The weather bureau will tell you what next Tuesday will be like, and the Rand Corporation will tell you what the twenty-first century will be like. I don't recommend that you turn to the writers of fiction for such information. It's none of their business. All they're trying to do is tell you what they're like, and what you're like - what's going on - what the weather is now, today, this moment, the rain, the sunlight, look! Open your eyes; listen, listen. That is what the novelists say. But they don't tell you what you will see and hear. All they can tell you is what they have seen and heard, in their time in this world, a third of it spent in sleep and dreaming, another third of it spent in telling lies.

(This is not to say that it isn't worth attempting, of course. But easy? Hell, no. Sparkly vampires and space dreadnoughts, those are easy. But engaging with healthcare reform, climate change, and the political consequences of the bandwidth explosion? Before you go here you've got to actually try to understand the present, and all the maps of the territory in question are by definition out of date.)

Engaging with the near-present in SF is hard.

Say, how's that sequel to Halting State coming?

Finally forced to confront the reality of anthropogenic climate change, humanity fizzles and factions off into three warring camps

All of the camps are technocratic? That seems wildly optimistic. (Or wildly pessimistic; your kilometrage may vary.)

Um, I keep coming across this--it's the standard view of "Frankenstein"'s message, rehashed in all the film versions, and for all I know Mary S herself thought that was what she was doing.

It doesn't say anything like that to me. It says: if you are going to do something, take responsibility for it. Do not go Ooh Ick and run away, do not blame your creation for your bad workmanship, do not pretend that it wasn't you, and damn well carry it through to the end. None of the troubles that Frankenstein suffers stem from the fact that he created a man; all of them stem from the fact that he then abandoned it because it wasn't as pretty as he wanted it to be.

Is this me being weird, or is it something I see that other people, better and wiser people than I, for some reason don't?

If you're weird, so am I, because your interpretation makes sense to me. It certainly strikes me as the sort of story that spending a lot of time around Percy Bysshe Shelley would drive an intelligent and perceptive young woman to write.

That is exactly the message from the Frankenstein I had mentionned in the Halloween thread. If I remember correctly, the first word uttered in it by the child-like Creature is "Beautiful", and it is its last word.

NB: I want to second Cory's plug for The Caryatids. It's one of those significant novels that is going to be cited over the next decade as being hugely influential ... (by folks like me).

I thought I had something to say about near-future sf, but putting it into words is proving difficult. More later perhaps.

I have one question, though: most fantasy is either set in alternate worlds unconnected to our own, or alternate worlds similar to our own but with magic as part of their history, or set in the present or the recent past with magic intruding into our world or people from our world wandering into another magical world. But it seems as though there ought also to be near-future fantasy, with science-fictional elements based on what's going on *now* when the author writes and what seems as though it could plausibly happen in the near future interacting in interesting ways with the intrusion of magic into our world or people from our world into magic. I can't think of many examples offhand; Galveston by Sean Stewart comes close, and various elfpunk works from the 1990s whose titles elude me are sort of what I'm thinking of but not quite. The elfpunk stuff seems to me (though I haven't read much of it) to be mixing urban fantasy elements with cyberpunk, when cyberpunk was already an established genre, a conventional near-future that was becoming less and less likely to be realized. The ideal near-future fantasy I'm thinking of would simultaneously have original thinky bits about where we are now and where we might be headed soon, like Halting State or Rainbows End, and liminal or fantasy stuff going on as well.

A tricky aspect of such genre-bending would be fairly incluing the reader sufficiently early as to what kind of story it's going to be; introducing both the magical and sf'nal elements early on in ways that don't confuse them, or confuse the reader only insofar as the viewpoint character is (hopefully temporarily) confused...

Or not. Cluelessly unreliable narrators are fun, but I expect they get exponentially more difficult to write if you're working in a less-established genre or violating genre conventions as well as narrative conventions, because the reader can have fewer safe assumptions about how the world works by which to correct the narrator's honest mistakes and deliberate lies.

Initially this was read not as a variation on mileage, but as [something]-rage, a comment on an angry as well as pessimistic view.

On the other hand? Anyone expecting another book about MMOs and gaming is going to be disappointed.

On the gripping hand, it could've been about the collapse of the global banking system, since last year's implosion has switched back to a combination of "business as usual," massive transfers from the public purse to the parties responsible, and electoral surges by those who believe in even more deregulation (see, e.g., Germany and almost Norway). So we're still due for a genuine meltdown.

Carol Kimball @11:

Initially this was read not as a variation on mileage, but as [something]-rage, a comment on an angry as well as pessimistic view.

Actually, I hate Kilomet so much. . .

"More coffee for me, Bob. I'm not as messed up as I want to be."

Funny enough how so many of those cyberpunk novels have had a lot of the tech predictions come true, and the societal ones to varying degrees. I am preparing to start messing with an Augmented Reality app on my iphone as I type this.

I'm dreading the prospect of beta-testing the upcoming HCLARP; there's no "save game" button in health-care....

Bravo! *applause with footstomps and whistles*

True enough, but that's not quite the point Cory is trying to make. (Or perhaps it's not quite the point I was trying to make.) It seems to me that when SF is powerful, it isn't necessarily because it "engages with the near-present" in a direct and literal way, but rather because two important elements power one another:

* the story's imaginative element, and
* actual present-day real-world concerns.

Among the works of SF cited by Cory are Asimov's robot and Foundation stories:

Asimov's robots were not supposed to be metaphors, but they sure acted like them, revealing the great writer's belief in a world where careful regulation could create positive outcomes for society. (How else to explain his idea that all robots would comply with the "three laws" for thousands of years? Or, in the Foundation series, the existence of a secret society that knows exactly how to exert its leverage to steer the course of human civilization for millennia?)

