# The Internet in Old Sci Fi **URL:** \ **Category:** Factual Questions\ **Created:** [February 10, 2015, 6:46pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-internet-in-old-sci-fi/712315 "2015-02-10T18:46:11Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 18\ **Page:** 3
**Author:** ![gnoitall](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/g/bb73d2/32.png) [@gnoitall](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/gnoitall)\ **Post date:** [February 12, 2015, 2:51pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-internet-in-old-sci-fi/712315/41 "2015-02-12T14:51:28Z")
> [@CalMeacham](#): > > 1.) It’s obviously viewing this futuristic guide as some sort of microform reel. Microform had been proposed as the solution to saving document space as early as 1851, and started being used in the 1920s. Heck, Wells suggested it for his Universal Brain. > 2.) Such microfilm storage was used for catalogs at large companies until the 1990s (my first company still used them when I came on board). They were pretty much replaced by the Internet as soon as that was practical. The above bit of fiction is clearly following the standard practice, projecting the use of this essentially 19th century solution to the massive information overload problem into the future. It’s a commonly-observed phenomenon in speculative fiction: it’s a rare visionary that doesn’t see the far-off future in terms of extrapolations from the immediate present. > [@](#): > > 3.) The very idea of an Ephemeris has been pretty much killed by the computational power of internet computer systems This caught my eye. I’m not sure the context in which you mean that ephemerides are obsolete. In my line of work (satellite ground system), almost the most important job the system has is computing ephemerides for future orbital track prediction. The major difference, I suppose, is that an ephemeris is truly ephemeral nowadays, generally only valid for a few days and recomputed at that frequency… rather than published one a year or decade. Maybe that’s what you meant? Besides, even with massive computation power and ubiquitous connectivity, [some types of ephemerides](http://ssd.jpl.nasa.gov/?ephemerides#planets) are still only computed every several years. > [@](#): > > 4.) So, arguably, has the idea of a 53rd “edition”. Nobody talks about “editions” of Wikipedia – it’s constantly being updated. True, but document in question is not a general encyclopedia; it’s a “Pilot’s Manual”, presumably published by some authority in the sector it’s the subject of. And bureaucracies love versioning documents. This still hasn’t changed. > [@](#): > > This is typical of SF of the period Poul Anderson was a helluva good SF writer, but he extrapolated from existing models for his futuristic society’s tools, rather than presciently predicting an internet solution, because it wasn’t what he knew or needed. Even if, somehow, he could foresee an internet, he probably would have made it the focus of a story, or wouldn’t use it – it’s not essential to his plot, after all, and explaining it would be an irrelevancy. > > For that matter, of course, the internet itself is only our current model for exchanging, storing, and evaluating facts and data. Like Poul Anderson’s microfilmed ephemeris, it’s decades old technology already. It just happens to be What We’re Using Now. If we want to be further ahead now that Anderson was then, we ought to be speculating on what forms such tools will take in the future. Direct brain hookups to databases? Connection of all computers and minds in an Ultra-Cloud entity? Or something completely unknowable or unpredictable because it relies on as-yet-unknown technology or a conceptual breakthrough? As I note, humanity still hasn’t abandoned all aspects of what you’re describing as outdated modes and concepts. There are other models of technology-mediated human behavior (wikis, for instance, instead of annual or decadal revisions of massive tomes), but at this point the new and shiny still hasn’t completely obsoleted the old and crusty in several professional endeavors. And you’re right that the “extrapolating what we have now” is still a potential trap for speculative fiction writers. There are such things as technological revolutions, and even technological evolution can take strange and unpredictable turns. ---
**Author:** ![Steve\_MB](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/steve_mb/32/5339_2.png) [@Steve\_MB](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Steve_MB)\ **Post date:** [February 12, 2015, 2:53pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-internet-in-old-sci-fi/712315/42 "2015-02-12T14:53:03Z")
> [@CalMeacham](#): > > What amazes me is how the internet, or something like it, is _absent_ from so much science fiction. Leinster,m despite his incredible hit with “A Logic Named Joe”, never used the idea again, to my knowledge. > [@Chronos](#): > > Why would he? He’d already done it. Science fiction isn’t meant to be predictive of the future as a whole. A good science fiction story will present a world almost like our own, but with a single major change. Leinster had already written a story where the single change was effortless access to information, and there really wasn’t more for him to say on the topic. I’m not following your reasoning. If it worked that way, any given science fiction author would only have one story including (for example) space travel, which clearly isn’t the case. ---
