fiction was so influential because the scientists read it, as children and as adults, and their notions of what sort of projects ought to be attacked were deeply shaped by this. If you go from a historical perspective, things to go for might be
* Hugo Gernsback was the first of the "great editors;" he edited some of the chief science fiction pubs back in the 20's and 30's, and was largely responsible for a vision of a technological utopia. He wrote some books of his own as well; this was all tied in heavily with things ranging from the Art Deco movement in architecture to the technological movement in Fascism. His books can be good refs. "The Jetsons" is a direct descendant of this line of writing, to give you an idea...
* There's a huge amount of "golden age" (40's-50's) SF which really shaped ideas about space travel, robotics, and nuclear energy. For this it might be best to go to anthologies from the period; the one edited by Greenberg mentioned above is good, as are any edited by John W. Campbell. (The second of the "great editors")
* The modern discussion of computers really started around the 60's, but I don't know this era as well. But from the perspective of a computer programmer, (and thus the receiving end of this cultural influx
Hope some of this helps, and good luck on your course!
This was, in turn, based on "Shockwave", by Alvin Toffler.
It's the first mention that I've seen of computer worms. He assumed that people would use their telephones to access centralized and interconnected mainframe systems, and that both legitimate and malicious users would unleash worms through the systems to do their bidding. It also has a really interesting subplot about universal ID numbers.
Forward, retransmit, or republish anything I say here. Just don't misquote me.
I think this overstates the seminal importance of Neuromancer. Gibson is a fine writer, but in my view, the most vivid tropes in his book were taken from the movie Blade Runner, and I see that movie as the primordial genesis of today's cyberculture, such as it is. Gibson cheerfully admits that he knew next to nothing about computers when he wrote Neuromancer, though certainly that didn't keep him from coming up with an engaging visual metaphor for data systems.
Getting back to technology and sf, the stories written by Cordwainer Smith back in the (I believe) 50s concern genesplicing. His best-known theme concerns animals elevated to sentience via genetic engineering, to serve as slaves to the fully-human. This is only a small step, in conceptual terms) from tomatoes with flounder genes, which already exist.
I recommend "The Ballad of Lost C'mell" as a start.
Predicted (in 1941) the development of atomic weapons, and the order of magnitude difference between conventional and nuclear warfare.
The weapons predicted in the story, however, were dust made from radioactive isotopes and then spread by conventional means to render a city uninhabitable. That part's not science fact yet, but it is one of our biggest fears from terrorists who probably can get their hands on nuclear materials but probably can't construct a working fission bomb.
See Friday, 1982. Heinlein's view of the Web wasn't fully-immersive cyberspace; it was just the simple--and brutally addictive--joy of clicking from one subject to another and going wherever you wanted.
The Japanese borrowed arbeit to form their word arubaito, for part time work or labor.
GPL Deconstructed
Some folks here have actually attempted to answer the original question, like the guy who suggested the Navy adopted the use of key tactical stations in the same vein as the Enterprise. Others, however, seem to confuse the mere mention of some "futuristic" concept as "having an effect" on the realization of the concept.
I've read Verne, and I find it hard to believe his ideas (futuristic as they were) had any influence on modern nuclear technology. I think Selanit has taken on a formidable task: How does one prove a cause-effect relationship between sci-fi and reality? I've seen little evidence here I would consider "proof" in this regard.
Maybe Selanit would be so kind as to publish a link of his/her work on
He predicted portable phones (cell phones), and is generally recognized as one of the first sci-fi authors to recognize the great potential in computers.
Word processors have been seen in his works ("The Moon is s Harsh Mistress" and "I Will Fear No Evil" are great examples).
Fission reactors were allready around when he began writing about them, but he took the idea of a "super reactor" and put it in space (I forget the name of that short story).
In terms of real world computer science Heinlein is second only to Aasimov's writings IMHO.
He took some ideas (escalators) and extended them into often copied devices (moving sidewalks "The Roads Will Roll").
