When Fiction Predicts the Future...

[Paul Levine]

"Dear Mr. Levine: Twenty years ago, you predicted the oil disaster in the Gulf of Mexico, or nearly so."

That's the opening of an e-mail I recently received from a woman in Tennessee who had just read the e-book edition of "Night Vision," my 20-year-old legal thriller featuring linebacker-turned-lawyer Jake Lassiter.

Fiction often predicts reality. From Jules Verne and H.G. Wells...to little old me. But did I really predict the Gulf diaster? I write about it in "For Novelists, Future Isn't Fiction" on Huffington Post.

Paul Levine
Author of "Night Vision," "To Speak for the Dead" and "Reversal"
"Mystery writing at its very, very best." --Larry King, USA TODAY

[MrKyle]

Along the same line. The government has a small group of scientists working on seeing if some Hollywood technology can actually be engineered. It's more like how Cell phones kind of was inspired by Star Trek.

[neilmarr]

Star Trek's writing team was backed up by a kind of geek department. Its job was to sensibly speculate -- as Paul obviously did -- on potential realities. There was not only the forerunner of the cell phone, which even foresaw (influenced?) its design, but the taser (phazer) and several other devices. Like an exceptionally smart and intelligent fortune teller, it's not too surprising the that the realistic SF writer will occasionally be spot on with forecasts. Good on Paul. Karma to ya. Cheers. Neil

[ApK]

Let's not confuse "borrowing from fiction" with "predicting the future."

Star Trek Communicators need no tel-com infrastructure to talk locally, to the other side of a planet or to a ship in orbit. They have perfect full-duplex 'speaker phones' that can be heard over and through loud background noise, and can instantly establish a private link with one party or a group of people.

The ONLY thing they have in common with real cell phones is that the flip design of some cells was inspired by them. Might as well say that Star Trek predicted the travel shaving mirror, because I have one them that flips open, too.

The Tazer, similarly, was named to sound like the Star Trek phaser, but it has nothing else in common with the technology.

ApK

[Worldwalker]

There is no "z" in Tom Swift Electric Rifle (the "a" was added later, for pronounceability).

Read The Machine Stops if you want a startlingly accurate prediction of the future -- and one of a very few stories that predicted the Internet, especially its social nature. Now reflect on the fact that it was written over a hundred years ago.

[ApK]

>>There is no "z" in Tom Swift Electric Rifle (the "a" was added later, for pronounceability).<<

Interesting. I did not know that!

I recall when they first came to the attention of the media, the comparison was made to Star Trek an awful lot. It has more in common with Tom Swift for sure...it's at least electrical!

[bthrowsnaill]

"Find the lady of the light gone mad with the night. That's how you reshape destiny."

[ApK]

Originally Posted by Worldwalker

Read The Machine Stops if you want a startlingly accurate prediction of the future -- and one of a very few stories that predicted the Internet, especially its social nature. Now reflect on the fact that it was written over a hundred years ago.

Thanks for the link, I just sent it to my Kindle.

I'll reserve judgment until reading it of course, but going only by the description on the linked page...startlingly accurate? I don't recall worshiping any god-machines recently. I mean, I like my Kindle, but....

[queentess]

Originally Posted by ApK

Thanks for the link, I just sent it to my Kindle.

I'll reserve judgment until reading it of course, but going only by the description on the linked page...startlingly accurate? I don't recall worshiping any god-machines recently. I mean, I like my Kindle, but....

It's not really about the worshiping part (though we arguably "worship" our technology), but more about the role of technology in our lives. And for being such an old story, it is startlingly accurate

[Worldwalker]

Everything is connected to Star Trek by media morons who have never even heard of any other science fiction. It's SF? Oh, that must be Star Trek.

As I understand it, the designs of flip phones really were inspired by communicators. But aside from that, for pretty much everything else, you can find prior art that led to both the item in question and its fictional relative.

[Steven Lyle Jordan]

Originally Posted by Worldwalker

Everything is connected to Star Trek by media morons who have never even heard of any other science fiction. It's SF? Oh, that must be Star Trek.

Before that, it was Buck Rogers.

In The Onuissance Cells and the Kestral stories, I postulated meat cloned and grown in labs, instead of harvested from herded and slaughtered animals. Today, scientists are making it a reality.

It's not like I'm asking for a Nobel prize or anything. It's just fun to be right once in a while.

[ardeegee]

Originally Posted by Steven Lyle Jordan

I postulated meat cloned and grown in labs, instead of harvested from herded and slaughtered animals. Today, scientists are making it a reality.

It's not like I'm asking for a Nobel prize or anything. It's just fun to be right once in a while.

You know, I don't even think that there is a Nobel category for "use of a concept that isn't even remotely new in science fiction."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_vitro_meat#In_fiction

[Worldwalker]

It's far from the first, but the one that stuck in my head was from H. Beam Piper's "Four Day Planet", where the narrator tells someone he can eat all the pate de foie gras he wants because they have a ginormous chunk of goose liver growing in one of their city carniculture vats.

It tends to make you think ... what's to come? While they're a minority today, there are plenty of people who have home vegetable gardens, especially people who want some kind of specialty vegetables not readily available in stores. And there are people who have setups for all kinds of exotic things; marine aquarists can buy jellyfish tanks off the shelf, now, when only a few years ago raising jellyfish was so difficult that only big public aquaria dared try it. I haven't seen any SF author proposing that hobbyists, foodies, or whatever, would have their own little carniculture setups in their basements, growing their exotic meat of choice, but think of the possibilities. Maybe vole actually tastes really good, or people might promote the benefits of home-grown cheetah over that flavorless commercially-grown stuff.

[ApK]

Originally Posted by Worldwalker

Maybe vole actually tastes really good, or people might promote the benefits of home-grown cheetah over that flavorless commercially-grown stuff.

It's totally unrelated, but that makes me think of an episode of 'Monk' where when asking if the hot-dogs were beef or pork, the maker said, making quote signs with his fingers 'They're "meat."'

' "Meat?" '
'Yes, we're required by law to put it in quotes.'

[Steven Lyle Jordan]

Originally Posted by ApK

It's totally unrelated, but that makes me think of an episode of 'Monk' where when asking if the hot-dogs were beef or pork, the maker said, making quote signs with his fingers 'They're "meat."'

' "Meat?" '
'Yes, we're required by law to put it in quotes.'

Apparently Taco Bell is having a similar problem right now: The USDA is saying they have too much filler and not enough meat, and must start calling their meats "meat product." (Apparently you can have as much as 60% filler, and still call it meat.)

Taco Bell says they do have the requisite 40% meat, so they can still call their meats "meat." Oh, thank goodness...