I realize that this is a point that can become so gaseously generalized that it loses analytical usefulness, but I think it's an important true thing about imaginative literature anyway. When I find SF and fantasy boring, the most frequent reason is that it seems arbitrary -- it lacks enough connection to lived experience. Powerful SF and fantasy aren't just about imagination, they're about imaginative connection.

"Mankind was my business. The common welfare was my business; charity, mercy, forbearance, and benevolence, were, all, my business. The dealings of my trade were but a drop of water in the comprehensive ocean of my business!"

I fear it's a minority pursuit, though: there seems to be a growing segment of the population out there who just don't get metaphor, these days. (Maybe I've been sensitized by recent events on my blog, but: it certainly rubbed my nose in the phenomenon.)

It says: if you are going to do something, take responsibility for it. Do not go Ooh Ick and run away, do not blame your creation for your bad workmanship, do not pretend that it wasn't you, and damn well carry it through to the end. None of the troubles that Frankenstein suffers stem from the fact that he created a man; all of them stem from the fact that he then abandoned it because it wasn't as pretty as he wanted it to be.

I know you were giving your perspective on Shelley and Frankenstein (for which, kudos!), but it occurs to me that this is you are also talking about the presidential administration of George W. Bush, too.

OtterB @ 18: Speaking as someone who adores her work, Shelley's not exactly a subtle writer. Frankenstein's treatment of the creature is constantly placed in opposition to *his* mother, saintly and selfless and wildly affectionate. And when the creature eventually "goes bad," it's explicitly as vengeance on the world in general and Frankenstein in particular for rejecting him. And it takes about 2/3rds of the book to get to that point.

Other entertaining things that get left out of the adaptations: hanging out with too many romantic poets apparently gave Shelley a skewed view of what normal men do under stress. Dr. F, when startled, faints dramatically, in extremis taking to his bed for months. He's a deeply flawed character, but the narrative doesn't seem to see this particular behavior as strange or problematic.

Other entertaining things that get left out of the adaptations: hanging out with too many romantic poets apparently gave Shelley a skewed view of what normal men do under stress. Dr. F, when startled, faints dramatically, in extremis taking to his bed for months. He's a deeply flawed character, but the narrative doesn't seem to see this particular behavior as strange or problematic.

Stephen King goes into some of this in his excellent history of horror fiction, Danse Macabre. (Which desperately needs a corrected edition, as the copyediting for the second edition to remove errors managed to add in new horrors of its own, including swapped footnotes.) My copy isn't available right now, but King points out that Frankenstein's full-speed-ahead to his wedding after the monster's promise "I'll be with you on your wedding night" isn't a obvious show of smarts on Frankenstein's part. It's been years since I read the book but I think King's other comment that Shelly's inability to decide if usurping God was worse than not taking responsibility for the monster hurts the book is correct as well.

So it's Mundane SF, but politer?

From what I understand, the 1931 film emphasized the technology-out-of-control aspect, and that's influenced many peoples' readings of the novel.

At one point, he goes to a convention and overhears somebody saying, "I wondered what happened to him." At that point he's grown up enough that it doesn't bother him.

Not a deep story, but I've always been glad it existed.

I tend to agree it didn't always work. Dr. F. is written as a drama queen from the get-go, so maybe his descent isn't so unexpected, even if it was un-scientist-like. The creature's fall was much more disappointing. It took a lot of authorial decrees to work up much sympathy for the doctor, or to get angry at the made man. I think the book is best read for a couple or four really compelling scenes.

De-lurked mostly to chime in agreement...I've been evaluating things similarly of late. What has grabbed me in sf over the last several years, has been when it is used as a lens to examine the human condition more critically, looking at our limitations as much as our hopes. Naked optimism is a hard sell, and so is pure fatalism, but there can beauty in that balance, and when an author finds it, it's really been getting to me. I read John Varley's Steel Beach this summer, for example, and was deeply impressed with it. Robert Charles Wilson always gets a lot of love from me for these reasons as well. (Shelley's masterpiece fits in too!)

I'm not sure, but I suspect this might be one of those things it's not possible to do on purpose.

"A Spoonerism, Walton, a definite Spoonerism!"

Whenever I read something like "the best science fiction is really about the present," I think about those awful Star Trek: TNG episodes which were pained and clunky parables about current events.

Or "topsy turvey" stories about an "alien" culture which is essential human, but with one societal relationship reversed.

Or painful artificial setups from the mainstream, like Wouk's Lomokome Papers.

I don't think SF should ever try to be about the present. The really good stuff my offer insights into the present by virtue of being written by someone in the habit of looking at the fishtank from the outside.

Perhaps the difference between this story and When The Sleeper Wakes is a difference of degree, not of kind.

Another guy I know wrote a play that involved a student newspaper in the nineties. He had some production notes explaining the differences between communications technology then and now. The audience thought these notes were funny.

This does sound very zen, but there are certain things that work best if they're not done with intentionality -- falling in love, being happy, writing zeitgeist books.

But they'd all be depressing novels, full of distressing events and with endings that are sad, annoying, or just pathetic.

I can't write without some fairly intense intentionality. I've never attempted a novel, but I have to know exactly what I'm trying to do and where I'm going to have any hope of getting anywhere at all useful or interesting.

Maybe that's why I'll probably never write anything on the level of Farthing.