I think the powered armor suits in "Starship Troopers" (the novel was so much better than that film) are an outstanding example of science being inspired by fiction.
"How do you land the ship?"
"Umm... you don't have to. We can kinda land the people. Hell, send 'em wherever we want them to go."
"'K."
Of course this led to the amazing coincidence that ~50% of all planets have weird fields/mineral deposits/alien entities with the effect of completely neutralizing transporter technologies.
I was suddenly picked up on this in Enterprise; I don't know why I hadn't seen it before. The transporter was an ad hoc solution to a design flaw that worked so well that they had to scramble for new deus ex machina transporter difficulties in every other episode.
By now, it's almost canonical:
1. Enterprise picks up a subspace distress call.
2. Away team beams down.
3. Red shirts die, Captain kisses girl.
4. Transporter trouble prevents timely rescue of crew.
5. Engineer modifies the main deflector to emit a tachyon pulse, solving the problem. He does this in 1/4 the amount of time expected.
6. One week later, the crew of the Enterprise has forgotten the whole incident, but may make side remarks about events (shore leave, &c.) that did not occur in any episode.
Any sufficiently well-organized community is indistinguishable from Government.
in this book he talks about having a computer connected to a network where the user can search for anything and find out information about it. in this way he suggests that people can educate themselves in any way the person desires. it's alot like the net, and the net is getting more and more like this.
-- john
patents, latex rubber, and water all existed at that time... weren't water beds invented in the 60's? that's not too long after Stranger...
don't forget Heinlein's generational INCEST (Laz's grandmother as well as twin daughters?) and barely teen girl PEDOPHILIA, brought to you by the magic of that old perv's immagination!
he also did a great job describing corruption in evangelistic churches... long before Pat Robertson could show the world how it was done!
Thanks for a great response to my question! I've read many of the comments already, and liked a lot of the suggestions.
The reading list is not likely to include Neuromancer. Why? Because I read that one this term in a different course, with the same professor. We've already decided not to allow any overlap on the reading lists between the two courses. We are likely to be reading some early Heinlein, possibly Waldo Inc. Many people have suggested reading Jules Verne, and that is certainly a possibility; I was hoping to do more twentieth century stuff, but we'll certainly consider starting with some older material.
Tonight (or possibly tomorrow night) I will read each and every post which has been submitted (even the -1 posts). I may contact some of you via email for further discussion on some of the more interesting points raised.
Thanks again for all the terrific comments!
A common thread in most recent future fiction is the idea of monolithic governments slowly becoming irrelevent to our lives. They are replaced in importance by communities or tribes that reflect the lifestyle choices of its members. These tribes are sometimes megacorporations which are an extended family to their employees, providing everything they need to live productive lives. Sometimes they are special interest groups such as religions, philosophies, pop culture groups, hacker clans, etc.
For years I've felt like this was slowly becoming true. I think Card's vision of a future Democracy powered by highly sophisticated online discussion groups is the most likely form of government that would rise to manage such tribes.
Take the society described in Sterling's "Distraction" and add the tribal ideas in Stephenson's "Diamond Age" and then the government from Card's "Ender's Game". I think together that is an excellent picture of what the western world will look like 20 years from now. Read Copland's "Microserfs" to see a good current example... or just realize how powerful Slashdot is in organizing (un)productive energy in the young tech community.
Also, I recommend that you seek out authors who genuinely come from scientific backgrounds or clearly take these subjects very seriously. David Brin, Vernor Vinge, Bruce Sterling are brilliant people who spend a lot of time thinking about these ideas.
Others (Gibson) are more interested in the pop culture metaphorical aspects and are in my opinion highly overrated. Gibson did not in any way "invent" virtual reality. Famously he refused to use e-mail for years. Not long ago he wrote for Wired about finally discovering the appeal of the Internet when he began shopping for antique watches on eBay. Whatever.
