Science fiction and vacuum tubes

[Exapno_Mapcase]

I just referenced the story a couple of weeks ago. It’s having a renaissance!

Obvious things about a creative work you realize after the millionth time (OPEN SPOILERS POSSIBLE)

Fritz Leiber’s gonzo story,“The Creature from Cleveland Depths,” from the December 1962 Galaxy, has what are essentially smartphones be grafted to bodies so that humans are in such constant communication with one another that they form a collective mind. It’s what used to be called black humor when black meant darkly satiric. Nobody ever listened to black humorists, even though they were almost always right in their critiques of culture.

What’s fascinating about it is the rare extrapolation of psychology in tune with extrapolated technology. And showing that inventions develop meaning from the way that societies use them, not the other way around. And notice that - in 1962 - he named his startup “Micro Systems.”

The story never got reprinted in an anthology until recently, though. Probably because it was too weird. Frederik Pohl had taken over Galaxy from the ailing H. L. Gold and Pohl was the most progressive editor in the field in 1962. Leiber is wildly underrated today, probably he got into a weird phase that had a cult following but not much more.

As an example, also in 1962 he released The Silver Eggheads (vastly expanded from a simpler 1959 novelette). I don’t care what drugs Philip K. Dick was on at the time; that book make Dick read like Asimov.

[E-DUB]

Not to mention the use of VCR as the origin of a slang term-Vicar.

[Andy_L]

@CalMeacham

I’ve got Robert Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land on audio, and re-listen to it frequently. One of the weirdest things is the way he describes sending “instant” messages in the future depicted by the book. There are apparently chains of messaging places, like the old telegraph offices, where you can send a message. You write or type it out, it gets photographed, and the photograph gets electronically sent to either your house or some other message store.

If it’s going to be somehow “zapped” across town or the country, evidently the scanner is too big, bulky, and expensive for individuals to own. That actually describes the state of the art of what we’d later call faxing when he wrote it (and for about a century before – sending facsimiles over wire is an older technology than the telephone), but Heinlein was the Master of Extrapolation. You’d think he’d have anticipated home fax machines, if not e-mail. (For that matter, the 1980s Back to the Future II didn’t do much better, imag8ining that faxes would be the main method of sending text messages in 2015, less than thirty years in the future.)

That is a little odd. I think he had a better guess about things in his much earlier “For Us, the Living” which has a worldwide communication network with home access

@Exapno_Mapcase

The story never got reprinted in an anthology until recently, though. Probably because it was too weird. Frederik Pohl had taken over Galaxy from the ailing H. L. Gold and Pohl was the most progressive editor in the field in 1962. Leiber is wildly underrated today, probably he got into a weird phase that had a cult following but not much more.

I read it in a Leiber collection from 1972 http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/pl.cgi?55782 . It’s a great yarn.

[Exapno_Mapcase]

He has a lot of good collections. Short stories were his specialty. Even back in the day his two Hugo Award novels were considered lesser Hugo works, although I liked The Big Time, weird as it was.

I should note that I’m talking about Leiber’s sf. He was certainly known for his fantasy, especially his Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser stories.

[John_W.Kennedy]

IBM’s first transistorized computer, the 7070, was announced in 1958.

On the other hand, when I was about 10–12 (1958–1960), I intuited the possibility of ICs. (OK, I have an above-average brain, but I’m no super genius.)

Still, consider how virtually no SF writer predicted computers before the Navy/Harvard/IBM Mark I/ASCC became public.