Sterling especially gets the way that technology is a disruptor, that it unmakes the status quo over and over again, and that a battle of technologies is a battle in which the sands never stop shifting. Casting his tale into the future allows him to illustrate just how uneven our footing is in the present day—and the fact that the book consists of humans getting by, even getting ahead, despite all the chaos and devastation, makes The Caryatids one of the most optimistic books I’ve read in recent days.

In an eerie coincidence, just today I read Bruce Sterling's superb short story Kiosk which deals with exactly this - but on a micro level, dealing with the ripple effect on a society of a transformative technology (in this case, a matter replicator).

Then again, is it surprising that writers, particularly good writers who have been at it for a long time, wouldn't have recurring themes and ideas that would evolve, be refined, and ultimately explored?

Mr. Sterling is himself a sterling example* of such. He's always so engaged with the interface of technology and society and what you might call "the ricochet effect" of sudden technological shock.

*(impossible to resist - a thousand apologies)

I see this as more a failure of literary mechanics than anything else. The writers of said parable are forgetting that Martians aren't Martians, they're manifestations of an abstract concept. The failure happens when you just add a rubber forehead to communists or Arabs and expect that to sustain you through a story arc.

and @ 39, I agree about intentionality. I've likened writing, when I'm in the flow, to falling in love -- because of the way the world shapes itself for you when you're falling in love, the synchronicities and coincidences that all come together to create resonances and surprises, when you didn't think you meant to go that way. Good writing is always like that for me. (So is reading good writing -- then I get to enjoy the feeling without the work!)

It's the same as much contemporary Christian music, or Left Behind: creating a piece of art with the aim of Making A Point causes one to lose the integrity, honesty, and quality of the art. Insights, emotions, and truths can come out in the creative process which don't fit with the point you thought you wanted to make, or the story you thought you wanted to tell. Ignoring and denying those things creates a false, forced product. Owning and engaging with those things creates something much more interesting -- and something with a much better point.

Sterling has written some of my favorite SF; "The Shores of Bohemia" and Holy Fire made me feel as if I'd been slammed in the forehead with a 2 x 4 lead weighted sunsawunda stick. I utterly adore many of his essays. (Homework: Go read "The Updike Version" and "Cyberpunk in the 90s.")

I was a big contributor to bruces' Dead Media and Viridian Green project.

But I really didn't like The Caryatids.

Now, Cory is making a literary point using the The Caryatids, rather than reviewing it; there maybe sympathetic characters in the book who reject all three of the grotesque and horrible ideologies described in that paragraph. Accordingly I won't decide not to read it just based on that, but my gut reaction was "wow, what an unpleasant read that sounds like."

The "playing God" interpretation comes mostly from later plays and movies. I suspect it comes from a worldview that sees scary new ideas and new technologies springing up and disrupting things and changing the world, and just wants it all to stop. (See Dresden Codak's "Caveman Science Fiction," recently linked on another thread.)

What I really want to read are stories that connect to the present, but connect to it through a cool space opera future with spaceships and aliens and people sauntering across the galaxy in a way that is probably impossible in real life, and in which the specific problems peculiar to our current society have been dealt with. I'd rather read about somebody else's problems.

Maybe it's as simple as this: you have to write about people and make them as real as you can if you want to engage your readers; when you do that you inevitably include your own knowledge of how those people would fit into the world you live in.

A Present theme that grows through the books, illustrated by people from the future, is what results from legislating a Nanny State society: a mortal humankind of anxiously polite, infantile techno-vegans stay in charge of things, while the cyborgs, who have lived as servants for millennia with violence, meat-eating and lack of plumbing, are the ones who retain vibrant human soul.

Xopher@41: I'm also not saying that I write in a naive trance without knowing what I'm doing.

Cory also mentioned William Gibson's Spook Country. I liked its predecessor Pattern Recognition better, partly because it was the first time I'd seen Gibson writing in the near present instead of the cyberpunk nearish future, but partly just that I liked the directions he took it better.

OK, survival & reproduction are basic drives present in a large majority of humans (not quite universal but close) so at a basic level "the purpose of existence" is not and never has been in much doubt. The two big drives beyond reproduction are for pleasure and status. Early civilizations were largely devoted to acquiring and securing the latter for ones descendants and then enjoying as much of the former as possible.

This is never very popular with the 50% of the population who get less of those things than the other 50%. So one wizard scam that held sway for a few thousand years was the claim that all of this was just a prelude to the next life in which all that pleasure and status one lacked in this life would be delivered, as long as you didn't rock the boat in this life. That lasted pretty well and maintained a fairly stable pattern of society (kings-nobles-merchants-peasants) where everyone understood what they were supposed to be doing until a few hundred years ago when the industrial revolution and all that started to screw it up.

Colonization and the industrial revolution and onward sees a string of existential justifications come along, roughly:

* Manifest destiny (runs out of steam when it runs out of "empty" land)
* Utopian socialism (mostly done for when it becomes clear that communist states are no fun)
* Ethnic nationalism & racial superiority (hits a brick wall in WWI which just gets it so mad that it finds a much bigger brick wall to smash its brains out against in WWII)

Now we get the overlap with SF:

* Scientific utopianism (nuclear weapons sort of put the lie to that one)
* Conquer the universe! (universe turns out to be 1. dangerous, 2. expensive, 3. empty, 4. very very very far away with FTL impossible)
* Nanotech/VR/cryptocurrency/online community/THE SINGULARITY will solve all our problems (not so far)
* Extremist green (oddly it is a tough sell to get people to believe that most of them dying is a good plan)

Meanwhile the old standby of "you will go to Heaven and it will be AWESOME" is sounding pretty silly even to the people who still claim to believe in it. And the one modern ideology or existential justification that survived the 20th century intact, corporate capitalism, isn't looking as great as it used to; the idea that it will deliver a future of security, equality and leisure seems ever more implausible as people work harder for a smaller slice of the results.

