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alexandraerinSo, the story I wrote today that I needed the Clarke quote for (see previous post) wasn't exactly a science fiction story. Yeah, I'll probably flag it as such when I post it on Fantasy In Miniature, because it has robots rather than elves, but it's really more a story that has a robot in it is than a science fiction story.
I mean, if I write a story where the protagonist sits at a modern-day computer and looks up information on the modern-day internet, or uses a modern-day smart phone connected to a 4G network, this story would be relying on fantastic applications of technology that are the equal or better of the uses for technology envisioned in many classic stories from the golden age of science fiction. Just a few hours ago I was contemplating using the internet to make a purchase using electronic money of a copy of one of Dr. Clarke's books, which would then be delivered wirelessly to a device that holds approximately thirty-five hundred books, only needs to be charged up once a month, and uses real-fucking-life ELECTRONIC INK to display text.
You know where you see something like the Kindle? Not in the annals of science fiction, but in the 5th season of Angel. The "source books" of Wolfram & Hart. Magic books. To the primitive minds of 2003 (the year the 5th season of Angel began and the year before Sony put the first e-book reader on the market), today's Kindle is "sufficiently advanced technology".
When Isaac Asimov imagined the future ubiquity of technological gadgets in his Foundation book, he imagined big cumbersome gadgets that needed a technician to adjust the dials of. There was no graphical user interface on the atomic gimcrackery (wow, Chrome's spellchecker knows "gimcrackery". I am impressed.) of his space traders, who were selling consumer goods that were supposed to be attractive to the point of being indispensable. What were they? Better penknives, better washing machines. Not so much as a personal organizer or tip calculator, just atomic powered versions of things that people needed in the 1940s.
When Asimov envisioned an entirely new gadget, it still appeared quaint and anachronistic a mere half a century later: Salvor Hardin uses an atomic forcefield built into his desk to harmlessly disintegrate the ash and smoke from cigarettes.
(The character of Salvor Hardin also gives us an epigram that is very applicable to anyone trying to write science fiction: "Nothing has to be true, but everything has to sound like it was.")
Reading passages like these from old science fiction books is very much like reading old laws and codes of behavior relating to the use of automobiles when horse-powered travel was still the norm and was expected to remain the norm... the idea that cars could spook horses was not only seen as a serious issue but was seriously counted as a strike against them. How could the blasted contraptions ever hope to catch on if they couldn't co-exist with horses and buggies?
People knew that automobiles existed but they had no idea what they meant.
Another example: some writers did predict a worldwide network of information storage devices from which people could query at will. H.G. Wells predicted a "world brain" where all of human knowledge would be indexed and could be transmitted rapidly to be displayed on a viewscreen. He thought we'd be using microfilm for this, but we'll let that go. He was envisioning new uses for the technology available at the time.
But could anybody who envisioned a worldwide network of computers linking people across nations and continents have imagined that I, a relative nobody who writes stories about people spanking each other, would be using that network to share an essay on science fiction beneath a picture of a meditating panda? That at the same moment that I'm typing this, there are several thousand separate conversations about magical talking ponies happening across this same network?
If you want to find anything even remotely like the common smartphones... or even a middle-of-the-line cellphone... of the modern era in fiction of preceding eras, you have to look towards the "do-anything" plot gimmick computers like the one carried by Inspector Gadget's niece Penny. Such a gimmick wasn't intended to be realistic or make sense. It wasn't meant to predict anything. It's like a sonic screwdriver with a slightly better user interface, and really if you think about it the invention of the graphical user interface is really the one thing that snuck up on people. In the original Star Trek, they interact with their computer through voice recognition, they fiddle with knobs and throw switches and click buttons, they peer into weird view things, but there's nothing so convenient as a mouse or even a keyboard. The interfaces used on board the Next Generation's Enterprise were impressively futuristic-looking when the show began, but the earliest PCs with a GUI were already on the market and by the time it went off the air... well, the show ended in 1994. Windows 95 came out the next year.
