Jees. You load sixteen tons…
and you can’t even get decent internet service.
Sorry I was inblognito for a couple days. And typing on a treo was gonna get me killed, no question.
Anyway, to finish this discussion:
The entire premise of my previous post was, that science and science fiction writing, (and to a lesser degree fantasy) are responsible for the lions share of what passes for today’s technology. This is not a guess, or a supposition, or a theory, but in a large number of cases, like the taser, the robot, the rocket, the palm pilot- all of those things were directly or indirectly affected by the inventors reading habits.
I’ll go back to the taser here, for a specific example. There are plenty, but this one is pretty obvious and clear.
In 1974, a NASA scientist named Jack Cover invented the first stun gun, which he named the TASER, or “Thomas A. Swift Electric Rifle,†after Tom Swift, a fictional young inventor who was the hero of a series of early 20th century adventure novels. Because it relied on gunpowder, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms classified Tasers as registered firearms.
(Talvi, Silja J. A.. “Stunning Revelations“, In These Times, November 13, 2006)
Now, it is possible that even though Jack Cover has a clear memory of the event, and in fact named the weapon at the moment of it’s completion after the science fiction story, that he received inspiration from elsewhere. it’s possible he received inspiration from, as Mrs D says, Neptune’s trident. He may have gotten the inspiration from HG Wells “20,000 leagues under the sea” where Nemo has a firearm that kills with a paintball-like electric charge. he may have gotten his inspiration from a group of travelling faeries who prized his eyelids open and pantomimed the saga of Thor, the God of Thunder for him in his sleep, and the subconcious idea surfaced and he invented the weapon. It’s just as likely, that the Flying Spaghetti monster touched him with His Noodly Appendage and infused him with the wisdom required to build his weapon.
William of Ockham helps me decide which explanation to choose. I will assume since the inventor SAID that was his inspiration, and he has no specific reason to mislead anyone, it’s a safe bet that is what happened.
Let’s assume, for a moment, that there was some other, less obvious explanation. Say, Jules Verne. Wait- that’s STILL science fiction. Faeries? well, hell the explanation itself is science fiction.
All of which makes my point, over and over again:
People who write science fiction stories, people who read science fiction stories, people who invent things, people who grow up to be engineers and geeks, people who have the geek gene, are the people responsible for most of the technology you are surrounded by today.
There are clear cases. When someone of the caliber of Joseph Engelburger (who would later become a good friend of Asimov) looks at you and says “I was a huge fan of Asimov, and the idea of calling our creation a robot was just natural” I have no specific reason to disbelieve.
Is it correlation, or causation? Pretty clear in my mind that whether it’s correlation or causation, no technology exists without geeks. Do the geeks who invent things, from the airplane to the ballpoint pen to the family radio service handheld radios take their inspiration from science fiction? Personal experience (and I have a LOT of it) tells me this is true. Is it possible that there is less causation than mere correlation? Sure, anything is possible. I understand post hoc ergo propter hoc. I also know when someone comes right out and says a specific novel or source or group of sources were their inspiration, I’m willing to accept them at their word. I can’t imagine why I shouldn’t.
20 comments Og | Uncategorized
Og,
Kim and Connie are family to me; it doesn’t mean they aren’t dead wrong once in a while.
We disagree on tattoos, science fiction, and libertarianism vs. conservatism (note the small “l” vs big “L:). The first and last are matters of opinion, the middle is a failure of imagination.
Because they can’t relate their own feelings and experiences to science fiction except by denegrating it; they assume that their experience is universal. It is not.
Everybody’s wrong sometimes.
I don’t think what I’m saying is far off what Connie is saying; I just think we’re approaching it from different angles. I think there is a direct causation, Connie thinks there is only a correlation. One way or another, without the ability to imagine the technolgy and act on our imagination to produce it, we’d all still be living in the trees.
“Great” literature is a by-product of science fiction. Without Og, who came down out of the trees and bent fire to his will, and all the intervening scientists/experimentors/geeks, there would be no Hemmingway, no Faulkiner, no Shakespeare.
Because Mark Twain could get up in the morning, from a clean bed, pump water out of a well to wash and brush his teeth, comb his hair (well, maybe not so much) cook his breakfast over a stove, all the tech available to him at the time, he could concentrate on his writing and not have to spend 80% of his day foraging for food. The geek mind, the engine of invention, is where it all began.