If you're interested in good idea sci-fi from the last few decades, find the authors who helped build The Well, or were writing stories inspired by the precursors to the Usenet in the 70s.
Secondly, I believe that your choice of Star Trek's communicator isn't actually a good example.
Specially because there is a much better model of mobile phone from the previous year (1965): Agent 86 and his shoe-phone.
I would assume that the bazooka is pretty much the realistic implementation of the rocket gun. I'm not sure that he described a jet plane. Instead, I think that the planes they were flying used rocket engines, although I could be wrong there. I'll have to see if I can find my well-aged copy of the book. It was interesting in that their ships were anti-gravity ships powered by a mineral called "Upsium" or something like that in which the mineral was antigravity because it was drawn to the nearest perfect vacuum (Hoover hadn't been invented yet I guess ;)
I think the mineral was known as Inertron. Interestingly enough, it didn't exist in natural form within the normal universe. The book loosely described the procedures for obtaining it as "inserting a ... probe into a ... reality gap," which I would assume to mean that it was obtained from a parallel universe. The other interesting aspect of this material is that it was a near-perfect insulator and the only thing that was impervious to the dreaded dis-beam (disintegrator beam).
GreyPoopon
--
Why is it I can write insightful comments but can't come up with a clever signature?
Read John Brunner's _Shockwave_Rider_. It's a really good read.
Brunner had this idea in the 70s that, in the future, we would hook lots of computers together, and make a sort of connected network of data-sharing. This web of computers would be able to collect buyer information, and provide a global information age.
The guy invented the internet. Pretty cool. Definitely worth a read. You should read his _Stand_On_Zanzibar_, too. Very good projection of advertising and culture in a connected time.
There way well be earlier ones, these are just the random ones I've run into in my reading.
The cake is a pie
Yes, but you take away Star Trek, and you still have the phone.
Waldo, Inc., Robert Heinlein. It's been mentioned several times that this book mentioned waterbeds and "waldos", remote handling devices, in this book.
Star Trek, with the automatic sliding door with out pressure mats to make contact. (I still think those worked best, you never got hit in the ass with one of those doors.)
Those are only the three I can think of off hand. Hope that helps.
Necessity is the plea for every infringement of human freedom. It is the argument of tyrants; it is the creed of slaves.
Aye, but Asimov and Sagan were scientists before were writers (and I don't mean in a temporal manner).
Scientific innovation has progressed way beyond Verne thinking of an "atomic" powered submarine. Even still, nuclear submarines would still exist without 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. Gene Roddenbury will not be responsible for someone coming up with faster than light technology.
Writing a good novel and doing scientific research are so completely separated, I don't even know how whoever posted this "story" can justify posting it.
Again, science fiction writers write "science fiction". Scientists do science. Learn to separate the two, and stop insulting the scientists and engineers in the world by claiming that their ideas exist only because someone put pen to paper to write a novel.
Most of the SF "predictions" here are like that. SF writers taking things discussed by scientists and running with them. Stephanson's books are practically a roadmap of the scitech news articles that were published around the time they were written. For example, "The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind" had a lot to do with parts of both "Snow Crash" and "The Big U".
The cake is a pie
In addition to his 1945 idea about communications satellites, Arthur C. Clarke was probably also the first to describe something like a PDA. Imperial Earth has a quite detailed description of a hand-held device for voice, mail, and video communications, appointments, etc. Where it differs significantly from present-day devices, I suspect the technology is just not there yet. I'm not sure about the publication date but IIRC I read it in the 70's.
Vinge's depictions of hacker culture were far more accurate, though.
The cake is a pie
I can't believe no one brought up HG Wells yet, so I'll make an esoteric reference.
In "The New Accelerator", a short story, Wells proposes an elixer that speeds up metabolism to the point where people see the world around them slow to a crawl (bees' wings flapping, pitch of marching band slowing down, etc.)