If you could go back in time and add a comfortable and convenient user interface to any science fiction technology of your choice, you would make the creator thereof appear about 10,000% times more prescient.
In 1997... less than a decade into the Age of the Internet... William Gibson said:
1997 was also the year that the book 3001: Final Odyssey came out.
The four books that make up Arthur C. Clarke's "Odyssey" series are titled chronologically: 2001, 2010, 2061, and 3001. Each book in the series occupies its own timeline, however, where the events in the previous books are assumed to have more or less happened in more or less the manner depicted before, but with some changes. These are not just the normal discontinuities that can creep into any series: the timeline is pushed back so that the events of 2001 and 2010 have more plausible dates attached and the technology used in those books is tweaked to take advantage of advances in the state of scientific knowledge.
While an author's fans will often make heroic efforts to smooth over these kinds of inconsistencies, Clarke made no attempt to hem and haw or hedge around what he was doing. From teh very beginning he said 2010 was not a "direct sequel".
All in all, I think this is one of the more graceful ways of dealing with the consequences of trying to construct a vision of the future, a task that is always a matter of trying to hit a moving target. If Clarke had written the same four books but had each one following directly from the unaltered events of the other, then each book would have been a quirkier and quainter example of accidental retrotech.
One specific example that springs to mind: the original book depicts astronaut David Bowman being uplifted into immortality by becoming a being of pure transcendental energy. Now this is a common science fiction trope, but Dr. Clarke had to be aware as he was writing those words that they add up to a lot of great and airy nothing. All the stuff about propulsion systems and gravity-based space maneuvers and radio transmissions in 2001 was hard science fiction. "Beings of pure energy" isn't even soft science fiction, no matter how many scienterrific buzzwords you string together. It's what we might call soft fantasy: fantasy that suckers you into believing "it could happen" by saying "ectoplasm" instead of "ghost" and "energy" instead of "soul" and "subconscious psychokinetic manifestation" instead of "magic".
In the later books it's revealed that Dave's "pure energy" form is actually a result of his consciousness being uploaded into an alien supercomputer. By the end of 3001, his electronic consciousness has been transferred into a terrestrial computer with a "petabyte" storage capacity. That's 1,000 terabytes. When the book was written in 1997 that was meant to be an impressively large unit of storage.
To put a petabyte into context: it's slightly smaller than the World of Warcraft. It's about how much data Valve's Steam system delivers in a day. (Source, or at least a link to sources.)
But the point of this is not to marvel at the fact that we have video games that could beat up Arthur C. Clarke's nascent star-god. It's not how much the world has changed between 1997 and 2011 that I'm interested in at the moment, so much as how much it changed between 1968 (2001) and 1997. When Clarke wrote 2001, he had no idea how a human mind could plausibly be separated from its body to become an immortal intelligence. By 1997, the idea of such a "ghost in the machine" wasn't even original.
None of this is to impugn Clarke's lack of foresight. See above, in re: magical talking ponies and the use of a massive worldwide network of computers to discuss them.
How do you see something like that coming?
And that's bolded because it's really the point of this ramble, and why I don't consider anything that I write to be science fiction. On some levels I consciously avoid science fiction because I'm conscious of all the "soft fantasy" cheating that goes on in it (invent a particle, call it a name-on, say it explains everything... see also: Thank You For Smoking and "Thank God we created the, you know, whatever device.")... I'd rather just say "It's magic." then have it be magic but cover it up with a layer of deuterium-iridium alloyed lies.
But part of my sci-fi avoidance is the awareness that the future is a moving target. Even the present is up for grabs. I don't think any one of us is aware of the full potential of the internet yet... I don't think we really understand how the net works.
In some ways, we're still not out of the "don't spook the horses" age with regards to the internet.
I mean, if I write a story where the protagonist sits at a modern-day computer and looks up information on the modern-day internet, or uses a modern-day smart phone connected to a 4G network, this story would be relying on fantastic applications of technology that are the equal or better of the uses for technology envisioned in many classic stories from the golden age of science fiction. Just a few hours ago I was contemplating using the internet to make a purchase using electronic money of a copy of one of Dr. Clarke's books, which would then be delivered wirelessly to a device that holds approximately thirty-five hundred books, only needs to be charged up once a month, and uses real-fucking-life ELECTRONIC INK to display text.