SF has been part of the popular understanding of these existential justifications for maybe 50-80 years now. And so its record has been tarnished by their repeated failure to match reality. One approach to that is to extrapolate them anyway and make it clear how miserable they would be if you stuck with them. Cyberpunk did that with corporate capitalism. Alaister Reynolds does it with space opera. But there's a limit to how much depression one can take.

If you stick to the old formulas, you wind up writing books that look ridiculous. Even the Mars trilogy - KSR not being anyone's Pangloss - looks ridiculous in light of our inability to accomplish simple things like universal healthcare. And most traditional spaceships-N-aliens stuff might as well be classed as straight fantasy at this point.

So we're dragged back to today, and so maybe what we want to read about is not a society of immortals a thousand years from now but a society of universal health care five years from now. I think that's natural, and probably healthy. I think the fact that near-future SF is more interesting matches what's happening in the society as a whole as those grand societal ambitions crumble in the face of our failure to make progress on our smaller ambitions. As a good example, I just read Metatropolis (Scalzi ed.) and while that was hardly utopian either, it wasn't completely depressing and it did at least have a whiff of potential reality about it that most traditional SF no longer does.

Of course as soon as the next shiny cure-all comes along we'll probably forget it all over again. Unhealthy though it is, I have to admit that I look forward to whatever that might be.

I also managed to like Brian Francis Slattery's Liberation, because he writes beautifully--he's probably the best new author to hit the SF genre in the last couple of decades--and because, despite everything, the book felt hopeful and compassionate.

Thriller? Well, not really. It was a wonderfully calm book. It didn't have a thumping edge of the seat soundtrack. More carefully choreographed cool jazz.

I won't go into why I disliked The Caryatids, out of respect.

To have a different stab at it, if the world in the book isn't a real world and if the people in it aren't real people doing real things and if the story that's happening in it isn't the real story - then it turns into by-the-numbers allegory not rich metaphor. (That doesn't preclude people liking it, of course.) It has to be living and rich on its own before it can stand in for anything in the real world.

That's the thing that saves Narnia from being an unsubtle and now-forgotten allegory - C. S. Lewis couldn't help writing the characters in it as real people with their real worries and quirks, and the world of Narnia as real on its own, not just a symbol, and the stories themselves matter. That breathes life into it.

Going back to Orwell, nobody's mentioned that 1984 was specifically intended as 1948? He mentioned somewhere that he just swapped the digits of the year.

I'm in heated agreement with this. There was a thread here at ML sometime in the last year or two about art and propaganda. My own position, starting at "Propaganda and art don't mix well", got pretty beaten up and pushed back after a few hundred comments, and I ended up just there, that it has to be art first.

Though Mary Shelley picked up her pen in 1816, and the book was published in 1818, the dates on Walton's letters are given as "17--." So she imagined that the story, which stretches over several years, had taken place many years in her past.

Given the rapid pace of recent advance in chemistry and medicine, it might have been more plausible to set the story closer to the present, if not in the future. But that's not the choice Mary Godwin (she was not yet Mrs. Shelley when she started writing the tale, and not yet nineteen) made.

As contrasted to his Silent Planet trilogy, which suffers greatly under the weight of its message....

When I read Frankenstein, I was startled that there's nothing whatsoever about Victor's actual techniques. The reanimated graveyard stuff is pure Hollywood.
And the discussion needs a gesture toward the heavy Freudian layer, too. Mary Shelly's mother had had nothing to do with men for most of her life, fell in love late -- and then died in childbirth (or was killed by doctorly filth to be more retrospectively precise). So the motif of the creator being destroyed by the creation was very personal.

@Charlie #23: The trouble with teaching in parables is there's always someone who thinks you're talking about sheep.

And isn't Greg House just a more nuanced version of Heinlein's Wise Grumpy Old Man?

Another guy I know wrote a play that involved a student newspaper in the nineties. He had some production notes explaining the differences between communications technology then and now. The audience thought these notes were funny.

It's difficult to predict the near-future, but it's also getting very hard to remember the recent past accurately. If you're writing a novel set in Britain in 1998, which of your characters should own mobile phones—just the well-off ones, or the poor ones as well? Does text messaging exist in 1998? What about photo messaging and polyphonic ringtones? Not to mention the Internet... It's a hell of a job to get all this right even now, and it'll be far worse for the poor historical novelists of 2059. They'll be doing a lot of swotting-up from the archives but it'll be fun to look out for their slip-ups and heckle their clichés. British bookstores are full of variously funny or serious Bildungsromane set in the last few decades, with lots of remembered or researched period detail (``Mam! The striking car-workers made fun of my Slade LP so I had to escape on my Raleigh Chopper!''). The eras pass; partial documentation remains to be looked at, but false reminiscences and parodies and speculation eventually outvote them. God alone knows what posterity will think of us.

None of those is near-future or placed precisely in this world. And yet, I think all three say stuff about our current world and situation, partly because that's when those authors are living, and partly because they're talking about human nature and societies and such, which don't change automatically when the scenery and technology changes.

(Well, she may be consigning some damn fine TV to the dustheap, but the point is elegantly made.)

What I remember from that conversation is a kind of consensus that a defining feature of propoganda is being more committed to delivering your message than to telling a story, or being honest, or making your characters behave in an internally consistent way. I think consciously writing as part of a movement or style might have some of the same properties--like, there's a place here where I must either break from the rules of my style/genre/movement, or I must f--k up the story or make the characters do something dumb or something.