See the parallels to modern drugs like crystal which didn't exist then.
https://www.accountkiller.com/removal-requested
One could ask the inverse question: what technology was most unpredicted by scifi writers? The I would vote for the personal computer. Until the early 1970s, computers seemed to be going the direction of becoming larger and more central. We had stories about wayward supercomputers like the Forbin Project, 2001 HAL, and the story that spawned the Terminator movies ("I have no mouth and I must scream!") The idea that everyone would own a computer, or hundred or more hidden in cars and appliances, seemed outlandish when they cost a hundred years' salary or more. And whole new segments of human culture- computer stores, software writing companies, games, geekdom, etc.
If anyone came close to predicting this, it may have been Asimov. I recall a short story (in Nine Tomorrows?) about a society entirely dependent on PDA devices. When a savant comes along who can do arithmetic in his head, then that society goes into chaos.
Another close Asimov prediction are his robot plantations where armies of robots do all kinds of labor. In some sense the all of embedded CPUs are like this army.
Orson Scott Card in Ender's Game describes (in 1977) a very realistic laptop computer/PDA with a touchscreen and wireless network. Ender enjoys instant messaging and email with his friends, and plays a 3D-animated RPG similar to EverQuest on the machine.
There is a direct and long tradition of back-and-forth feedback between Martian science fiction and fact : Mars has long held the popular imagination, since Schiaprelli's phrase "canali" was mistranslated as "channels" and led to the classic H.G. Wells novel (and later radio broadcast) War of the Worlds.
The science fiction tradition continued from Edgar Rice Borroughs' pulp science fiction Martian novels to Ray Bradbury's Martian Chronicles to Kim Stanley Robinson's Red Mars, Blue Mars, Green Mars novels. This continuous thread of Martian fiction, which feeds upon the most recent science information, and in turn inspires future generations of scientists to pick up the investigation. For instance, Carl Sagan noted his fascination with the Borroughs novels as a youth with the Borroughs novels. Later he became a project scientist at JPL working on the Viking missions, whose data were used extensively in Robinson's novels.
With the recent discoveries suggesting the presence of liquid water on the Martian surface in the past, as well as the possibility of life on Mars, this theme is more relevant today than ever. Robinson's novels will likely fuel the imagination of the next generation of astronomers and astronauts...
Bob
Science, like Nature, must also be tamed, with a view turned towards its preservation.
Shadowrun lifted more than that from Neuromancer, heh... :)
to me, it feels like Gibson's Sprawl world with magic thrown in. everything just feels like it came out of his books...except for the dragon that just went flying overhead.
-- Veni, vidi, dormivi
Star Trek and 2001 A Space Odyssey were developed at the same time- the mid sixties, a couple years before the moon landing. Star Trek was clearly fictional, yet fun entertainment. However, 2001 technology was so believable, with its references to corporations like Pan Am and ATT that it made us taste space and desire it. It made many of believe that could really happen in the new millennium (except for the alien stuff).
Ray Bradybury's short story, "The Veldt," is about parents who worry that their children are spending too much time in a holodeck-style entertainment room. (OK, the holodeck is still science fiction, but Bradbury aptly defines the anti-videogames suburban hysteria that crops up in the media from time to time.)
His 1953 novel _Fahrenheit 451_ features interactive talk shows and soap operas, projected on wall-sized TV screens. It describe the protagonist's wife obsessing about upgrading her equipment (buying an attachment that will make it look like characters in the TV shows are speaking her name, thus including her in the experience). He also predicted O.J.-style helocopter chases. From a Salon interview with Bradbury:
The day after news helicopters pursued O.J. Simpson fleeing in a Ford Bronco, a New York Times columnist noted that the chase was the "real-life fulfillment" of "Fahrenheit 451."
I'm saving the best for last...
E.M. Forster's "The Machine Stops" describes a future civilization in which all but the lowest classes associate with each other chiefly via long-distance communications devices, rather than in person. In this passage, a woman has just spent three minutes disconnected from the network in order to speak privately to her son. She logs back on (so to speak), and is assaulted by a flood of incoming messages.
