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.
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 are still only computed every several years.
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.
As I note, humanity still hasn’t abandoned all aspects of what you’re describing as outdated modes and concepts.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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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!”
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.
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 <whatever> 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.
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.
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.
