So what, indeed. I’ve never said there was anything wrong with that. Just the opposite, I say it’s SOP.
It’s just that as a student of history as much as a student of sf, I get really irritated when I see people point to an sf story and say, look, they thought of that 20,40,60,100 years ago. Ain’t sf writers grand?
Sure, sometimes the writers thought of a wonderful way of depicting the future that’s all theirs. But its really, really rare. As Asimov once said (paraphrasing), sf writers thought of speedy supercars that drove into skyscrapers, but none of them predicted traffic jams and parking meters. There are almost no pieces of the future that were invented by sf writers. They may have popularized current thinking but that’s the most that can be claimed for them.
Getting information speedily from a central source was an obvious straightline extrapolation off the library and the telegraph. Thinking of the Internet was a cultural extrapolation. Cultural extrapolation was something the vast majority of sf writers of the day couldn’t do for beans.
It’s not a knock at them. It’s a knock at modern commentators who don’t know what they’re talking about because they haven’t done the research.
With this I’ve got no problem. It’s absurdly easy to cherry-pick cases where an apparently early good prediction took place, and ignore all the incorrect ones. But some writers were quite on the mark a lot of the time (Verne, wells), and , if anything, it makes their failures more interesting.
My objection was that it seemed as if Leinster was being slighted as unoriginal and simply quoting someone else’s work, when a.) There’s Nothing Wrong With That and b.) Although I haven’t seen the Bush paper, I suspicion Leinster did do a fair amount of extrapolation in the piece. As a final note, something peopl rarely mention about “A Logic Named Joe” is that it’s really supposed to be a humorous piece (right down to that title, parodying the then-current film “A Guy Named Joe”), not sober and considered futurology. That it does do so well is a tribute to Leinster’s thinking stuff out.
I don’t want to beat this into the ground, so one final comment.
The line I was responding to was:
Nothing wrong with this statement as such.
However, I find all too common for people to interpret “first SF prediction” as “first prediction.” Because, you know, those wacky sf guys really invented the future and they should get more credit. And if you mention Murray Leinster’s name in the right crowd everybody knows it, while if you mention Vannevar Bush’s name you might at best get asked whether he was the president’s grandfather.
Sometimes those wacky sf guys deserve more credit. Far more often, in my research, I find that somebody else who is totally forgotten today deserves the credit. You can pretty much trace all of what we remember of Golden Age sf to newspaper headlines of the 1930s. Nobody remembers those, however, even though some fascinating stuff was happening or at least being prototyped or suggested.
Just trying to give a little more credit where I think credit is really due. It’s a commentary on the way the world works and not a slam at anybody.
(Can’t help knowing who Vannevar Bush is, though. They’ve got a building at MIT named after him, and when I go in, through the Least Appealing Lobby in the World, I pass his larger-than-life picture, scrowling at me from behind a drill press.)