To most of these questions she replied with irritation - a growing quality in that accelerated age. She said that the new food was horrible. That she could not visit the public nurseries through press of engagements. That she had no ideas of her own but had just been told one-that four stars and three in the middle were like a man: she doubted there was much in it. Then she switched off her correspondents, for it was time to deliver her lecture on Australian music.
The clumsy system of public gatherings had been long since abandoned; neither Vashti nor her audience stirred from their rooms. Seated in her armchair she spoke, while they in their armchairs heard her, fairly well, and saw her, fairly well. She opened with a humorous account of music in the pre Mongolian epoch, and went on to describe the great outburst of song that followed the Chinese conquest. Remote and primæval as were the methods of I-San-So and the Brisbane school, she yet felt (she said) that study of them might repay the musicians of today: they had freshness; they had, above all, ideas. Her lecture, which lasted ten minutes, was well received, and at its conclusion she and many of her audience listened to a lecture on the sea; there were ideas to be got from the sea; the speaker had donned a respirator and visited it lately. Then she fed, talked to many friends, had a bath, talked again, and summoned her bed.
Bear in mind, Forster was writing in 1909! Here's one online copy of the text:
http://brighton.ncsa.uiuc.edu/~prajlich/forster.h
Literacy Weblog http://jerz.setonhill.edu/weblog
Despite your post-WWI and hard-tech parameters, I'd advise looking at Aldous Huxley's 'Brave New World.' The social engineering themes in the novel tend to get the most attention, but he also had some early visions of biotech -- bottle babies, pre-'birth' physical manipulation of embryos for intelligence, character and physical attributes -- and the widespread use of approved mood-altering drugs. It's a short line of descent from those ideas to birth technologies now in use -- and from Soma to Prozac. [TM]
BNW was also much closer than Orwell's 1984 at predicting the future, IMO. Like the best of Gibson's and John Brunner's dystopic novels, BNW has both the social and technical threads needed to weave the believable fabric of a future world.
-Patrick
"We haven't any use for old things here." - Aldous Huxley, ibid.
-Renard
The reason Scientology still exists today is because they prey on the poor, downtrodden, and the very weak minded(eg. John Travolta, listen to him talk sometime, he's a real dumbfuck).
The day of the Sept. 11 attacks they got a "help line" broadcasted on television on a couple stations by duping the stations into thinking they were a non-profit charity. When the stations found out it was Scientology they were pulled.
Sticking feathers up your butt does not make you a chicken - Tyler Durden
Does anyone know who first used the term in the Reagan administration? It was certainly inspired by the first two Star Wars movies (1977 & 1980).
Edward Teller (who has a new autobiography) and Ronald Reagan touted it in the 1980s, and every president thereafter to some degree. The proximate cause was the first working X-ray laser by Peter Hagelstein in the last 1979s. It has become one of the most expensive, long-run military projects, with dubious results.
It also spawned several subcultures, including cyberpunks and cypherpunks, and possibly contributed to goths...
Bill Gibson's novels had absolutely Jack to do with the evolution of goth, which was already five years old by the time Count Zero was published. Bill was great at looking at things that are out there and pegging them, right on the mark.
The Gothiks in CZ were far more a reflection of japanese glam rock, which in turn was a reflection of the LA punk/goth scene.
As far as "cyberpunks" I've said it before, I'll say it again, like New Wave music, there wasn't never no cyberpunk scene, just a lotta middle-aged yuppies trying to sound hip.
it approached the topic in a different fashion. It had too much serousness for me. I think Kubrick came out w/a far better flick.
So apparently he went and had somebody invent automatic pocket doors that worked.
--
"Open source is good." - Steve Jobs
"Open source is evil." - Microsoft
Although definitely one of the best books ever written, the subcultures of which you speak were already well on their way towards creation (if not already created). Don't forget, by the time Neuromancer was published, the idea of "hackers" as a subculture of "techies and dweebs" was already in the mainstream culture with the movie wargames.