You know where you see something like the Kindle? Not in the annals of science fiction, but in the 5th season of Angel. The "source books" of Wolfram & Hart. Magic books. To the primitive minds of 2003 (the year the 5th season of Angel began and the year before Sony put the first e-book reader on the market), today's Kindle is "sufficiently advanced technology".
When Isaac Asimov imagined the future ubiquity of technological gadgets in his Foundation book, he imagined big cumbersome gadgets that needed a technician to adjust the dials of. There was no graphical user interface on the atomic gimcrackery (wow, Chrome's spellchecker knows "gimcrackery". I am impressed.) of his space traders, who were selling consumer goods that were supposed to be attractive to the point of being indispensable. What were they? Better penknives, better washing machines. Not so much as a personal organizer or tip calculator, just atomic powered versions of things that people needed in the 1940s.
When Asimov envisioned an entirely new gadget, it still appeared quaint and anachronistic a mere half a century later: Salvor Hardin uses an atomic forcefield built into his desk to harmlessly disintegrate the ash and smoke from cigarettes.
(The character of Salvor Hardin also gives us an epigram that is very applicable to anyone trying to write science fiction: "Nothing has to be true, but everything has to sound like it was.")
Reading passages like these from old science fiction books is very much like reading old laws and codes of behavior relating to the use of automobiles when horse-powered travel was still the norm and was expected to remain the norm... the idea that cars could spook horses was not only seen as a serious issue but was seriously counted as a strike against them. How could the blasted contraptions ever hope to catch on if they couldn't co-exist with horses and buggies?
People knew that automobiles existed but they had no idea what they meant.
Another example: some writers did predict a worldwide network of information storage devices from which people could query at will. H.G. Wells predicted a "world brain" where all of human knowledge would be indexed and could be transmitted rapidly to be displayed on a viewscreen. He thought we'd be using microfilm for this, but we'll let that go. He was envisioning new uses for the technology available at the time.
But could anybody who envisioned a worldwide network of computers linking people across nations and continents have imagined that I, a relative nobody who writes stories about people spanking each other, would be using that network to share an essay on science fiction beneath a picture of a meditating panda? That at the same moment that I'm typing this, there are several thousand separate conversations about magical talking ponies happening across this same network?
If you want to find anything even remotely like the common smartphones... or even a middle-of-the-line cellphone... of the modern era in fiction of preceding eras, you have to look towards the "do-anything" plot gimmick computers like the one carried by Inspector Gadget's niece Penny. Such a gimmick wasn't intended to be realistic or make sense. It wasn't meant to predict anything. It's like a sonic screwdriver with a slightly better user interface, and really if you think about it the invention of the graphical user interface is really the one thing that snuck up on people. In the original Star Trek, they interact with their computer through voice recognition, they fiddle with knobs and throw switches and click buttons, they peer into weird view things, but there's nothing so convenient as a mouse or even a keyboard. The interfaces used on board the Next Generation's Enterprise were impressively futuristic-looking when the show began, but the earliest PCs with a GUI were already on the market and by the time it went off the air... well, the show ended in 1994. Windows 95 came out the next year.
If you could go back in time and add a comfortable and convenient user interface to any science fiction technology of your choice, you would make the creator thereof appear about 10,000% times more prescient.
In 1997... less than a decade into the Age of the Internet... William Gibson said:
…I felt that I was trying to describe an unthinkable present and I actually feel that science fiction's best use today is the exploration of contemporary reality rather than any attempt to predict where we are going…The best thing you can do with science today is use it to explore the present. Earth is the alien planet now.(Source-ish.)
1997 was also the year that the book 3001: Final Odyssey came out.