I’m sorry. I just finished reading ‘Fallen Angels’, by Niven. This is pertinent: one basic premise of the book is that only science fiction fans drive knowledge or have any reasonable amount of cleverness and creativity. Thus, your argument is “spoiled” for me by Niven’s overbearing and ridiculous assumption. (BTW, the book is available for free download from http://www.baen.com/library.)
That’s not your fault. Sorry. I’ll look at your argument by itself. But I wouldn’t have responded if that book hadn’t made me a bit annoyed :-).
“Great literature is a by-product of science fiction.”
Well, that’s true if you define “science fiction” to mean “any kind of technology”. I don’t see how that’s a useful definition; in fact, it begs the question, since you’re attempting to argue that “science and science fiction writing, (and to a lesser degree fantasy) are responsible for the lions share of what passes for today’s technology.”
I’m also noticing now that you actually said “science and science fiction”. Given that your argument is entirely about science fiction, why do you mention science?
(Not an argument — just an honest question.)
“The geek mind, the engine of invention, is where it all began.”
As a geek, I’m proud to have developed a few cool things. But as a geek, I also recognize that I and other geeks have wasted a LOT of time speculating without attempting to realize any speculations. There’s something else that’s required to produce anything useful, and that’s entrepreneurial spirit. I’m not saying that geeks lack it; I _am_ saying that science fiction fabulists lack it. It’s fine to write about rocketpacks in the year 2000; but none of the people writing about it made one I could buy. Few of them even tried — and when they were writing about them, they produced _nothing_ to help realize them.
Except maybe, just maybe, they created the _desire_ for the thing. Without that desire, the engineer/inventor who does the real work of designing the thing wouldn’t have any market. Hey! So sci-fi does something productive: it creates a market. There’s a name for people whose task is creating and discovering markets. They’re called marketers.
So science fiction, in general, is like marketing. But I don’t think that’s what you wanted to prove. I think you wanted to prove that they’re like engineers or entrepreneurs. And that’s just not true.
BTW, thanks for the stories. Excellent blog.
I think you wanted to prove that they’re like engineers or entrepreneurs. And that’s just not true.
Well, you’re wrong there. it’t not ALWAYS true. But neither is it always false.
It’s only whimsy and my natural tendency to be a smartass that leads me to say “Great literature is a by-product of science fiction.†I understand what you mean, and I didn’t write that to ruffle feathers. Well, okay, maybe a little.
The point I’m trying to make is that the ability to have persistence of thought is what brought us out of the trees. Hominids developed and flourished because they were able to imagine something different, something better, and sometimes, they had the skills to develop the tools that improved their world. This is not a figment of my twisted imagination, it’s a pretty well foregone conclusion.
That spark is synonomous with science and science fiction (to answer your question, the two are as inseparable as they can be- you cannot reasonably expect to be able to comprehend one without the other)
if proto-humans had sat around in trees and developed language absent any technology, we might still have evolved, but probably not very far.
Bottomline, is that I never saw a new rifle design or an improved car or a better skillet due to the work of a team of english majors. By the same token, there arent’ a bucketload of great literary works by people who spend their time designing circuitry. This doesn’t make either better or worse than one another- only different. To cast aspersions on the low quality of fiction produced by the Geeks among us misses the point- each of us has his or her skills. You use them the best you can. There are more geeks stringing together fiction than there are english majors building supercomputers, so the idea that the quality is not comparible is a non issue. It’s not about the quality of the writing from a literary point of view, it’s about keeping the geekery moving around out there, about circulating the ideas so they spread and grow and don’t get lost.
BTW, I would never for a MOMENT suggest that non SF fans don’t posess creativity. There’s an awful lot of creativity out there, and the best of it is from people utterly unaware of any technology. THAT is the one of the PURPOSES of geekery. To make tech so good and so invisible that creative people can CREATE.
The purpose of a classical education to to create a well-rounded person. That person could decide to improve on a chair to make it more comfortable, to dress it in a fabric that would be more pleasing to the eye, and sit in it to ponder the great discoveries in science, or the history of what makes Man tick, and what will make him tick until the earth explodes. Technology may change, fashions may come and go, but man has not changed one iota since he climbed down from the trees.
