[ih] Fiction->History

[John Day]

"1000 Monkeys at a 1000 typewriters  . . .”  Only half joking, with all of the sci-fi writers out there you would expect a few to come close once in awhile.  ;-)  But future predicting in general has been pretty bad.


> On Sep 24, 2015, at 12:56, Miles Fidelman <mfidelman at meetinghouse.net> wrote:
> 
> A few more obvious ones comes to mind:
> 
> "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress"
> 
> "Colossus: The Forbin Project" - and lots of variants on that theme (up 
> to, and including, the Terminator movies -- and what with automatically 
> swarming drones now a reality, somehow Skynet seems to loom on the near 
> horizon!)
> 
> "Shockwave Rider" - which seemed to get an awful lot of things right, 
> for its time
> 
> Miles Fidelman
> 
> Bill Ricker wrote:
>> 
>> On Wed, Sep 23, 2015 at 10:27 PM, Larry Sheldon <larrysheldon at cox.net 
>> <mailto:larrysheldon at cox.net>> wrote:
>> 
>> 
>>        Fiction->History
>> 
>> ​There are two sorts of SciFi (aside from the Fantastic) - those that 
>> aren't facts yet​
>> ​but likely will be if we persevere, and ​those that could be facts if 
>> we screw things up even worse. Those writing near-term SF are well 
>> advised to leverage  William Gibson's aphorism "The future is already 
>> here - it's just not evenly distributed" to sniff out what is in the 
>> labs and the pockets of the early adopters.
>> 
>>    ​
>>    In 1977 there was a book titled “The Adolescence of P-1” (Thomas
>>    Joseph
>>    Ryan)
>> 
>> 
>> I thought I remembered this was either serialized or first appeared as 
>> a novella in one of the magazines before release as a book, but Google 
>> finds no proof of that? Odd.
>>   There was a flurry of pre-cyber-punk AI / rogue-programmer stories 
>> in Analog in the late 70's, i recall one featured a female hacker but 
>> i forget the title, and that it was the month before or after P-1 so 
>> it seemed a trend.  ​
>> 
>> There are plenty of listicles that catalog SciFi 
>> stories/concepts/widgets that became reality -- partly through 
>> invention of the engineering fact being easier after invention of the 
>> idea as fiction, as testified to by the inventor of Cellphones being 
>> inspired by Kirk's (Roddenbery's) communicator -- but has this been 
>> treated in the full academic style as literature-and-society  or 
>> history of science? I don't know. ​I am remiss in not surveying 
>> academic treatment of ​ SciFi as LitCrit in between Padlipsky's thesis 
>> (latterly of MULTICS and this I-H list) and Gannon's [1] /Rumors of 
>> War/ [2] and Pournelle's SIGMA [3], which respectively study and 
>> practice influence of SF on military and government policy.
>>    If there isn't yet an academic study of the influence of P-1 and 
>> the following Cyber-punk movement on Silicon valley et al in any/all 
>> aspects (network, OS, application, User interface), it's due, it's ripe.
>>    If we don't get an answer on this list, i can ask Chuck Gannon and 
>> network through my other SF&F friends to see who if anyone is working 
>> such.
>> 
>> ​ (I do highly recommend /Rumors of War/, particularly if you admired 
>> MAP's literary writing style as i do and are interested in social 
>> impact of early English-language SciFi on the military.) ​
>> 
>> ​ [1]​ http://www.charlesegannon.com/BioTop.html
>> [2] http://isbn.nu/9780742540354
>> [3] ​ 
>> http://www.onthemedia.org/story/129496-science-fiction-in-the-national-interest/transcript/ 
>> ​
>> 
>> -- 
>> Bill Ricker
>> bill.n1vux at gmail.com <mailto:bill.n1vux at gmail.com>
>> https://www.linkedin.com/in/n1vux
>> 
>> 
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> 
> 
> -- 
> In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice.
> In practice, there is.   .... Yogi Berra
> 
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