If you're going to tell em a story that works, I think the story has to be more important than following the conventions of your movement or genre. That said, fiction worth reading tells you something about yourself and your fellow humans and your society and your world.

As an aside, I came to reading Jane Austens' novels in my mid-30s, as an SF fan. And I perceive myself to use the same basic world-building, suspension-of-disbelief, acceptance-of-weird-assumptions processes reading her books as I do reading SF.

Spook Country read like a paean to brand-name-dropping to me.

Now you can do this twice as much, with the Zombies and Sea Monster versions.

I'm really enjoying Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters. They went to eleven on this one, not just tacking in sea monsters but altering the world and the characters to fit the changes, while still keeping the story intact. It's lots of fun.

SM Stirling's Conquistador did this to me. There were a dozen or so brand names thrown in constantly--I think part of this was to make clear what stuff was being imported by the Commonwealth, and part was to simplify description. But about halfway through the novel, I began to wonder if the thing had been sponsored by Segway and Hummer.

I bought a Braun coffee maker because the brand was mentioned in Neuromancer, and so I thought it would help make me cool.

A fine quote. We have to remember that "Dollhouse" and "Mad Men" make up about 0.01% of the total production of TV programs, so they don't affect the average significantly. The average is something on the order of the reality show, "So You Think You Can Brachiate!"

What I dislike are "speculative novels" by literary lions who don't really believe anything will change from their current situation. They end up with bad characterizations and everyone being a plastic symbol of a current social archtype. My best example would be Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale, set in a US taken over by religious zealots. Its a good take on sex roles, but it is increasingly obvious as you read it that Atwood has never actually met anyone who really believes in God.

From an essay I mentioned uptopic:

"Updike is wrong. He clings to a rotting cultural fabric that he knows is based on falsehoods, and rejects challenges to that fabric by declaring "well you're another." But science, true science, does learn from mistakes; theologians like Roger Lambert merely further complicate their own mistaken premises.

It's a shuck, ladies and gentlemen. It won't wash. It doesn't own the future; it won't even kiss the future goodbye on its way to the graveyard. It doesn't own our minds any more. We don't live in an age of answers, but an age of ferment. And today that ferment is reflected faithfully in a literature called science fiction. SF may be crazy, it may be dangerous, it may be shallow and cocksure, and it should learn better. But in some very real way it is truer to itself, truer to the world, than is the writing of John Updike."

"Man! That brew is STRONG!"

When people read Dickens, or Faulkner, or whomever, and say they hated it and don't know why anyone likes it, I think what they mean is this piece didn't speak to me or my experiences as a human being living right now.

albatross, #69:

As an aside, I came to reading Jane Austens' novels in my mid-30s, as an SF fan. And I perceive myself to use the same basic world-building, suspension-of-disbelief, acceptance-of-weird-assumptions processes reading her books as I do reading SF.

Now I'm wondering if all that time I've spent reading science fiction, with its utterly alternate cultures, is the reason I can get into Dickens, and other nineteenth-century novelists, so easily.

You'll probably appreciate Rocket Fuel Coffee, then. heh.

There's an apocryphal story about an engineer from White Sands getting plastered in a bar one night. At one point he turns to the bartender and says, "I've burned more alcohol in one minute then you've ever sold across this lousy bar!"

Ob-XKCD.

I went to my first computer conference at the New York Hilton about 20 years ago. When somebody there predicted the market for microprocessors
would eventually be in the millions, someone else said, "Where are they all going to go? It's not like you need a computer in every doorknob!"

Years later, I went back to the same hotel. I noticed the room keys had been replaced by electronic cards you slide into slots in the doors.

There was a computer in every doorknob. -- Danny Hillis

B. Durbin @30: That sounds familiar. It's probably "Willie" by Madeleine E. Robins, F&SF December 1992. My copy is packed up somewhere so I can't confirm all the details you mentioned, though.

Has any university created a program in Cold War studies yet?

Just look at the sex roles in 1950s era SF for an example of that. You could have interesting and smart and capable women (think of Penny in Double Star), but the underlying assumptions about sex roles were as invisible to the writer and most readers, I think, as the assumptions about computers (or their lack). And I think you could see that as a kind of attempt to work out what those sex roles might look like, when you moved out to space and accepted that women were going to do important work and be edcuated and all, but still tried to integrate that into more traditional roles. (And it's not clear to me that their prediction was less plausible/likely than what we got, which is largely the result of social and political movements, as well as all kinds of technological change.)

In-culture, it was probably quite effective & evocative. Elsewhere, it was like using in-jokes, slang, jargon, or code-words to subtly(?) exclude Not Us, or at least demonstrate no interest in communicating to anyone else. Perhaps only English versions went untouched and foreign-language ones had "translations", at least at first use.

Authors who try to evoke a past era they lived through by naming then-cool bands usually lose me very quickly by being too coolly obscure. ``I've never heard of these people; stop going on about them.''

Don't know about that, but on another thread Teresa describes publishers editing authors works to include product placement.

(The inverse of this was the period when BBC TV presenters were under orders not to mention any brand name whatsoever for fear of committing advertising.)

Mind you, thanks to blogging I have emotional reactions to a wide range of American journalists, going the whole way from hatred to hatred via sarcasm, contempt, half-amused cynicism etc. I could probably parody several of them. But sportsmen, general purpose TV personalities, etc - these actually work as a distancing device, rather than a familiarising one.