**Author:** ![Miss\_Mapp](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/miss_mapp/32/369_2.png) [@Miss\_Mapp](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Miss_Mapp)\ **Post date:** [February 12, 2015, 4:04pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-internet-in-old-sci-fi/712315/43 "2015-02-12T16:04:44Z")
> [@Aquadementia](#): > > E. M. Forster story “The Machine Stops” is about living in a giant machine that > > stops > > More then any other story I think it is best at describing internet culture that comes from communicating electronically. And it was written in 1909. This was the story I wanted to mention, by that same visionary author who gave us the science fiction classics, _A Room with a View_ and _Howard’s End_. 🙂 It’s online at [Shibboleth Authentication Request](http://archive.ncsa.illinois.edu/prajlich/forster.html) if you’ve never seen it. ---
**Author:** ![CalMeacham](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/calmeacham/32/35_2.png) [@CalMeacham](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/CalMeacham)\ **Post date:** [February 12, 2015, 4:14pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-internet-in-old-sci-fi/712315/44 "2015-02-12T16:14:29Z")
> [@Steve\_MB](#): > > I’m not following your reasoning. If it worked that way, any given science fiction author would only have one story including (for example) space travel, which clearly isn’t the case. Quite right. There are plenty of SF series where one builds upon assumptions. Have a look at George O. Smith’s \* Venus Equilateral\* series, in which each succeeding story assumes the technology changes in all the previous stories. They all got assembled into a single volume collection eventually, but Smith seems to not have considered them as a single “novel”, but a collection of linked stories. Even more important, just because an author uses an idea in one story doesn’t mean that he has exhausted all its potential, and he may write another story looking at a different aspect. Jules Verne didn’t just write one submarine story, _20,000 Leagues Under the Sea_, and then abandon the idea. Even ignoring the sequel that was _The Mysterious Island_, Verne wrote another submarine story in _For the Flag_. Similarly, Frederick Pohl realized, after he wrore _The Space Merchants_ (with C.M. Kornbluth) that they had completely ignored the merchandizing frenzy that was Christmas, so he wrote another story in the same “Universe” that examined how it handled Christmas. (He later went and wroite a sequel to TSM called _The Merchant’s War_, as well). There are plenty of other examples. The point is, a writer need not devote a single story to a concept, then declare it done. Very,very often he’ll write another story in the same “universe”, or write a very similar story to consider another variation. A Good concept is worth this sort of treatment. My comment is that Leinster evidently didn’t think his “logic” concept was interesting enough or had enough angles to warrant further looks. We now know that there are plenty of other facets that could have been examined, alonmg with its impact on society. This wasn’t so obvious back in the 40s, orm, apparently the 50s or the 60s, and it wasn’t until the actual techn ology started to make its presence felt after that that SF authors started to treat it. ---
**Author:** ![Saintly\_Loser](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/saintly_loser/32/4045_2.png) [@Saintly\_Loser](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Saintly_Loser)\ **Post date:** [February 12, 2015, 5:00pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-internet-in-old-sci-fi/712315/45 "2015-02-12T17:00:12Z")
John Brunner’s _The Shockwave Rider_, from 1975, had a pretty good vision of the future of connected computing, I think. It addresses things like viruses, privacy issues, the psychological effects of extreme connectivity, and more. ---