It’s the pidgeon-holing in education, and it becoming training and money making that we object to. Preferences in entertainment are one thing–anyone can read for pleasure what they like.
But supposing that technology without a grounding in being able to communicate (learned from the oh-so-often discounted English major), would be ughs and grunts.
This blog, and all blogs, provide a combination of the Humanities and Science. No point in having the software for a blog or the computer to put it on, if we don’t have the langauge rules to make communication and understanding possible. And oh how boring this blog, and all blogs would be, without those nice graphics and font choices selected from a basic knowledge of art and design.
this blog was ‘designed’ not to make any specific use of fonts or graphics. I don’t discount english majors any more than sf geeks are discounted by others, but I will give them their due. it is pretty arguable that language was developed to articulate complex concepts, the type that are required to communicate tech. Being able to sharpen a flint- and being able to pass that tech on- was important years before “grammar” existed.
Good points. I think I have to concede your main point, which I would state as: “modern science and science fiction are inseparable.”
This is demonstrated philosophically (by you) and historically (by my looking at Wikipedia for date coincidences).
[regarding science and science fiction:]
“(to answer your question, the two are as inseparable as they can be- you cannot reasonably expect to be able to comprehend one without the other).”
I admit: it’s arguably true that modern science and science fiction are inseparable. They appeared at roughly the same time — science in the late 1500s (Bacon), science fiction in 1515 (More’s Utopia, More influenced Bacon). Science fiction became more technical and specific a bit in advance of science itself becoming more technical and specific. I’m basing these claims on Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_science_fiction
“That spark is synonomous with science and science fiction”
Hmm. No, sci-fi (stories about tech) didn’t appear until the 16th or 17th century. If you want to say that the spark is the same thing as science, that’s fine, but then you can’t claim science and science fiction are related — you’ve redefined science.
“It’s not about the quality of the writing from a literary point of view, it’s about keeping the geekery moving around out there, about circulating the ideas so they spread and grow and don’t get lost.”
Good point. Well said.
And hey, I’m a geek and a sci-fi addict.
After reading that book (Fallen Angels, Niven) I’ll never be able to refer to myself as a ‘fan’, though. Sad.
To the Mrs. du Toit:
“The purpose of a classical education to to create a well-rounded person.”
Not exactly. The purpose is to create a person who is a productive and original member of society — or at least to push as many people in that direction as possible. The Trivium of Grammar, Logic, Rhetoric: learn what others learned, then learn how to put those facts together, then learn how to compose originally. None of this requires a major in English; the Trivium applies to electronics and math as well as Latin, and my child is learning that way.
Of course, along with a solid grounding in languages. Well-roundedness IS one of the goals.
Hmm. No, sci-fi (stories about tech) didn’t appear until the 16th or 17th century.
I think it’s arguable that the greek and norse myths are the science fiction of thier time.
The proper definition of speculative fiction is that it starts at the state of current knowledge and extrapolates. Most definitely NOT required are what we would call “tech” or a setting in the far-flung future.
Cogent arguments have been put forth by respected figures in the field that virtually all of human literature qualifies in some way or another on this basis. The Illiad and the Odyssey, for example. The Gilgamesh Epic for another.
The line between SF and fantasy is generally accepted to be at the point where the author’s world-building hews to proper scientific rigor — or not. The rule of thumb is that you are allowed one — and only one — departure from known science. You can have a warp drive or a sentient robot, but not both. You can have rayguns or a warp drive, but not both. And so-forth. Too many gimmes and you’re writing fantasy.
The definition of “tech” can be a fun one to play with, too. Technology, after all, is what mechanically-inclined type do with scientific knowledge. And, as Clarke puts it, any sufficiently advanced technology can appear to be magic to the uninitiated.
Or, as my thaumaturges in the Dollyverse put it, there’s no such thing as magic, only a technology you don’t understand yet.
M
M
“And if you include ALL literature — including Greek and Norse myths — your thesis explains nothing, because science did NOT go along with those literatures”
Um, F for effort.
Let’s take one sole specific example- say, Mjöllnir, the Hammer of Thor.