Like using the bizarre sex organs of the Wqlzhk slime mould colonies of the planet MK3458 to render the familiar human drama playing out aboard the starship thrillingly strange.

Which is as good a place as any to suggest Barbara Ehrenreich's Bright-sided : how the relentless promotion of positive thinking has undermined America.

Isn't that the dual theme of all science fiction?

Like using the bizarre sex organs of the Wqlzhk slime mould colonies of the planet MK3458 to render the familiar human drama playing out aboard the starship thrillingly strange.

And after bizarre alien sex, what could be more refreshing than a nice, hot bowl of Campbell's Soup, and a Coke? Especially while sitting in your Hummer, listening to your iPod, and smoking a Marlboro?

It's the world-view of someone who's only ever been in a Christian bookstore. Or watches Fox News.

I seem to remember reading about an early-1960s Buck Rogers strip about a sect of the 24th Century that worshipped a person of our era called Hari-Hari - who it turns out bears an uncanny resemblance to SF writer Harry Harrison.

Another example is of someone trying to deal with this problem is Accelerando. The action stays focused on the recognizably human characters even when they've been reduced to a tiny fraction of the jungle humanity has become.

Mark Walsh @ 75: "It explores changes that will come whether we want them or not, and dares us to react to them."

I think that's exactly what sf is about--exploring the relationships between our technology, our society, and our psychology. They all condition each other, and I think a large chunk of sf is exploring how the other two change when the first changes. (In this model, fantasy is about exploring what happens to all three when nature itself is altered.)

Wesley @ 79: "Now I'm wondering if all that time I've spent reading science fiction, with its utterly alternate cultures, is the reason I can get into Dickens, and other nineteenth-century novelists, so easily."

I think that's exactly why.

Allan Beatty @ 85: "Ob-XKCD."

Ob-Dresden Codak.

There was the rather well-publicized case a few years back in which Fay Weldon's The Bulgari Connection was the result of seriously well-paid product placement by the jewelers of that name. Eighteen thousand pounds, for at least twelve mentions of Bulgari. I have no idea whether this was in addition to her regular contract.

There was a Bill Cosby (I think) routine about horror movies, in which he explained what to do if you suspect you might be in a horror movie: You start chanting "fuck Pepsi Cola", because in a horror movie you can't use bad language or mention brand names. If you try and find you can't, you're screwed. I believe Steven King and company have changed all that, not necessarily for the better (I haven't read much King, but generally the brand name uses he's famous for that make some people feel at home apparently, seem gratuitous or just puzzling to me).

Just look at the sex roles in 1950s era SF for an example of that. You could have interesting and smart and capable women (think of Penny in Double Star), but the underlying assumptions about sex roles were as invisible to the writer and most readers, I think, as the assumptions about computers (or their lack).

I recently read The Demolished Man for the first time and was bludgeoned by a 22nd century that had blithely accepted telepathy and interplanetary travel, but still had Freudian psychoanalysis, stark gender roles and a massive crime solving supercomputer that ran on punch cards. I'm still not entirely sure what a knife-pistol that resembles a flower is supposed to look like. Is it a magnum with a bayonet and orchid scope? A six-shooter/Ginsu/daisy? A long lost Salvador Dali sculpture? Whatever it is, it shoots weaponized jello.

... and to JJ Abrams, based on what one could see in the recent Star Trek movie.

I think that King used brand names very effectively from a USian point of view in that novel. The first scenes take place in a Texaco station just outside city limits, which calls up an immediate set of associations for most USian readers: a little grimy, lit by unforgiving fluorescent lights, a place where nearly everybody local stops and nearly everybody who's just passing through for that matter, but starkly utilitarian. One of the characters is addicted to chocolate Payday bars, which were dropped from the Hershey's lineup shortly after the book was first published, putting the original edition firmly in the 1980s. (It was set in 1990.) Paydays are very sweet, salty, and rich--essentially a handful of salted peanuts held together by caramel--and covering them in chocolate makes them messy to eat as well, especially in the summer heat; they fit the character very well. The different models of car that the travelers stumble across on their journey say something about the people who owned them if you know what they are; in fact, they're practically epitaphs, since the people in question have mostly been anonymized by death.

Gosh, that title sounds familiar.

Yep, there it is, atop my "buy this and read it" list, on the recommendation of a friend the other day.

Once again I'm reminded that some pretty awesome heads hang out here. This place is special.

When I first ran across Wolfe (sometime in the mid-1960s; "Gambit" was the first one I read) I had fun trying to figure out just what a Heron would look like. I think I decided it was an American knockoff of a Rolls.

-----
* Or in this case, localisation

2010! Next year! That makes me feel old.

The book is set in a fully-realised, richly-textured world that is nothing at all like the world we live in, but is very revealing about how the world looked in 1969.

It's probably too late for the full-on academic conference this book deserves, but I hope someone is scheduling a panel at one of the 2010 cons, or at least organising a room party. Though not, I hope, one modelled on Guinevere's.

Speaking only as one reader of the stuff, I still like big cool ideas, and find accurate prediction very satisfying. There's lots of wonderful things about Simak's City, but it also starts off with an automated lawn mower.

I'm not totally bored by vampires or elves, either. I consider this to be good luck.

#54 ::: Jacob Davies:

Interesting essay, and I do think that purpose is harder to identify as life gets easier.

Afaik, many religions don't use heaven as a major motivation. Judaism doesn't.

I'm not sure where health care fits into your argument -- it's an indication that basic survival stuff isn't solved.

#79 ::: Wesley :

It may be that the temperament which drew you to science fiction that makes historical fiction accessible for you, rather than the time you spent reading science fiction.

