This is absolutely amazing! I’ve always wondered how modern sci-fi technologies will pan out. Is The Enterprise even possible, let alone a United Earth & Federation of Planets? Could interstellar travel be mastered to the extent shown in Star Wars, where even a vagabond smuggler like Han Solo can have a bitchin’ hyperspace ride?
This story of the Camera-Phone, while clearly inaccurate with the specifications of the gadget, is brilliantly explored with near dead-on accuracy! Simply amazing……
This being an Onion piece, I’m willing to bet it’s hooey.
However, Verne was particularly good at predicting which technologies would prove useful. His recenty-discovered Paris in the Twentieth Century (written in 1863, set in 1960) described things we’d recognize as credit cards, fax machines, el trains, automobiles, etc.
Why are you guys acting surprised? I mean, this was the guy who wrote the visionary masterpiece Le Joueur MP3, after all. No one saw that coming except ol’ Jules.
…to elaborate, the OP is a vague invitation to discuss Verne and his ilk and the success with which the future has been predicted by ancient sci-fi authors. Obviously, this point was clear only to me, and only guessed by some. That’s my fault, of course.
If the flavorfully vegetative origins of this piece weren’t enough to convince you, you should at least have noticed that the inventor’s name is a French rendering of a major manufacturer of cell phones.
But on to the gushing: It’s been said that the quickest way to teach an English boy French is to give him a copy of Around the World in 80 Days, with only the first half translated. So engrossing is the story, that he’ll learn fluent French just to finish it. I can believe it, too.
On the other hand,
The el trains and possibly the cars are recognizable, but the fax machines only barely so (they filled a room and were entirely mechanical). And I don’t remember anything about credit cards at all. Then you also have all the things he predicted which have not come to pass, like the multi-purpose appliance, which serves as a piano, a living room set, a commode, and a kitchen.
Still, though, one must admit that he’s done a considerably better job of prediction than most.
Oh no you don’t. You were caught! Ha! I keep a list of people who thought Onion articles were real and laugh myself to sleep at night while reading it :D.
By the way, what’s an el train? I always thought people were saying L train, as in “I didn’t want to walk all the way to the M train.”
Despite any articles by The Onion or others, Verne did a good job at extrapolation, as I’ve noted on this Board before. My best example – in Robur the COnqueror he has his genius’ heavier-than-air craft built not out of metal, but out of composites. I am truly impressed. The idea was so far ahead of its time that a reviewer inthe 1960s referred to it as “a kind of plastic” (which it isn’t). Verne also gave us survival suits for shipwreck victims (in ** Tribulations of a Chinaman**, the use of Radio to call for distress (in The Barsab Mission), the Submarine, the Tractor Beam (in The Hunt for the Meteor), Television (in Castle in the Carpatians and Today and Tomorrow), and a great many other things. Many of these were the result of careful research (the composite airship material, for instance, and most of the Nautilus’ technology. And Verne knew about Stringfellow’s heavier-than-air flight experiments, because he cites them.)
