IIRC, though, wasn’t that the case for Ender’s Game, as well? Ender of course had access to (extremely censored) information by virtue of being a student at the highest-funded educational institution in history, and didn’t Valentine and Peter have to leverage various connections to be able to get a decent hookup? Never mind the absurdity of world conquest via message board trollery.
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.
A lot of big libraries did that. It’s actually part of the premise of the 1957 Tracy/Hepburn movie, “Desk Set”. Along with the idea that a computer would put such reference departments out of business. Katharine Hepburn was the manager of said reference department and Spencer Tracy was the consultant who was helping set up the computer system.
ETA: Checking Wiki, the reference library was part of a nationwide tv network, rather than an actual library. But the premise is otherwise the same.
In the not-so-distant past, kids’ sci-fi author Bruce Coville predicted the smart phone, by writing about something called the URAT. Gizmodo on Bruce Coville
Described as a Universal Reader and Translator, I remember the URAT as a complete repository of human knowledge.
I, with my preteen brain, fantasized about using a URAT to see naked ladies.
Yay for living in the future!!
In A Fire Upon the Deep, Vernor Vinge pictures an interstellar, inter-civilization, pan-galactic communications network that reads just exactly like Usenet.
Millennia into our race’s future, in a galaxy where individuals, AIs, and even whole civilizations can trancend into something indistinguishable from godhood… and everyone’s subscribed to soc.galaxy.catastrophe or something.
To me, a hardcore usenetter at the time, the book was simultaneously comfortably home-like and terribly unsettlingly wrong.
A digital phone service, controlled by computer, exists in Heinlein’s The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress.
There is some internal evidence to suggest that Mike (the AI), also controls an “internet of things” on the Moon.
Fountains does anticipate Google in a way; information like how much rain fell in Zambia in 1977 is instantly available, so to challenge people’s data finding skills you have to ask questions like when was the last time the World Cup was won by a country with three vowels in its name in a year when rainfall in the Amazon was more than twice normal.
That’s because the book was published in 1992 and author Verner Vinge, a computer scientist and mathematics professor at SDSU, was most certainly familiar with if not actually using Usenet.
Ben Bova had a character using a pretty accurate version of the modern internet in Colony (1978). I don’t remember the details but he got the “feel” right - his character would casually look up information the way we’d google something via a smartphone.
I think we need to define the internet to answer this question properly. Most answers given so far suggest texts in which a vast, searchable store of human knowledge exists. In my mind, however, the defining feature of the internet is its global interconnectivity.
In 1990 there was a documentary broadcast by Douglas Adams called “Hyperland” which described a graphically linked and hypertext searchable worldwide database. I guess it was like a “best guess” of how things were developing but it certainly pre-dated and predicted the world wide web as we now know it. Apart from the cute “MICONS” or motion icons of course!
Link: Here
A little off topic, but I read a European Scrooge McDuck and Donald Duck story as a kid in the seventies in which Scrooge asks a Gyro Gearloose constructed computer (the typical wardrobe sized device complete with dials, knobs, bulbs and scales): “How do I get to the treasure of (insert exotic Spanish sounding name here)?”, and alas (probably after a bit of wiggling and blinking), the computer ejects a page with the answer. When I reread that story in the eighties as a teenager after having gotten my first own computer (a C64), I laughed and thought: “Haha, how silly, that’s not how computers work!”. When I finally read (or just remembered) the story a third time sometime after the emergence of Google at the beginning of the century, I had to concede that yes, that’s how it kinda works now in the real world. I hadn’t anticipated that in the eighties.
Vernor Vinge had already written 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 by John Ford from 1980. It even has an information network known as the “Web”.
It’s not just Fountains of Paradise, though. You can find similar items in other Clarke writings, like essays in The View from Serendip.
I think you’re being to restrictive there. Giant searchable databases, like Wells’ Universal Mind are one thing, social connectivity is quite another. If you look at the old fiction, when people thought about connecting with others, they thought in terms of telephones and telescreens – communication devices, rather than any sort of computer*. Nobody seems tio have considered the idea of such devices as providing “billboards”. Even Murray Leinster, in his icredibly prescient “A Logic Named Joe”, didn’t see his “logics” as providing ways for people to send information to other people – when people get tickets, or plans for breaking into banks, or finding out how toi commit the perfect crime, it’s because the thinking-machine “logic” tells them how to do it, using info it has access to. People are interacting with the machine mind, not with each other.
And it’s really interesting that what precipitates the action in the story is that the “logic” of the title has its sel;f-censoring circuit break down. All the awfdul things the internet is held responsible for these days – providing porn to minors, giving out company secrets, spreading knowledge of how to coimmit crimes – were held in check in the story by self-censorship by the logics.
*(Intriguingly, nobody thought of televisions mainly as one-way devices providing information or entertainment content to large numbers of people simultaneously, but as two-way communication devices between two people. This was true even after commercial radio broadcasting gave them a model for television broadcasting)
He does mention that, in the Beyond, it’s the interstellar links that have the low bandwidth requiring usenet-like formats; local communication is much wider.
Just opened my copy of Poul Anderson’s Ensign Flandry (1966), and this jumped out at me, right on the first page:
Interesting because:
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.
3.) The very idea of an Ephemeris has been pretty much killed by the computational power of internet computer systems
4.) So, arguably, has the idea of a 53rd “edition”. Nobody talks about “editions” of Wikipedia – it’s constantly being updated.
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?