This is an object of obviously advanced technology, which was wielded to magical effect (see Clarke’s law) and has inspired other similar fictional weapons through time, and no doubt acts as the inspiration for plenty of non-fictional weapons. Put simply: Science and science fiction writing revolves around artifacts or concepts that are posessed of or imbued with magical or mystical powers that the author dreams was real instead of mythical. The distinction is pretty clear: The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. No mythical objects imbued with magical powers. Not science fiction. Pegasus and Bellerophon? Magical creature endowed with magical powers- if there is any single person that can honestly say that the creation of Pegasus wasn’t a deep seated dream of humanity to fly, that began the first time a human saw a bird take flight, i will point to that person and laugh. The path from Ba, in Egyptian mythology, and Pegasus, and the Halcyon, to the Ornithopter, to the airplane, is pretty clear in my mind. And there is a LOT of purely factual writing from those times, as well as a lot of oral and written record that tells fictional stories of ordinary people in ordinary life doing ordinary things. Without magical things. Which were the technology of the time. Before engineering there was just magic.
By the way, sorry your comment was held for approval, I don’t know why it did that. I certainly welcome rational discussion.
“Um, F for effort.”
Technically, if you’re going to grade by effort, you’d have to note that I at least brought in actual evidence, correlating dates and events. If I got an F, it wasn’t for effort.
It’s pretty clear that you have your own definitions of “science fiction” and “science”. They don’t appear to match anything else I’ve ever seen.
By your definitions, “science fiction” is always correlated with “science”, and both are everywhere required for technological, economic, and cultural advance. I actually agreed with part of that — modern sci-fi is correlated with modern science. To agree with that in general, I’d have to undefine both science-fiction and science.
“Put simply: Science and science fiction writing revolves around artifacts or concepts that are posessed of or imbued with magical or mystical powers that the author dreams was real instead of mythical.”
I thought that was called “financial planning”. (Sorry. I just thought that was funny.)
Your definition depends on being able to distinguish the author’s “dreams” (I know what you mean); that’s a pretty tall order for ancient history. It’s effectively impossible for modern authors. I think you’d have to clarify that to include something objectively determinable — perhaps that the plot turned on characteristics of the device, its powers, and/or how that power was made available to the characters.
Seriously, though, you did give a definition. Let’s accept it for the sake of argument.
“Let’s take one sole specific example- say, Mjöllnir, the Hammer of Thor.”
Now, what tale in the Eddas are you claiming is science fiction? It’s not enough to claim that an imaginary warhammer is science fiction — the hammer itself isn’t literature, the _stories_ about it are. The stories I know about Mjöllnir don’t revolve around it or its properties — except perhaps its forging, but that was more a story of Loki than of Mjöllnir.
Modern stories about Mjöllnir don’t count as an example of what you’re arguing.
“The path from Ba, in Egyptian mythology, and Pegasus, and the Halcyon, to the Ornithopter, to the airplane, is pretty clear in my mind.”
The path from one thing to another can always be made clear in one person’s imagination. But was there actually any such path? Did the person who imagined Pegasus know anything about Ba? More likely, each of those was an independent invention. There’s no actual historical link from one to the other.
The only science fiction here is the fiction that there’s a link from Ba, to Pegasus, to the Halcyon, to the Ornithopter, to the airplane. And that’s a modern fiction.
“By the way, sorry your comment was held for approval, I don’t know why it did that.”
No problem — I didn’t assume anything negative. I’d rather my comment be held than tons of spam pour out.
“I certainly welcome rational discussion.”
And I’m grateful for the presumption of rationality even in the middle of an argument.
Chill, dude, I’m pulling your leg ever so gently. Guess you’d have to know me better to understand, hope you stick around to do so.
The concept of the hammer itself is science fiction. Unless you can bring me an example that shows it as science fact. If there is a third option (1:not science fiction, 2:science fiction, 3:wombat, for instance) I am unaware of it’s existence.
Is there a clear provenance that links mythical flying creatures to the airplane? Well, you’d have to go back and try to determine what the specific inspiration was for each item at each step. That is impossible, of course. What I’m speaking about, what I alluded to before, is man’s dream of flight. That common dream has fueled both the fantasies of Ba, and the DC-3. And it continues to fuel- the modern hang glider continues to be developed and advanced, long after the SR-71 blackbird. Some men just want to fly. The clear provenance is the ongoing desire of man to be like birds. As I said, one of the concepts of sf is to keep those stories, those concepts, circling around out there to make sure the ideas don’t get lost.