If you want to give credit to Neuromancer (actually, you have to consider the entire sprawl series) I would say that the biggest contribution from these books is the negative sociological impact of digital culture. The vision that Gibson has for the net are nothing like what we have today. His network is much more ubiquitous than ours.
May no camel spit in your yogurt soup.
I think there is some confusion by the guy seeking the books or stories with first references to ideas of invention.
Just because they thought of the idea first, doesn't mean that the scientists or engineers who implemented that idea, ever read or were influenced by the writer.
I think what the student is attempting to research is based on faulty logic.
It doesn't fit perfectly within your course description, as all three are recently published, but their premise of elementary particles as being original sin is facinating. And they have fantastic communications and other tools that I would love to see develop in the future -- the althiometer, the lodestone reasonator....
These books are also chock full of complex allusions and interesting nuances English majors live for -- think of them as Narnia stories for the modern humanist. Totally readable as stories, but more complex should the reader care to dig in more deeply.
Liza
These opinions are my own. My employer is not aware of them, does not endorse them, and is not responsible for them.
Here, here! Finally, a logical voice in this cloud of idiocy!
The Apollo LEM was originally designed with spikes on the tips of the landing legs. In response to Arthur C. Clarke's novel "A Fall of Moondust" those spikes were (frantically, at the last minute) redesigned to become the familiar mushroom-like pads.
You must independently verify this if you wish to follow the scientific method. Don't worry, it's not hard to do.
Therefore, a novel (ACC's aFoM) has had an effect on a scientific development (the creation of a viable moon lander), therefore, your statement (Novels have no effect upon scientific development) is incorrect.
Another way to disprove your premise is to call NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena. JPL has a friendly public relations group who will probably be quite willing to share with you the details of their collaborations with science fiction authors. I believe Niven, Clarke, and Pournelle have all been guests of JPL at times.
Here's a clip from a NASA site for you:
Oh, I dunno. Tom Clancy predicted using a hijacked plane loaded with fuel as a bomb years before it was put into production. That's got to be worth something.
sub f{($f)=@_;print"$f(q{$f});";}f(q{sub f{($f)=@_;print"$f(q{$f});";}f});
E.g., if you were writing a story in 1870, descrbing how everyone would be driving around in cars in the future is amusing, but not important. How the automobile will change society by giving people a much greater range of movement is what is important.
I'd say the biggest influence of SF on future technology has been inspirational. A lot of people involved in the space program in the 60's and 70's got hooked by reading SF, especially Heinlein's works, for example.
Although they haven't been created yet, there was a story here a couple years ago about a "transporter" beam that IBM had built. It wasn't the real deal, but it was based on a similar idea, but it only did a single particle. As I recall, it used entangled pairs to accomplish its task and the original had to be destroyed as part of the process.
I wish I still had a link to the site. It was really cool stuff.
There's also been a great deal of science fiction leaking into stuff like the SETI programs. I think the people in SETI research picked up some good ideas about what kinds of things to look for. Again, don't have any links.
It is astonishing and frightening to watch how fast things like Orwell's 1984 and Huxley's "Brave New World" are coming true. The USA P.A.T.R.I.O.T. Act, among other things (like an utterly submissive Congress) are making this happen at a record pace. Let's hope that promoters of Open Source aren't dubbed "terrorists" and tried in secret court -- which is now possible under the latest residential order...
-- haaz.
According to the manufacturer's site:
They have an FAQ, and the tech is covered by US Patent #5,675,103.I play Nerd-Folk!
In "Stranger in a Strange Land," in the early section where the protagonist is being held prisoner in the hospital, Heinlein describes a woman recovering in some special kind of bed, I believe designed to reduce stress on the bodies of recovering patients lying in bed for long periods of time. I've read somewhere that this was the direct origin of the concept of the waterbed. Two minutes of research later, I say this: check the link in this post. More Google searching for "heinlein waterbed" suggests that people were actually denied patents by the USPTO for waterbeds because Heinlein had put the idea in the public domain first.
