People in sf love to extend predictions backward until they lose all meaning.
In any case, the timing indicates that Leinster was probably responding to a recent article by Vannevar Bush.
Most sf “predictions” upon closer inspection turn out to be something that was in the news then but forgotten now done up in story form. Whether these are really “predictions” is a matter of definition. They certainly look a lot less impressive, though.
Vinge wrote the first story about something that really “feels” like the modern Internet. He deserves all the credit.
I dunno about that. James H. Schmitz kept casually mentioning “ComWeb” in his Hub stories in the sixties. Granted, he didn’t really flesh it out, but that’s because the ComWeb was just viewed as a utility by the characters, not as the subject of a story itself. But it feels really parallel to just having an Internet connection handy so you can look up stuff and send information to other people.
Is the science your top priority? Or do you need a decent story to go along with it?
Because otherwise you might take a recommendation for, say, Bob Forward (Dragon’s Egg, frex) at face value. The speculative science in his novels is truly skull-expanding. But the storytelling, unfortunately, is shite. On the whole, his books are worth reading, but they can be quite a slog if you don’t know what you’re in for.
Some examples of what you tried based on the previous thread and enjoyed or did not enjoy might be helpful.
I recently read and enjoyed **The Wreck of the River of Stars ** by Michael Flynn. Hard SF, but the conflict is only secondarily characters vs. hardware. Flynn is able to build realistic characters and set them on collision courses.
I haven’t read Schmitz in 40 years, so I don’t remember those stories. But there’s a vast difference between mentioning a source of information in the background - something that was quite common - and using the “feel” of the Internet as a new experience to drive a story.
I’ve recently been reading the works of Nancy Kress. Her Beggars series had me facinated with the storylines, while saying a lot about the nature of social contracts, via the effects of genetic engineering on society.
And I always plug Joe Haldeman’s “The Forever War” in any Hard SF thread.
I consider Kim Stanley Robinson’s trilogy Red Mars, Green Mars, Blue Mars, about two hundred years of a colonization/terraforming project on the Red Planet, to be the Lord of the Rings of hard science fiction.
He followed that up with The Martians, which was more of the same only short stories, and then Antarctica. Don’t waste your time on Antarctica, but if you like hard sf you should definitely read the others.
I’ve read Schmitz in the past couple of years, and while he does mention something like the Internet, it’s more along the lines of mentioning a futuristic way of cooking that doesn’t involve fire or heat. Vinge did (and does) indeed propose ways that people will change their lives because of the Internet. In Rainbows End, for example, he mentions microroyalties as people use various bits of art, music, whatever, as the eventual outcome of the fight over copyright. In the same book, people are always on the lookout for collaborating on ideas, as the right idea can make one rich.
Don’t get me wrong, Shmitz is still quite readable even after all these years. I just think that Vinge comprehends the internet better, as he should, given his background.
Greg Egan. I just read his short stories in Axiomatic and his novel Diaspora. He has some pretty big ideas, and usually includes some bind-bending stuff. Diaspora, for example, has multi-dimensional mathematics and physics, wormhole theory, and machine intelligence.
Someone I haven’t seen mentioned yet is Wil McCarthy. I’ve only read one of his books, Bloom, which was a pretty decent book about nanotech, and I note that he wrote a non-fiction book in that field too.
Not meaning to hijack, but is **Greg Bear ** considered good or crap by Sci-Fi enthusiasts? I remember liking the science in a couple of his books - but only when I was about twelve.
I tried to read, and failed to complete, the only Banks book I ever attempted - Excelsior - and was constantly irritated by his choice of ridiculous space ship names.
Problem Child
Meatfucker
Ethics Gradient
Sac Slicer II
Anticipation of a New Lover’s Arrival
Steely Glint
Serious Callers Only
Shoot them Later
End In Tears
Full Refund
And nearly twenty others almost as stupid.
I don’t have a high regard for Banks as a writer. The Human v Alien racketball games in ‘Excelsior’ using a creature with crippled wings as a ball reminded me of a similar set up in ‘Red Dwarf’, which I won’t bother going into here.
Baxter is a much better choice as a writer of hard SF.
If they’re warships, then naming them would probably follow the pattern of warships on Earth. Admirals, Generals, Battles etc.
If they’re gigantic pleasure cruisers of the huge Caribbean size and standard, then expect words like: ‘Monarch’, ‘Princess’, ‘Stellar’ or anything similar.
Not even the many small boat owners I know personally (I’m talking 10’-20’ powerboats here) give their boats undignified names. (‘Barfer’ would be the worst, but the owner’s a bit of a dill).
Apart from that I derived no pleasure from reading Banks. Each to his own, I guess.
The Culture isn’t descended from Earth, and doesn’t really have Admirals and Generals. Dedicated warships tend to name themselves something aggressive though, like “Killing Time” in the book.
Some of the Culture vessels have billions of inhabitants - “Princess” seems a little small
The ships pick their own names, on a whim mostly.
Well, indeed, and we’re probably way OT for this thread anyway.
I dobn’t know. I was blown away with how closely Leinster’s story felt like the Internet. In particular, after the “censor” function has been eliminated (and I love that, in the 1940s it was felt that you had to have such a censor) people start
– downloading ways to efficiently and undetectably murder other people
–downloading plans to banks and the like –
–Kids start downloading porn.
I haven’t read the Bush article (although now I have to get it), but I’ll bet these things weren’t in it. This is the sort of extrapolation that characterizes hard SF – taking an idea that might have been postulated by a scientist and examining its likely consequences.
There are other candidates for “first internet story” (I don’t care what you say about such compiulsive backward-stretching. I love it). as Martin Gardner pointed out, H.G. wells had written a story involving such a central accessible databank as well, although, from his description, it doesn’t feel very internet-like. Arthur C. Clarke wrote things in the 70s and 80s that definitely have the behavior and feel of the internet – although by then we already had Darpanet, so it wasn’t much of a prediction.
As for the writers getting their inspiration from the writings of others – so what? That’s exactly how writers operate. I can show you countless examples of such things. It was Verne’s standard method of operation. We can trace back plenty of his ideas to their sources,. But those sources never turned out 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea.
More to the point, Frederick Soddy wrote about the possibilities of fission and the “atomic bomb”, but it was Wells’ “The World Set Free” and his imagining the political consequences of using those bombs that inspired (by his own admission )Leo Szilard in his thinking about what would become the REAL atomic bomb.
I liked **Eon **and Forge of God, but not Anvil of Stars. I thought Darwin’s Radio was okay.
I already plugged Peter F. Hamilton and Dan Simmons in last year’s thread, although I suppose their stuff is more space opera than hard sci-fi. They write nice thick books, though.
The rest of my “hard” sci-fi favorites that are still writing have already been mentioned - Joe Haldeman, Nancy Kress, Kim Stanley Robinson and David Brin. Have to suggest Lois McMaster Bujold too, who I only recently discovered, although I wouldn’t consider her stuff hard.
I really need to try Vernor Vinge, I’ve never read him. I didn’t like the one Ben Bova book I tried, but maybe I tried the wrong one.
I remember hearing about microroyalties in academic discussions a good dozen years before Rainbows End. It’s hardly a proposal on Vinge’s part.