And I’m not arguing, I’m discussing. I hope you are too.
Man, even after the fact Akismet is deleting some of your posts, I do not know why. I’m really sorry about this, I don’t know how to undo it.
“Chill, dude, I’m pulling your leg ever so gently. Guess you’d have to know me better to understand, hope you stick around to do so.”
Sorry if I sound brittle or offensive — I’m interested and enjoying the discussion, as it involves several things I’m interested in.
And no way I’m leaving — when I stay I hear cool stories. If I leave you’ll laugh at me behind my back. :-)
“The concept of the hammer itself is science fiction.”
Category error. Fiction is a type of literature, and a concept of a hammer isn’t itself any kind of literature.
“Unless you can bring me an example that shows it as science fact. If there is a third option (1:not science fiction, 2:science fiction, 3:wombat, for instance) I am unaware of it’s existence.”
Well, there are four options — nonscience nonfiction, nonscience fiction, science nonfiction, and science fiction. Mjolly isn’t nonfiction, so stories about it’re either science fiction or some other kind of fiction.
Obviously that leaves only wombat fiction, as reviewed at http://www.shadowgallery.co.uk/reviews7.html. (A good comic strip, by the way — decent art in general, and sometimes very impressive.)
But seriously, there’s plenty of nonscientific fiction out there; there are morality plays, pseudohistories, origin myths, and so on. Do you have a specific story about Mjolly in mind, so I can attempt to classify it? Not all of the stories involving it fall into the same genre.
I’m referring to the concept of an automated hammer. A hammer that is self motivating and bends itself to the will of it’s owner. Science fiction explores concepts and objects that are fictional and do not yet exist. if the category is “fictional Devices found in fictional stories” then the hammer does in fact fit the category.
At this point we are only picking nits anyway, subdividing the discussion into smaller and smaller fragments, trying to ascertain the truth or falsehood of each.
My memory of the Norse legends is spotty, having read them the first time more than forty years ago. I don’t remember a specific story, and it’s not cogent to the overall point, which is: People have written about and imagined devices and concepts from the beginning of recorded history. And those imagined devices and concepts, seemingly so mystical and magical at the time, have eventually morphed into real world objects. The path of that transit is variegated and strange, and though the Norse Myths were not considered science fiction at the time, it was probably only because the words had yet to be invented.
I could sit and argue the relative provenance of each and every fictional story it would make no difference to the overall point.
I could also argue your point about categories, but what I said is specifically, provably true: What is science fiction is science fiction, an what is not science fiction is not science fiction. I put (in my mind) every story, concept, impliment, tool, toy, gadget, or gewgaw whimmy diddle that DOES NOT exist at the time of writing into the category of SF.
The bottomline is this: People have ideas. Sometimes, as Mrs D put it, those ideas come to them in dreams. Sometime in nightmares. Sometimes by watching a bird fly- or a turtle dive. THose ideas often make it into fiction- because an idea which does nto exist in the real world of the time is the definition of a fictional device, even if the story is otherwise devoid of fiction of any kind. The Picture of Dorian Gray could, if not for a painting and an extraordinary man, be a work of ordinary fact, the telling of a simple story. Those ideas travel around, and an incredible amount of the time, alight in the head and hands of someone who can turn them into reality.
Picking nits about specific stories, specific myths, whatever, doesn’t change any of that.
“the overall point, which is: People have written about and imagined devices and concepts from the beginning of recorded history. And those imagined devices and concepts, seemingly so mystical and magical at the time, have eventually morphed into real world objects.”
I SEE! Seriously. Yes, you’re not trying to make a point about science fiction as a category of literature; you’re trying to make a point about how literature drives technology.
“Picking nits about specific stories, specific myths, whatever, doesn’t change any of that.”
I see what you mean.
-Billy
Exactly. I won’t make an argument that SF is literature- it’s probably not. But it is important- maybe vitally important, to civilization.
It’s an interesting concept to say the least..