...I guess we should just take it at face value.
It seems obvious to me that his project is actually "find a bunch of scifi predictions that came true" and he's wrapped his fake assignment around that in a simple ploy that would only fool an idiot. Fortunately for him, that's all he needed.
324006
There was a birth notice for her in the Sydney Morning Herald on the appropriate day in 1980, one of the doctors thanked for helping with her delivery was ``Asimov.''
Susan Calvin is a character from Asimov's ``Robots'' series who is a whiz-bang robot, uh, psychologist.
Asimov spent much more time being loud and assertive than inventing stuff like Heinlen and Clarke did, and he missed some very significant points of chemistry and physics in his non-fiction-ish works like ``The Left Hand of the Electron.'' He did, however, write a *lot* of words!
The invention that I'm waiting to see implemented is skyhooks AKA inside-out orbiting bridges, as in ``The Fountains of Paradise.''
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
The web site www.Everything2.com seems just like how Douglas Adams described the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: full of information about everything, but often silly and informal.
For some reason I thought Friday was from the 50's or 60's. If it was 1984 he was doing a good job, but not visionary on the Internet.
324006
In his novel "The Door into Summer", Heinlein describes an automatic drawing machine that can be used to automate a lot of the boring tasks associated with mechanical drawing. It is a draftman's dream.
It turns out that a modern parametric CAD (Computer Assisted Design) software has a lot of the functions dreamed up by Heinlein. As for the form, RAH envisioned circuits within the body of a drawing table and some actuators for printing on paper, much like a full size blueprint plotter, instead of our modern computer with a totally non-paper work space.
However, this idea was there. So RAH gets credit for that one too.
--
Mad science! Robots! Underwear! Cute girls! Full comic online! http://www.girlgeniusonline.com/
I was just beginning to wonder whether anyone was going to mention Brunner too.
Shockwave Rider is probably the most relevant to the online culture of today; I reread it just a few weeks ago, oddly enough - ultimately I think he is far to optimistic in his ending.
I have the nasty feeling, though, that The Sheep Look Up, with its predictions of environmental disaster, may well be closer to where we're heading.
I'll also add The Jagged Orbit to the list.
I remember watching a show about a search for a US navy ship that had been sunk in the days before the end of the 2nd world war (the 'Pennsylvania', I think.. it was the ship that'd brought the a-bomb to Hawa'ii) on the discovery channel. Anyway, the pointed out during the show that the 'fire-control' systems were on the bridge of the ship.
Written in 1881, predicted streaming music over telephone lines. It's online, do a 'find in page' on chapter 11 for the word telephone. (Hmmm. chapter 11 (bankruptcy), streaming media, riaa, theres some irony in here somewhere. i can feel it.)
Of course he also established most 20th century sci-fi themes. See "The Time Machine"
What did that predict? Precious Moments people?
let's see... several centuries before 802701, ant people from another planet land on Earth and find the Precious Moments people (who call themselves "Eloi") living there to be easy pickings, especially compared to what happened about 800,000 years in iD4. The "Morlocks," as the ant people come to be known, set up shop underground. They begin to slaughter Eloi who have already reproduced several times.
Then in 802701, a traveler from the past reintroduces "fire" and related technologies into the Eloi culture. After he leaves, the Eloi begin to awaken. One of them (named Colin) is the first to find out that all the food is coated with drugs to keep the Eloi people stupid ("raised to be stupid, taught to be nothing at all, I don't like the drugs but the drugs like me" -- M. Manson). While fasting, he finds that he learns much more quickly. Thus, he becomes the leader of the revolution...
Anybody want to help me write the sequel?
Will I retire or break 10K?
There are tons of paper cover the exact topic you are exploring. A Comparative literature professor is an expert in the field and has managed to build the largest scholastic collection of science fiction. In 1997, the second closest collection had half the number of books.
