ah. That’s one of the few Tarzans I never read. Pardon my ignorance.
…didn’t John Carter of Mars get there by just sorta wishing on it? Was that telepathy? Also, the Martians had an extremely advanced technology…but fought with swords! What was that all about?
Jules Verne wrote probably the most accurate science fiction (in terms of it coming true); however, his mistakes about the moon were rather damning-even the astronomers of his day knew the moon had no atmosphere.
I think they were Betas. IIRC, every female character of note in the novel was a Beta, and there was no mention at all of female Alphas. That ticked me off even at age 13.
IIRC he went into what turned out to be a sacred cave or the like - the second earthman begged the god of war to bring him to Mars.
**
Largely an honor code - you met an opponent with the same or lesser weapon, and you did it face to face. You can’t pull a radium pistol on me if I pull a sword on you, or you are a coward.
I’d agree. The idea for science fiction is to give the reader a semblance of the future, not the real thing. After all, zoom ahead 200 years and most readers would find it utterly incomprensible.
For me, science fiction is good at identifying isolated problems and features of interest. The only thing the other contents have to do is provide a recognizable context.
But wait a minute! Wasn’t the sound from those old tube ships supposed to be warmer and mellower?
Star Trek: The Motion Picture
I’m pretty sure NASA will never get its act together enough to launch four more Voyager probes.
Sounds like “The Fountainhead”.
Ahh, Symmes’ hole. Back in the 19th century a naval officer named Symmes was convinced that the Earth was hollow and that there was an internal sun, with openings at both poles. The aurorae were reflections of the internal sun. There were a lot of bad fantasy and sf novels based on this, like “A Goddess of Atvatabar” by Nobody You Ever Heard Of. See Martin Gardner’s Fads and Fallacvies in the Name of Science. Verne’s “Journey to the Center of the Earth” was not inspired by this at all (although Poe’s “Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym” probably was, and Verne wrote a sequel to it – “The Sphinx of the Icefields”.)
Derleth, I think you’re referring to “Nerves” by Lester del Rey. Good story, inaccuracies and all.
???
Verne never put an atmosphere on the moon, as far as I can recall. The Melies film that is often held to be based on Verne (pretty damned loosely, though) shows people walking and breathing on the moon, but in Verne’s From the Earth to the Moon and Around the Moon no one ever lands on the moon, let alone getting out.
Verne did slip up now and then (his celestial mechanics in FTETTM doesn’t pass muster), and he had people breathing on a comet in Hector Servadac (AKA Off on a Comet), but you can’t blame him for putting an atmosphere on the moon.
H.G. Wells put an atmosphere on the Moon, but he had some sleight of hand behind it. The really unforgivable “atmosphere on the Moon” offendere is Fritz Lang, in his film Die Frau im Mond. He shoulda known better.
Whenever I reread Spacehounds of IPC (Doc Smith) I’m always amused by the fact that the main character is a computer, i.e. a man who computes for a living.
Still in a Doc Smith thread, his first novel, The Skylark of Space, has ships fueled by some form of radioactive copper…?..
Hmmm, lessee now. Where to start?
Well, nothing with Martian canals, even Heinlein’s Red Planet
We won’t be traveling with Lucky Starr and the Oceans of Venus , my favorite of the series. And no dragons, voders or otherwise, in the swamps of Venus as in Heinlein’s Citizen of the Galaxy or “angels” with their happy dust from Podkayne of Mars
And, speaking of the moon and atmosphere, it seems to me one of C.L. Moore’s Jirel of Joiry or Northwest of Earth stories explained how the moon lost its atmosphere…
Oh, yeah. Those formfitting clothes often came with puffy little ridges standing up from the shoulders.
And in many of those early 50s movies, the guys of the future wore baseball caps, without turning them backwards.
I’d assume they were engineered that way, by men who assumed they couldn’t, or didn’t want them to, be capable of much.
I can’t remember the exact episode of the Next Generation this exchange occured on, but there was a scene in which Data walks into Picard’s office while the Captain is looking over Fermat’s “unsolvable theorem.” Picard remarks how, despite all the incredible technology the Federation has developed, no one could ever solve this puzzle.
Fermat’s theorem was solved in 1992:
http://shop.barnesandnoble.com/booksearch/isbnInquiry.asp?userid=182X3ESVUV&mscssid=XTKT3FM35X9X8GFJ77QWRQ5N28HG01BC&isbn=0385319460
This is a hijack, but has it ever bothered anyone how everyone is so amazed how a brain could be surgically removed? The Enterprise routinely disassembled human bodies on a molecular level every time they beamed a landing party down to a planet’s surface. Taking a brain out ought to have seemed like child’s play compared to that.
Art Vandelay, Architect writes:
> Fermat’s theorem was solved in 1992
It was solved in 1993, actually. (The link you give says it was in 1995, but that’s wrong too.) Andrew Wiles announced the proof at a conference in 1993. There was a small hole in the proof he hadn’t plugged. He and John Taylor proved a lemma in 1994 that completed the proof of Fermat’s Last Theorem.
I just thought of another category: science fiction that’s obsolete because it isn’t fiction anymore. Examples:
-cell phones
-in vitro fertizization and surrogate motherhood
-geneticly engineered and cloned animals
-corrective eye surgery
-flat-screen tv and monitors
-face recognition by computer
-voice recognition and computer dictation (still hasn’t replaced the keyboard, but longer “gee-whiz”
-solid state lighting
-videophones (no one wants them, but they’re available, especially net cams)
also automatic bank machines - featured in The Door into Summer by Heinlein.
Not to mention Wrath of Khan…according to that Khan and his people left Earth in 1996. :eek:
You’re thinking of Between Planets here. No one visited Venus in Citizen of the Galaxy.
Wasn’t part of Space Cadets also set on Venus?
Yup. It was even inhabited by Venusians who were an amphibious race and highly intelligent.
It wasn’t so much radioactive copper as it was an element that allowed you to have some kind of nuclear reaction using copper, or other metals, and it gave off some kind of anti-gravity field as well that was never really explained.