**Author:** ![LSLGuy](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/lslguy/32/5813_2.png) [@LSLGuy](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/LSLGuy)\ **Post date:** [February 12, 2015, 5:47pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-internet-in-old-sci-fi/712315/46 "2015-02-12T17:47:39Z")
I can’t remember the author or title, but around 1973 I read a shortish SF story, probably published in Analog. I can’t say when it was written but obviously it was prior to then, and my vague recollection of the language style says probably post WW-II. The overarching plot conceit was that everybody lived in little studio apartments and communicated via 2-way TV/phone/computer thingies. If you “dialed” your friend and he didn’t answer, that meant he was dead. Nobody ever left their solitary pods since they could communicate with anyone anytime, or virtually visit any environment, just by requesting it from their terminal. The real story was the social side effects of this dependency / degeneracy. And it was slowly revealed that the communication with other people wasn’t really full-fidelity. You sorta kinda got the feeling of communicating & camaraderie, but not really. And as society slowly vegetated into its’ comfy couches folks lost the ability to notice or appreciate the difference between reality and the crappy virtual version being served up. As some have already said in this thread, lots of authors predicted the Ultimate Central Wikipedia curated by the Authorities. This story was different in flavor because individual person-to-person social communication was really the main function of this gizmo. It was really the then-current phone system on steroids more than a central all-knowing brain. The similarities of this story to pecking at the miscomprehending SDMB all day while Amazon Prime delivers my goods and groceries are scary. Not that I personally really live that way, but some of our members do. As do folks in other virtual communities. Shame I can’t give a cite. The work was no classic, but it was thought-provoking. ---
**Author:** ![Exapno\_Mapcase](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/exapno_mapcase/32/1051_2.png) [@Exapno\_Mapcase](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Exapno_Mapcase)\ **Post date:** [February 12, 2015, 5:50pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-internet-in-old-sci-fi/712315/47 "2015-02-12T17:50:00Z")
Asimov’s _The Naked Sun_ can be looked at in this context. On his planet Solaria, there are only 20,000 humans and except for couples live in widely separated houses. They communicate via a three-dimensional viewer which gives them the equivalency of face-to-face communications. The 200,000,000 robots do all the work and can answer any questions. I don’t remember if they are all interconnected and how, but I presume they were. That’s not quite social media but an extrapolation of what social media could be if restricted to an elite rather than the masses. The masses lives on Earth, as shown in _The Caves of Steel,_ a ridiculously overcrowded world of 8 billion, almost where we are today. It’s hard to convey how hugely important the gulf between the elites and the masses pervaded visions of the future. Wells’ _The Time Machine_ made it into an allegory that deliberately exaggerated the issue but Francis Bellamy’s _Looking Backward: 2000-1887_ was first to make it explicit. Bellamy wrote the book because he wanted to escape what was to him noisy, dirty, overcrowded Boston with its masses of lower-class foreigners who weren’t even Protestant. Almost all futures that followed imagined a rational, calm, clean world where the elites could safely interact with one another apart from the lower stratas. A world where you didn’t have to go outside and mingle with the peasantry was ideal. You can see another example in [A Journey to the Year 2025](http://www.flyingcarsandfoodpills.com/#!a-journey-to-the-year-2025/c3rm) by Clement Fezandié, Hugo Gernsback favorite writer. His sheer, plotless utopian extrapolations literally separate the upper and lower classes, with the former entering buildings from rooftops and the latter stuck to the streets. Asimov found a third way to accomplish the same by separating Earth and Solaria. Fezandié was typical of the mindset of the day. A modern Internet with social media and crowdsourcing and anonymous mixing of all peoples was an impossible notion to a world in which the masses were to be ignored, physically shunned, and socially isolated. Even for science fiction, our leveling of societal interactions was so impossible that it was literally unthinkable. “On the Internet, nobody knows you’re a dog” would be something they could only literalize with intelligent dogs. That would be far more likely than true equality of people. ---
**Author:** ![bump](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/7c8e57/32.png) [@bump](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/bump)\ **Post date:** [February 12, 2015, 7:55pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-internet-in-old-sci-fi/712315/48 "2015-02-12T19:55:08Z")
> [@Aquadementia](#): > > E. M. Forster story “The Machine Stops” is about living in a giant machine that > > stops > > More then any other story I think it is best at describing internet culture that comes from communicating electronically. And it was written in 1909. Slight hijack… if you’ve read World War Z, did you think the otaku guy’s story was a deliberate shout-out to “The Machine Stops”? It struck me right away that it was very similar. ---