I don't think that's all there is to liking historical fiction, or to liking history for that matter.

There's a particular pleasure in thinking that something really happened, just as there's a particular pleasure in the imagination which isn't bound by facts.

Not everyone is strongly motivated by both pleasures.

I think we're talking about different things. The drive and desire to pursue something is not the same as the skills necessary to do it. I think you're right that the things people get out of sf and historical fic are very different--nonetheless, I think the skills necessary to read the two genres have similar foundations.

I think the skills needed for reading science fiction apply for historical fiction if you're reading hf about a period you're not familiar with and you're interested in deducing what's going on.

If you're familiar with the period or you just want a preferred flavor of exoticism, not so much.

It's not altogether not like today. "EngrelaySatelserv's" headquarters is a mile and a half from my office.

At the time I first read the novel, I had never heard the word "prefect" and read it as "Perfect." I thought, like Joel Polowin, that it was just an illustration of his cluelessness about naming conventions.

Andrew M @119, Joel P @120, First appearance of Ford was first episode of first radio series – 1978 (see h2g2). Perhaps vehicle was more known 31 years ago.

Crawling off to drop now.

The only reason I ever knew was because it was explained in the foreword to the version of HHGTTG that I have. I'd guess that these days, Ford Mondeo might be a better mistaken choice.

So. On listening to the talking-type steam radio as a thirteen-year-old when Hitch-Hiker's was first broadcast, I knew what a Ford Prefect was and laughed appropriately. I can't claim some unlikely and pre-Internet worldliness, because I was a singularly unaware sort of child.

Perhaps the things I was aware of were mostly mechanical.

You could make a long list of Brunner stories that predicted aspects of our world: "Shockwave Rider", "The Sheep Look Up", ... I think part of his ability to see what future societies might do was that he saw what was happening in the present very clearly. He was one of the first SF writer to write explicitly about contemporary racism, for instance. Even some of his space operas were reflective of contemporary international politics in a very broad way: "Sanctuary in the Sky" talks about the way nations bully each other.

There was a mob called 'Morris Minor and the Majors' who had a novelty hit with, um, something or other. (It's dreadful how the malign influence of Google has denied a chap the simple pleasure of pretending not to know a fact for the purposes of dramatic wossname. As Oscar Wilde once said, 'Those search-engine people can be right tossers sometimes.' Um. Probably.)

There's also a rugger player called Austin Healey, which is endlessly confusing.

Any theories about why the popular version of Frankenstein is so different from the book? Is it just that it's more fun to think about monsters than responsibility, or is there something deeper?

I have some thoughts, though not a full explanation.

First, the popular notion of Frankenstein is derived more from movies than from the novel. And James Whale's definitive 1931 movie, for one, is derived from stage versions.

The novel's narrative consists of letters from Robert Walton, Arctic explorer, which for the most part transcribe Victor Frankenstein's first-person narrative as dictated to Walton. Walton also has a brief conversation with the Creature. So there is a lot about Frankenstein's thoughts and feelings.

In transferring this (mostly) first-person account to the stage-- a generic problem-- the solution was to give Frankenstein an assistant, so that dialogue between them can reveal exposition, thoughts, and feelings. This may distort the story away from Mary Shelley's storyline. Dramatists also tend to add new characters.

A premium is placed on action as well. I have seen a playbill from the first stage version, Presumption, or the Fate of Frankenstein, which appeared in 1823, just five years after the novel. Guess what?

Among the many striking effects of this Piece, the following will be displayed:

Mysterious and terrific appearance of the Demon from the Laboratory of Frankenstein. DESTRUCTION of a COTTAGE by FIRE. And the FALL of an AVALANCHE.

That's right, even in 1823, producers were emphasizing the special effects!

My second point is that the whole story springs from the question: "What if someone could make an artificial person?"

(See also Pygmalion, the Golem of Prague, etc.)

There are a lot of thoughts that might follow that question. Mrs. Shelley explored some of them, but subsequent Frankensteinians trod different paths. In hundreds of plays and movies, only a few have followed her storyline closely, and those examples are fairly recent.

I seem to remember that, not long ago, you mentionned a ballet of the era where the SFX were handled by Faraday and, I think, Babbage.

The Austin-Healey Mk 1 Sprite has been my dream car since I was ten years old, and I saw one in a TV ad for soda. Doesn't everyone want a car that looks like a cheerful Muppet?

Even earlier than that. David Garrick at one point played Hamlet in a hydraulic wig that would, on the appearance of the ghost, stand its hairs on end like a fretful porpentine.

It was probably impressive in the 18th century, but I can only imagine it accompanied by the sound of a slide whistle.

That reminds me of the long-ago Dilbert cartoon where the boss decides to call their new product Uranus-Hertz.

How she must have screamed in frustration when Sesame Street came out, and the name Kermit ceased to be effective in that regard. How her heart must have ached as her chubby and bespectacled son trudged to yet another day of having his middle name be 'the'.

He wasn't the only Kermit at my school, either, but the other one was slim and athletic and did not need glasses.

Or a floor-cleaner of remarkable speed.

And the more modern association is with Gordon Brown, btw, unless I've critically failed my Cultural Knowledge (native) roll.

The danger from fire remained the main obstacle to staging the ballet. Lumley had been greatly impressed by the brilliancy of the colours and the effect of the Rainbow Dance, but prudently hesitated to make a decision that, in his opinion, might involove the destruction of his theatre. Babbage tried to reassure him, and, to show that he apprehended no such danger himself, even offered to be present in the house at every performance, but to this Lumley pointed out that if the theatre were burnt, his customers would be burnt with it, which, Babbage allowed, 'was certainly a valid objection for though he could have insured the building, he could not have insured his audience.'

