Tuesday, October 28, 2003
It really irritates me when people talk in amazed tones about how a certain strand of science-fiction has managed to predict an aspect of the future, IT'S SPECULATIVE FICTION! THAT'S IT'S JOB! You might as well say "wow, cars are really good at being four-wheeled vehicles that allow us to travel fast over distances that would take us ages to cover by foot". The worst offender being Star Trek. I have nothing against it per se, just against the 'science of Star Trek' type books that are full of "wow, Star Trek had communicator devices which fit in the palm of your hand, that means they predicted the whole mobile phone revolution", no they didn't! You already had mobile phone technology at the time Star Trek started, they were walkie-talkies used in the Army! And if you consider it, Star Trek's success rate to date has been fairly low, as warp drive, transporters, aliens that are culturally similar to non-American peoples, holodecks, artifical intelligences and women who would seriously find William Shatner attractive have yet to be discovered.
But science fiction is speculative fiction, so you'd expect it to at least once in a while have something which vaguely looks like developed technology. When you have fantasy like Harry Potter, and some berk like the Chief Technical Officer of Nokia mobile phones saying " [J.K. Rowling] is very good when it comes to predicting the future" because she writes about pictures which are alive. We'll ignore the fact that the Chief Technical Officer is talking about Nokia creating pictures where the image is displayed having been sent from a mobile phone, that it's static, doesn't interact with people and so therefore is COMPLETELY DIFFERENT from the pictures in J.K. Rowling's books, then yes, it's as though she has a pipeline to the future.
Here's an idea. I want to predict that the Presidential Elections in the US next year will be won by an American. Worship my god-like intelligence at predicting that outcome!
But science fiction is speculative fiction, so you'd expect it to at least once in a while have something which vaguely looks like developed technology. When you have fantasy like Harry Potter, and some berk like the Chief Technical Officer of Nokia mobile phones saying " [J.K. Rowling] is very good when it comes to predicting the future" because she writes about pictures which are alive. We'll ignore the fact that the Chief Technical Officer is talking about Nokia creating pictures where the image is displayed having been sent from a mobile phone, that it's static, doesn't interact with people and so therefore is COMPLETELY DIFFERENT from the pictures in J.K. Rowling's books, then yes, it's as though she has a pipeline to the future.
Here's an idea. I want to predict that the Presidential Elections in the US next year will be won by an American. Worship my god-like intelligence at predicting that outcome!