**Author:** ![yabob](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/yabob/32/2821_2.png) [@yabob](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/yabob)\ **Post date:** [February 12, 2015, 8:33pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-internet-in-old-sci-fi/712315/49 "2015-02-12T20:33:30Z")
> [@Saintly\_Loser](#): > > John Brunner’s _The Shockwave Rider_, from 1975, had a pretty good vision of the future of connected computing, I think. It addresses things like viruses, privacy issues, the psychological effects of extreme connectivity, and more. And as I alluded to upstream, it anticipated Cyberpunk 9 years before Gibson published “Neuromancer”. Of course, it was inspired by Alvin Toffler’s “Future Shock”, which was a bestseller at the time. People often class it with Brunner’s Dystopians (“Stand on Zanzibar”, “The Sheep Look Up”, “Jagged Orbit”), but I think of it as somewhat separate from that group. ---
**Author:** ![Terminus\_Est](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/terminus_est/32/3087_2.png) [@Terminus\_Est](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Terminus_Est)\ **Post date:** [February 13, 2015, 3:52am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-internet-in-old-sci-fi/712315/50 "2015-02-13T03:52:20Z")
> [@Exapno\_Mapcase](#): > > The masses lives on Earth, as shown in _The Caves of Steel,_ a ridiculously overcrowded world of 8 billion, almost where we are today. It’s pretty clear in the book that, outside of the Cities, there’s plenty of free space on Earth. It’s just that the populace has voluntarily segregated themselves into enclosed capital-C Cities and would never dream of going Outside. Isaac Asimov, an acknowledged agoraphobe, preferred it that way. ---
**Author:** ![Exapno\_Mapcase](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/exapno_mapcase/32/1051_2.png) [@Exapno\_Mapcase](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Exapno_Mapcase)\ **Post date:** [February 13, 2015, 4:04am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-internet-in-old-sci-fi/712315/51 "2015-02-13T04:04:48Z")
> [@Terminus\_Est](#): > > It’s pretty clear in the book that, outside of the Cities, there’s plenty of free space on Earth. It’s just that the populace has voluntarily segregated themselves into enclosed capital-C Cities and would never dream of going Outside. Isaac Asimov, an acknowledged agoraphobe, preferred it that way. My copy’s gone missing and I was running on decades-old memory so thanks for the correction. I flipped through a few pages of _The Naked Sun_. Shocked me when I read that Baley called the robot servant “boy.” Have to wonder whether Asimov was just making a comment or that it was so obvious that he never gave it a second thought. ---
**Author:** ![Terminus\_Est](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/terminus_est/32/3087_2.png) [@Terminus\_Est](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Terminus_Est)\ **Post date:** [February 13, 2015, 4:54am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-internet-in-old-sci-fi/712315/52 "2015-02-13T04:54:29Z")
> [@Exapno\_Mapcase](#): > > My copy’s gone missing and I was running on decades-old memory so thanks for the correction. > > I flipped through a few pages of _The Naked Sun_. Shocked me when I read that Baley called the robot servant “boy.” Have to wonder whether Asimov was just making a comment or that it was so obvious that he never gave it a second thought. Terran robots also had a perpetual grin and affected a happy, servile demeanor. Just about the only thing they didn’t do was shuffle their feet and say, “Yassuh, massuh!” ---
**Author:** ![GreenElf](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/g/9de053/32.png) [@GreenElf](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/GreenElf)\ **Post date:** [February 13, 2015, 5:45am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-internet-in-old-sci-fi/712315/53 "2015-02-13T05:45:27Z")
Pete Townshend’s Lifehouse featured “experience suits” interconnected in a universal grid. Songs like “the Relay” make reference to the grid. > [@](#): > > From tree to tree, from you to me > Travelin’ twice as fast as on any freeway > Every single dream wrapped up in the scheme > They all get carried on the relay ---
**Author:** ![Voyager](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/voyager/32/133_2.png) [@Voyager](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Voyager)\ **Post date:** [February 13, 2015, 6:04am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-internet-in-old-sci-fi/712315/54 "2015-02-13T06:04:29Z")
> [@tanstaafl](#): > > Vernor Vinge had already written [_True Names_](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/True_Names) back in 1981. Yes, the Internet existed by then (and I need to point out that the Internet far predates the World Wide Web, which is what most people are really thinking of when they say “Internet” (and does anyone say “World Wide Web” anymore?)) but he has what are essentially forums, avatars, on-line aliases and the like. At one point a character is doing a search but doesn’t want others on-line to know what he is searching for so he downloads an entire database to his own machine and searches it locally; predicting that our search habits would be monitored. > > There’s also [_Web of Angels_](http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/784567.Web_of_Angels) by John Ford from 1980. It even has an information network known as the “Web”. I was not impressed by most of that story. Vinge actually predicted something better in it though - the cloud. When they were assembling compute resources, they were basically building a cloud. I’m not aware of an earlier reference. ---
