Neanderpundit

About thirty years ago, I was watching a friend of mine get stinking drunk, and though I warned him against the things he might do when drinking, did so anyway, just because.

Now, I was not, at the time, all that opposed to stupidity myself, and in fact often acted as if it were a virtue. This time, though, I was trying to prevent my friend from being a fool, and he wasn’t listening.

So he got hammered like an anvil.

And we got him tattoed.

Well, no, actually, we didnt- but we made him THINK he did.

One of our guys was a pretty good artist, and we had him do a drawing of the guys mom doing something unspeakable to a hog.

On his hand.

We then held his hand against the muffler of a car to cause it to swell somewhat and hurt.

He woke up, took one look, and wigged.

Now, I’ve seen people wig before, and I’ve seen people wig since, but I have never seen anyone wig out the way he wigged out, when he became convinced he had gotten a tat, in a visible spot, of something patently obscene.

I don’t think he ever forgave any of us.

He never drank heavily around us again, though.

Clickety click.

Over here, I’m having a conversation wiht Mrs D about fiction and it’s effect on the culture. Specifically science fiction, or at least that’s the part of the conversation I’m trying to contribute.

Mrs D, not a geek, feels that there is a correlation between people who read science fiction and people who invent things, and that is a natural correlation. Sure, it is. She also feels that the fact that people invent things is generally not caused by reading science fiction. Well, not so much.

I’m not a mathemetician, but I am a reader, and I have watched the advance of science, and I can tell you, the idea that someone reads something in a science fiction novel or story and turns it into reality is a verifiable fact. I have independantly verifiable personal experience with several of these instances (and they are damned big ones, manufacturing wise).

I believe, though I’m not smart enough to prove, that the advancement of technology has a causational relationship with the popularity of science fiction. I’d be interested to see if anyone has any statistics on that.

I DO know, that in a lot of cases, the inventors of devices or processes or mechanisms have taken their inspiration from science fiction. I have met Joe Engelburger, who invented the industrial robot, and who was following the career of Asimov at the time he did. He makes it very clear that I Robot was the inspiration for the Unimate. I have also met Dr S Inaba, who brought industrial robotics to the state they are in today, and he named the special language robots speak “Karel” after Karel Capek, the man who first used the word Robot in his play RUR. Which Dr Inaba read in his youth.

And it’s not only huge ideas and incredible processes that begin as the fancies of SF writers. As I explain at Mrs D’s place, the TASER is an invention of a gentleman named Victor Appleton- or at least the name is. The Tom A Swift Electric Rifle was invented by a guy named Jack Cover after reading of it in “Tom Swift and his Electric Rifle”

These are simply places where causation can be proven beyond a shadow of doubt; each of these inventors will come right out and tell you they got their inspiration directly from a specific science fiction novel.

As for Victor Appleton, he himself is an invention. The books- or most of them- were written by Howard Garis, and they were popular enough (Tom Swift and his adjective noun) that they (the Stratemeyer syndicate) brought the hereo’s son back in a new series, back in the late 50’s through the 70’s, written by “Victor Appleton Jr”. The “Tom Swift Jr and his adjective noun” books are the ones I cut my teeth on, but I have gone back to read the originals too.

If you look down the list of these books, though they were children’s stories, they told of fantastic inventions. At the time. Today, they are mostly science fact. The motorcycle. THe electric locomotive. The deep tunnel. The sky warship. These books seem simplistic because they are full of what today is science fact. Don’t forget, when these books were written, none of this science existed. Correlation. Someone wrote it, and someone invented it. But: if you were to show me you could prove causation, that the folks who were working on these mechanisms took their inspiration from the pages of Tom Swift and his…., I would not be surprised. In fact, I expect it is true, if not of Tom Swift, than of something similar.