But that’s not a “flying car” unless you live in one of those developments with adjacent runways and 100-foot streets. I concede it fills the niche in a very limited way, though.
Or the “hundreds of megabytes” Johnny Mnemonic had to implant in his head so he could courier it to wherever. Was there something wrong with using an encrypted thumb drive? Or sending it via an SFTP server? Heck it’s the future. A couple hundred megabytes would probably be a medium sized email attachment.
That never seemed to trouble Luke Skywalker.
What is meant by “flying car” is a flying machine that you can operate like you drive a car, i.e., without an airplane pilot’s expertise and without a lot of pre-flight equipment checks; you just hop in the driver’s seat, find a place on the dash for your coffee, and up and away into the rush-hour-commuter-traffic-stream you go.
Which is not entirely plausible, given advances in computerization.
That such a machine could be as cheap-and-therefore-ubiquitous as ground vehicles, however . . . now we’re on the borderlands between hard SF and fantasy.
A hover car (“landspeeder”) isn’t flying; it isn’t traveling in three dimensions. It does require other than friction braking.
You ever read Jack McDevitt? He’s not the greatest scifi author, but he’s head and shoulders of above most of 'em, and I don’t think he gets enough credit. And, well, reading what you have wrote - I think you would be a big fan. You have four bullet points, I"ll try to address all them all, but I’m folding your second into number 3.
1.)In the Academy series (the first book is The Engines of God) the engines are talked about, obviously, but it’s really nothing more to the story than humanity can get from A to B. B is a long way away. Later in the series, the engines are changed and upgraded, but it’s a normal upgrade. The characters didn’t invent the new upgrades. Hell, they’re anthropologists.
2.)The beauty of the series is that people are always the same. There are no massive social changes in McDevitt’s novels. The novels are written in first person from the pilot’s point of view. Hutch is just doing her job, and that is the thing here. McDevitt writes female characters really well. I’m not talking about feminism; Hutch is a character that loves to pilot interstellar craft, and though she’s had to sacrifice would be romantic relationships back home, she’s alright with it. She is the hired captain of the ship. She’s used to being gone for 18 months at a time. Call it a “tour of duty”. That’s no different from anybody throughout all of history who’s personality makes them go on long, long trips.
3)I digressed a bit, but let me get back to the “future”. The “Academy” isn’t some monolithic organization. It’s an academic organization trying to do archeological and anthropological work. Because Jack Mcdevitt knows time, and this writer postulates that when we get to the stars, and we make first contact, we will only see the remains of a long, long dead civilization. A long dead civilization that we don’t have the simplest clue about. There’s no damn Rosetta Stone.
After you bullseye a womp rat on the way home, what happens when you pull into your driveway and put it in park and turn it off before grabbing a blue milk?
Ever read HBP’s “Omnilingual”?
Besides being a very fresh, modern and believable take on future events, written in the early 1960s, it solves the Rosetta Stone problem in a very likely manner.
In the 2076 world of The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress, computer graphics had not been invented until the AI, who spontaneously awakened when the Moon’s concentration of computer circuitry grew dense enough, creates video images. To create these images requires millions of calculations per second (i.e., a megahertz of computing power), and to attain this computing power, the AI has to suck up all the computing power on the Moon. To wit: the consciousness of an AI requires less computing power than would a dancing baby video.
If memory serves, Gibson has said that he is (or at least was at the time) entirely computer-illiterate.
That’s actually a good example. Herbert avoided zeerust (or at least lampshaded it) by postulating a collapse of civilization (the Butlerian Jihad) between the present and the time in the novel. David Feintuch’s stories of Horatio Hornblower In Space do the same thing (as do the cavemen in “B.C.”).
How many times do we see a three car pileup on the highway that was happened because a car stalled and the driver behind didn’t react in time? Imagine stalling in midair. Plummeting through the lower lanes of traffic and impacting not just the ground but possibly other flying motorists.
Until we can automate ground traffic, I don’t think we should even think about ‘flying cars’ as defined upstream. Private flying should be left to the well-trained private pilots. But even those folks would have a time handling the close formation flight patterns needed to support hundreds of thousands of commuters in rush hour. Even the best fail at this at times. I am reminded of a Blue Angel accident during an air show.
But, a hover car? More realistic though it presumes the antigravity field generators. But, one must assume the same would be true of the proposed flying car. Hmmm…
I guess the best way is to never mention the ‘how’ of these gizmos. Just the ‘what’ as in ‘what do they do?’ The details can always be filled in later if needed for the plot but in general over-explaining things is not as good of an idea as it would seem to a budding SF writer.
In most golden-age and 1950s sf, robots and computers can accept complex voice instructions but are unable to synthesize a voice.
We technically do have flying cars already–they’re called “light aircraft” (i.e. Cessna’s and helicopters). They’re still too expensive for the Average Joe to own and too complicated to learn how to operate (not to mention all of the infrastructure you need for planes and helicopters), but who knows what’ll happen in a few more generations?
Personal aerial vehicles would almost certainly have to be entirely under the control of an automated traffic system. You’d ride in them but you wouldn’t fly them.
Why not? George Jetson does.
That’s actually a superb way to insure your stories will date badly. We may not notice that people supposedly living in the 26th Century are behaving exactly like early 21st Century Westerners, but future generations sure will!
Write like Frank Herbert. That’s your tip. I read Dune for the first time 2 years ago and didn’t notice a single fleck of zeerust.
Don’t extrapolate current brand names into the far future, unless that’s the POINT of the story. One of the most jarring things about Babylon 5 to me (watching for the first time in the 2000s) was that goddamn Zima sign in the bar…
That was in fact a deliberate, knowing joke. They put that in to make fun of exactly this trope.
Well, duh on me, then. :smack:
Damn skippy. It’s not the fall that kills you… it’s the abrupt stop at the end.