Just screws with me:
Science Fiction's Cloudy Crystal Ball
William Gibson argues that we shouldn't read the genre to peer into the future...Sigh.
No sane person I know reads SF to "peer into the future" and since SF is sort of my thing, waving foolish posts it in front of me is like waving "Little did he know" in front of Jules Hilbert in "Stranger Than Fiction":
I've written papers on "Little did he know." I've taught classes on "Little did he know." I once gave an entire seminar based upon "Little did he know."
2 comments:
it's like he never read the tagline for your blog.
it's like he never read SF. William Gibson got most of it wrong, but does it matter? the stuff that really happened in the future - cell phones and personal computers - isn't really as interesting as the stuff that didn't happen - moon colonies, asteroid mining, rocket cars and computers that want to take over the world.
"and computers that want to take over the world."
Yeah, I've always thought it was very interesting that almost all the science fiction writers from the early ages of computer technology predicted that computers would get bigger and bigger and access to them would get more and more controlled. Instead computers got smaller and smaller, access is virtually unlimited, and we now have unprecedented abilities to communicate with people all over the world with them. (And BUY STUFF TOO!)
Isaac Asimov saw that a bit more. He even predicted Kindle type readers being used.
But, as you say, people don't read science fiction to "peer into the future".
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