**Author:** ![Voyager](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/voyager/32/133_2.png) [@Voyager](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Voyager)\ **Post date:** [February 13, 2015, 6:05am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-internet-in-old-sci-fi/712315/55 "2015-02-13T06:05:49Z")
> [@robert\_columbia](#): > > They might not be as old as you were hoping, but two good “reasonably modern Internet” stories are Orson Scott Card’s _Ender’s Game_ (1985), which portrays a fairly decent model of online message boards/newsgroups, and William Gibson’s _Neuromancer_ (1984), which presents a world similar to MMORPG’s and Second Life. IIRC, Second Life was inspired, in part, by _Neuromancer_. I was using an online message board, wrote for an online newspaper and could do IM 10 years before this, so I’m not that impressed. ---
**Author:** ![Chronos](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/chronos/32/134_2.png) [@Chronos](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Chronos)\ **Post date:** [February 13, 2015, 2:57pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-internet-in-old-sci-fi/712315/56 "2015-02-13T14:57:03Z")
> [@](#): > > Quoth **Steve MB** : > > I’m not following your reasoning. If it worked that way, any given science fiction author would only have one story including (for example) space travel, which clearly isn’t the case. Interstellar travel is usually given an exemption from the “single big change” rule, since it’s so common in SF, and it’s necessary to make so many other concepts work. It’s a lot easier to write about a planet of aliens that are just like us except \ if you can get Earth humans to that planet. And an author won’t necessarily exhaust an idea with a single work, and some ideas are enough to sustain whole shelves full of books. I was just saying that Leinster, specifically, had said about all he could in “A Logic Named Joe”, and so there was no point in him revisiting that specific topic. > [@](#): > > Quoth **LSLGuy** : > > I can’t remember the author or title, but around 1973 I read a shortish SF story,… There are doubtless many stories along that theme, but that sounds like “The Machine Stops”, already referenced up-thread. ---
**Author:** ![LSLGuy](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/lslguy/32/5813_2.png) [@LSLGuy](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/LSLGuy)\ **Post date:** [February 13, 2015, 4:28pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-internet-in-old-sci-fi/712315/57 "2015-02-13T16:28:00Z")
> [@Chronos](#): > > … There are doubtless many stories along that theme, but that sounds like “The Machine Stops”, already referenced up-thread. Following your thought expressed here via Machine I spent a moment on google locating a epub of the story. 2 more button pushes and I enjoyed reading it upon my screen in the privacy of my chamber. You idea is correct; that was the book I recalled from so long ago before the Machine. Reading it was chilling. I’m going to go outside for the rest of the day while I still can. ---
**Author:** ![Isilder](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/i/cc9497/32.png) [@Isilder](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Isilder)\ **Post date:** [February 14, 2015, 10:07am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-internet-in-old-sci-fi/712315/58 "2015-02-14T10:07:19Z")
> [@XT](#): > > Well, since all the good ones have been taken, how about Hitchhikers Guide? IIRC, it was written in the late 70’s and did a pretty good job of predicting something like the internet and things like search engines. yes, more specifically the Hitchhikers Guide functions in a way similar to Wikipedia. While Ford was working specifically for HHG, he’s doing it in a rather ad hoc manner, seeminly free to do as he likes - he didn’t have the awkward discussion with his boss about whether returning to work was more important than saving the universe/earth/President…1 against 2 to the power of 252 billion and falling ! Farenheight 451 has home made videos… like youtube. In some cases youtube videos are made by people who don’t actually work in the same room together… Off hand, Natilie Tran does the same thing by acting different parts herself (mostly) and editing it together. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-internet-in-old-sci-fi/712315.md?page=2)