The four books that make up Arthur C. Clarke's "Odyssey" series are titled chronologically: 2001, 2010, 2061, and 3001. Each book in the series occupies its own timeline, however, where the events in the previous books are assumed to have more or less happened in more or less the manner depicted before, but with some changes. These are not just the normal discontinuities that can creep into any series: the timeline is pushed back so that the events of 2001 and 2010 have more plausible dates attached and the technology used in those books is tweaked to take advantage of advances in the state of scientific knowledge.
While an author's fans will often make heroic efforts to smooth over these kinds of inconsistencies, Clarke made no attempt to hem and haw or hedge around what he was doing. From teh very beginning he said 2010 was not a "direct sequel".
All in all, I think this is one of the more graceful ways of dealing with the consequences of trying to construct a vision of the future, a task that is always a matter of trying to hit a moving target. If Clarke had written the same four books but had each one following directly from the unaltered events of the other, then each book would have been a quirkier and quainter example of accidental retrotech.
One specific example that springs to mind: the original book depicts astronaut David Bowman being uplifted into immortality by becoming a being of pure transcendental energy. Now this is a common science fiction trope, but Dr. Clarke had to be aware as he was writing those words that they add up to a lot of great and airy nothing. All the stuff about propulsion systems and gravity-based space maneuvers and radio transmissions in 2001 was hard science fiction. "Beings of pure energy" isn't even soft science fiction, no matter how many scienterrific buzzwords you string together. It's what we might call soft fantasy: fantasy that suckers you into believing "it could happen" by saying "ectoplasm" instead of "ghost" and "energy" instead of "soul" and "subconscious psychokinetic manifestation" instead of "magic".
In the later books it's revealed that Dave's "pure energy" form is actually a result of his consciousness being uploaded into an alien supercomputer. By the end of 3001, his electronic consciousness has been transferred into a terrestrial computer with a "petabyte" storage capacity. That's 1,000 terabytes. When the book was written in 1997 that was meant to be an impressively large unit of storage.
To put a petabyte into context: it's slightly smaller than the World of Warcraft. It's about how much data Valve's Steam system delivers in a day. (Source, or at least a link to sources.)
But the point of this is not to marvel at the fact that we have video games that could beat up Arthur C. Clarke's nascent star-god. It's not how much the world has changed between 1997 and 2011 that I'm interested in at the moment, so much as how much it changed between 1968 (2001) and 1997. When Clarke wrote 2001, he had no idea how a human mind could plausibly be separated from its body to become an immortal intelligence. By 1997, the idea of such a "ghost in the machine" wasn't even original.
None of this is to impugn Clarke's lack of foresight. See above, in re: magical talking ponies and the use of a massive worldwide network of computers to discuss them.
How do you see something like that coming?
And that's bolded because it's really the point of this ramble, and why I don't consider anything that I write to be science fiction. On some levels I consciously avoid science fiction because I'm conscious of all the "soft fantasy" cheating that goes on in it (invent a particle, call it a name-on, say it explains everything... see also: Thank You For Smoking and "Thank God we created the, you know, whatever device.")... I'd rather just say "It's magic." then have it be magic but cover it up with a layer of deuterium-iridium alloyed lies.
But part of my sci-fi avoidance is the awareness that the future is a moving target. Even the present is up for grabs. I don't think any one of us is aware of the full potential of the internet yet... I don't think we really understand how the net works.
In some ways, we're still not out of the "don't spook the horses" age with regards to the internet.
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no subject
on 2011-04-12 03:07 am (UTC)no subject
on 2011-04-12 03:20 am (UTC)Hmmm. Interesting sidenote: I almost said "literal tablets", because that's (as far as I know) what the things they carried around in place of notepads in TOS were called, but of course a hand-sized notebook isn't a literal tablet, a literal tablet is a slab of stone or clay.
And now a tablet is an electronic device.
It's things like this that make me look sideways at people who insist that a laser or plasma-based device could never be called a "rifle" because it wouldn't have a rifled barrel.
no subject
on 2011-04-12 03:20 am (UTC)no subject
on 2011-04-13 12:08 pm (UTC)