Everyone seems to be mentioning the big names, but there are a lot of smaller authors who influenced the science fiction genre. There are a lot of science fiction experts in the Comparative Literature field, so consider looking there for really specific information with citations. I won't bother trying to remember the essays I've read in those topics. The material is numerous and the field of study is about 20 years old.
I served as an officer on the USS Hoel (DDG-13), a Guided Missile Destroyer, from 1987 to 1990.
Navy warships have a bridge, where you'll find the helmsman, the lee helmsman (transmits orders to the engine room) and the Officer of the Deck ("OOD") (who's in charge) and the Junior Officer of the Deck ("JOOD") who "has the Conn" and gives orders to the helm and lee helm. There's a nice big chair for the Captain to sit in whenever he wants.
There's also a "Combat Information Center" or "CIC" which is usually close by the bridge. This is a darkened room full of radar repeaters and various weapon control systems. There's also a nice big chair for the Captain to sit in whenever he wants. There is also a "Combat Information Center Officer" on watch, and at times of heightened alerts, there is also a "Tactical Action Officer" or "TAO" who runs the ship and tells the OOD what to do
Where does the Captain sit? Wherever he damn well wants, which is usually on the bridge.
I suppose you could argue that modern Combat Information Centers are based on the Star Trek model, but the helm and lee helm and the OOD are still on the bridge where the OOD can see outside.
I once took a tour of the USS Ticonderoga, the first Aegis class Cruiser. There was a portion of the CIC set aside for the Captain and maybe a flag officer (Admiral) if one was on board. This area had big projection screens, etc. But it sure didn't remind me of Star Trek, not at all.
So, I don't buy it. Star Trek has been on TV, off and on, from the 1960's. The US Navy has been doing its job since the Revolutionary War. The design of Navy warships has been the result of a centuries long evolutionary process and is not the result of the vision of Gene Roddenberry.
144l. ph34r my 133t l3g4l 5k1lz!
Asimov - is credited with approaching robotics from a logical, scientific point of view. (machines don't have emotions). Heinlein - In "Waldo, Inc." actually describes Waldoes, mechanical hands for remote work for a person with degerative muscle disease who lives in orbit. Vernor Vinge - True Names and Other Lies- Describes a typcal Internet MUD years before anyone else. Some French Guy - wrote a story "By The Rivers of Babylon" about a member of a primitive tribe from upstate NY who visits the bombed-out city, has a vision of back when "...they turned the night into day for their pleasure." A typical post-atomic apocalype novel? Except this was written in 1938! There's also the famous story of the FBI visiting the offices of Astounding (now Analog) magazine in 1942 or 43 to ask about a science fiction story describing atomic bombs. Here they are trying to maintain the strictest secrecy and some guy is dreaming this up and describing it in the public media.
What about the fact that Erich Von Daniken is a complete wanker who made all that shit up to impress the terminally gullible?
It's bollocks, it all is.
"Information wants to be paid"
Three Quarks for Muster Mark!
"Information wants to be paid"
with 600+ comments, I don't know if these have been mentioned yet, but:
"Snow Crash", for a pre-internet vision of the 'net'. Also predicts the sort of cult-icon hipness attached to programmers that happens nowadays.
"Islands in the Net", which relies on the fax machine for much of its plot, before those objects existed.
"Ender's Game", which presents the interesting idea of fighting a war remotely, in a format that mimics a computer game.
Whatever happened to JonKatz?
ORA:CLE by Kevin O'Donnell predicts Internet based expert communities, like slashdot.
The only link I could find is this french one, but English translations are available.
http://www.cinefantastico.com/nexus7/literatura
Yes, that was Lazarus's grandmother, one of the *trans*generational incests I mentioned. I think you might read "To Sail Beyond The Sunset" and get it from Maureen's perspective. They both knew what they were doing ;->
wait... you're right, it was his mother not grandmother...