[ih] Fiction->History

Thu Sep 24 11:15:23 PDT 2015

My favorite examples of science fiction that got it right are  E. M Forster's 1909 The Machine Stops, which I thought did a good job of capturing some Internet capabilities a century later as well as some AI possibilities (you may disagree), and Vannevar Bush's As We May Think, which he pretty much knew by 1945 wouldn't be realized by an opto-mechanical system and didn't yet see the alternative, but which inspired a lot of people who eventually realized it.

-----Original Message-----
From: internet-history-bounces at postel.org [mailto:internet-history-bounces at postel.org] On Behalf Of John Day
Sent: Thursday, September 24, 2015 10:41 AM
To: Miles Fidelman <mfidelman at meetinghouse.net>
Cc: internet-history at postel.org
Subject: Re: [ih] Fiction->History

"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] 
>> https://na01.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=http%3a%2f%2fwww.c
>> harlesegannon.com%2fBioTop.html&data=01%7c01%7cjgrudin%40microsoft.co
>> m%7c017d402c961741d8b01e08d2c509968d%7c72f988bf86f141af91ab2d7cd011db
>> 47%7c1&sdata=q7jU7ofQJIG6RffRwGGqkzlGlBQxl6tOjh66CMCtZiQ%3d
>> [2] 
>> https://na01.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=http%3a%2f%2fisbn.
>> nu%2f9780742540354&data=01%7c01%7cjgrudin%40microsoft.com%7c017d402c9
>> 61741d8b01e08d2c509968d%7c72f988bf86f141af91ab2d7cd011db47%7c1&sdata=
>> tOjyX8U9aGRdw83B7KfybvuRrds6o4kCEuuDLbM0DC0%3d
>> [3] 
>> https://na01.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=http%3a%2f%2fwww.o
>> nthemedia.org%2fstory%2f129496-science-fiction-in-the-national-intere
>> st%2ftranscript%2f&data=01%7c01%7cjgrudin%40microsoft.com%7c017d402c9
>> 61741d8b01e08d2c509968d%7c72f988bf86f141af91ab2d7cd011db47%7c1&sdata=
>> 6pArgzSS4HlMwGzSXP3lI%2f0Tx60Rbj5e0bJ4iw4tQC0%3d
>> 
>> 
>> --
>> Bill Ricker
>> bill.n1vux at gmail.com <mailto:bill.n1vux at gmail.com> 
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