Oh wow. Babbage's Ballet sounds SO NEAT. Unforunately, it seems it didn't quite happen--the theatre owner backed out for fear of fire.

Thanks for digging that up-- I had always wanted to know more about that affair! It is disappointing to realize that, according to Ivor Guest, the performance never occurred before an audience. According to Babbage's autobiography, they seem at least to have gotten as far as a sort of dress rehearsal:

The night proposed for the experiment of the dance at length arrived. Two fire-engines duly prepared were placed on the stage under the care of a portion of the fire brigade.

About a dozen danseuses in their white dresses danced and attitudinized in the rays of powerful oxy-hydrogen blowpipes. The various brilliant hues of coloured light had an admirable effect on the lovely fire-flies, especially as they flitted across from one region of coloured light to another.

Since Alethes and Iris calls for sixty dancers, I suppose this wasn't a full-blown rehearsal. Still, Babbage's lighting system was demonstrated with real dancers on the stage of a real ballet, and how many mathematicians can claim that?

Irrelevant, but fun, fact to know: Congressman Bill Foster founded a major stage lighting company while a student, before embarking on a career as a particle physicist and accelerator designer.

That'll be Lord Reith's BBC, Lord Trenchard's RAF, and Dame Ninette de Valois' Royal Ballet. At one point the BBC actually administered colonial territory - a couple of islands where key radio transmitters stood - as well as having all its trades in house and doing very serious radio engineering R&D. John Causebrook, who essentially founded GSM radio planning at Vodafone in the 90s, started out as a propagation engineer with BBC Research.

Trenchard insisted from the word go that the RAF would have not only its own Staff College to create its own doctrine and its own corps of general staff officers, but its own Technical College to create its own craftsmen and engineers. This was a key difference between the RAF and the Luftwaffe in 1940; Hitler insisted on spending every penny on moar aircraft. We spent a lot on institution building - not just the radar project, but the maintenance shops and flying schools and warehouses full of parachutes and many, many telephone lines to tie it all up.

De Valois wanted, and got, an institution that would provide a regular income for dancers, but also a career path for lighting technicians, musicians, choreographers, costume tailors, etc, etc.

Lesson; it's fun to tear down the dead wood, but you'll end up putting it all back and more.

That sounds kinky.

I don't think so--I think they are fire engines in the modern usage brought because of the afore-mentioned fear of fire.

I blame the parents, myself.

Xopher, I'm a bit surprised that in the pre-Sesame Street world the name Kermit didn't immediately invite comparison with the younger Roosevelt, or with his son. Not that I wouldn't personally prefer being green.

"Their clientele is all anorexic models and Eurotrash named Serge."

Too bad the name 'Mercedes' now conjures up an image of a woman built like a big old clunky car.

...while, for me, it makes me think of Ornella Mutti, who played Mercédès in Depardieu's Count of Monte Cristo miniseries.

"It's difficult to predict the near-future, but it's also getting very hard to remember the recent past accurately. If you're writing a novel set in Britain in 1998, which of your characters should own mobile phones—just the well-off ones, or the poor ones as well? Does text messaging exist in 1998? What about photo messaging and polyphonic ringtones? Not to mention the Internet... It's a hell of a job to get all this right even now, and it'll be far worse for the poor historical novelists of 2059. "

Somebody mentioned this on another blog, asking if there were any studies of movies *made* in a certain era, vs made later, and *set* in that era.

Bertha Benz (now there's a warship-worthy name) was an important investor in Karl's company, pioneer motorist & had several children with him. None called Mercédès.

'Mercedes' was the daughter of an extraordinary agent/partner/customer/collaborator of Benz's, Emil Jellinek. The whole Benz epic & Benz/Jellinek saga is a long, twisted, up & down story.

"Barry @166, that question came up today in my office. Someone commented that everyone on Mad Men smokes like a chimney. I was trying to remember if everyone in Billy Wilder's movie The Apartment, set in a similar environment but filmed in 1962, featured quite as much smoking, and I don't think it did."

IIRC, the US adult male smoking proportion peaked at 2/3 in the mid/late 1960's.

Robert Fletcher really does tell his authors to advertise their books via comment spam. How they do it: They set up Google Alerts on certain keywords related in some way to their books. When those keywords pop up on message boards or in blogs, they go and paste in their ad in the comment thread.

This particular one, poor grammar and all, gets over twelve-hundred hits on the Google-indexed web. I'm sure there were more, but the sysops deleted them as spam. As just happened here.

Unfortunately, there is just about zero chance that the author will come back to see this comment.

I seriously doubt that that was true.

I also find it amusing to watch "Star Trek" and compare their computer speeds to ours. I like Star Trek, but I like it more when it is dealing with its own universe instead of ours. I feel the same way about a lot of Josh Whedon's work. I like it when writers really dig into their imaginary universes and explore them and deal with ramifactions of past actions or refer back to them in dialogue.

I read an article in the most recent "Internet Review of SF" that techno-thrillers are near present SF. Those written in the tradition of "Hunt for Red October" or "Jurassic Park" assume a new technology and consider the ramifactions.

Your assumption does appear to be correct in Gina Kolata's case, however. At least nearly as I can gather by a bit of googling.

Unfortunately, Bush steered us right back into the bad old nightmare world.

What's a techno-griller? Is it a story of international intrigue about hi-tech outdoorsy chefs?
("Not techno-griller, Serge. It's techno-thriller.")
Oh.
I guess I won't need that BBQ sauce after all.