What science fiction missed

[nancylebov]

We're closer to wild animals or they're closer to us. Afaik (with an exception of Bisson's non-realistic "Bears Discover Fire), science fiction has assumed a fairly sterile future, even when it became obvious that anything that can kill a 100-pound deer can also kill a person, and that there's no good way to keep deer out of the suburbs, especially if you're going to insist on having woods anywhere near where people live, and people do seem to be insisting on that.

Also, I strongly suspect that we've been selecting wild animals for intelligence.

And the predictions about computers were pretty indequate. E.M. Forester had it in "The Machine Stops" (1909) that people would use computers for chatter--but the field completely forgot that insight.

No one guessed what would be easy and what would be difficult--grand master chess has turned out to be a more solvable problem than vision and walking. Once upon a time, science fiction writers seemed to think that your first problem with a computer was keeping it from trying to take over the world rather than getting it to to work at all.

And no one had the foggiest that there would be whole sections of books for the general public on dealing with computers, nor that computers would make it reasonably easy for people to have a combined printing press and post office at home and this would be problematic.

Afaik, no one in science fiction has taken a real crack at just how complicated nanotech is going to be.

Comments

[raincitygirl.livejournal.com]

It's Forster, not ForEster. Only one 'e'. Good point about the deer. What precisely is nanotech? I vaguely think it has something to do with extreme miniaturization, but I could be totally wrong.

[nancylebov.livejournal.com]

Wow. that was a fast comment. I should include more errors.

From the wikipedia

Nanotechnology as a collective term refers to technological developments on the nanometre scale, usually 0.1-100nm. (One nanometre equals one thousandth of a micrometre or one millionth of a millimetre.) The term sometimes applies to any microscopic technology. Due to the small size at which nanotechnology operates, physical phenomena not observed at the macroscopic scale dominate. These nanoscale phenomena include quantum size effects and short range forces such as van der Waals forces. Furthermore the vastly increased ratio of surface area to volume promotes surface phenomena. Since the progress of computers is growing exponentially it is believed that it will develop into nanotechnology in the near future.

In fiction and media, "nanotechnology" often refers to molecular nanotechnology (also known as "MNT"), a hypothetical advanced form of nanotechnology that is belived will be developed some time in the future.

I'd been using the fiction/media definition--assuming that nanotech meant putting each atom where you wanted it, but apparently there are useful things to do on the molecular scale which don't require quite that much precision.

Just to take an example of the potential complexity of nanotech, suppose you have an anything box--feed it the raw materials and energy, and it can make you anything you want (it has a limit on size and probably some limits on how much energy density it can handle). How do you adequately specify what you want? What if you don't want to do all the design work yourself? These are semi-solvable problems, but it's going to take huge design libraries and skill at using them to do much of anything interesting.

Will it be possible to have anything boxes that can't make viruses? It'll be entertaining (from a distance) if they can.

Back in 2002, some scientists synthesized polio. The reassuring news is that smallpox viruses are much larger and more difficult.

[raincitygirl.livejournal.com]

Sorry about the hasty corrections. Daughter-of-an-English-teacher syndrome, you see.

Thanks for the thorough explanations of nanotech. Given what you've said, I too am now surprised that science fiction hasn't used it more.

[nancylebov.livejournal.com]

No apology required--I'd rather get things right.

At this point, there's a moderate amount of sf about nanotech (near-Singularity sf seems to be the up-and-coming subgenre), but I don't think they're taking the complexities seriously enough.

[schulman.livejournal.com]

Well, the first Telzey Amberdon story is a good example of intelligent wild animals living too close to humans for comfort. On the other hand, they're not exactly Terrestrial animals.

[juuro.livejournal.com]

Forster's Machine is frightening. I feel we are seeing quite a bit of the development he predicted. That, or Herbert Franke's Orchid Cage.

Vilafiling

[wolfdancer.livejournal.com]

The Computer was largley unknown so it was easy to make it into a new monster. In metropolis the great moderanataion of tem is the evil that steels the soul.
Littel did they have iin mind cubes farms were ones sould was sucked out .. or perhaps they did.

Re: Vilafiling

[nancylebov.livejournal.com]

It's interesting that there hasn't been any recent sf (or at least none that I've seen) about human intuition defeating the cold, rational computer. Part of this is that we've come to realize that computers are only rational on a small scale--the big programs might as well be inhabited by gremlins. Perhaps we're *too* rational to stand up to them effectively, though it's probably just that we trust them too much.

As for soul-sucking cube farms, the nearest thing I can think of is _We_ by Zamyatin (1920), but iirc, that was apartment blocks rather than work. See also _Resume with Monsters_ by William Browning Spencer, in which Lovecraftian monsters/hallucinations are shown as preferable direct experience of a joh.

last sentence

[velvet-wood.livejournal.com]

What about Neil Stephenson?

V

Re: last sentence

[nancylebov.livejournal.com]

_The Diamond Age_? It's been a while since I've read it, but iirc, it has access to nanotech but little consideration of the making choices in huge range of possibilities nor of nanotech limitations of energy storage and communication.

Now that I think about it, Stephenson should get points for having nanotech results delivered (right?) instead of having tiny do-anything machines. Figuring out how to power and control molecular-sized machines is challenging.

Drexler (one of the first writers about nanotech) seemed to assume that computerized engineering would be necessary. Afaik, science fiction hasn't tryed looking at consequences of delegating important design decisions to computers. On the other hand, I haven't been reading Analog for quite a while, so maybe there's been somewhat there.

[daev.livejournal.com]

I don't think "The Machine Stops" had computers in it. I think that's a case where we read "computers" into the situation Forster describes, one with a global communications network and service mechanisms so complete that its users never have to leave their houses.

I don't mean this to be mere nit-picking. I think it's the source of a lot of the complaints about how earlier SF authors "missed" something important about future computers, because their depicted computers are rare, mechanical, and specialized for computing things.

But really it's an accident of language and local perspective that we've taken this big communications and information-distribution network and called its agents by the name computers, the name of calculating machinery. Miniature versions of big iron computing machines evolved into general-purpose, malleable control devices that can be put to work sending photos of your cat across the phone lines, so it's only a historical accident that we call the devices "computers," and I don't think it's a failing of old SF that it tends to use the word more strictly.

If the old SF model failed in the tedious business of describing the future, it's that it didn't postulate that we'd have all these tools -- chatting, desktop publishing, movie watching -- on one general device, or that as a result it'd be hard to know how to do most of it (and require books). Yet the purpose of SF is to tell stories, and if you want to toss around an idea that arises from universal access to publishing (for instance) it's much better to grant your fictional world a cheap publishing machine. What's the story-value in "computers"?

[nancylebov.livejournal.com]

IIRC, "The Machine Stops" had messages queued up, so it just show a super-telephone system.

The thing the story got right was the strength of the human urge to chat, and how much people will tolerate low bandwidth to do it.

Is your final question about whether there were any story possibilities in mere extensions of big calculating machines? If so, you've got a point, though such machines did get a nice walk-on role in Clarke's "Superiority".

I suppose that one of the things I think science fiction could have predicted is that any sort of highly capable but unintelligent machine would be extremely tricky to direct.

I'll have to think about your general point. I don't think any particular story is obligated to get the future right, but I do find it interesting to look for blind spots in the whole field.

[sturgeonslawyer.livejournal.com]

I've been fascinated for quite a while by the process by which various "wild" species are adapting to human environments: those damnable, annoying nonmigratory migratory birds; urban hawks, racoons, even skunks; the feral parrots of San Francisco (and probably other cities); the gradual return of coyotes, cougars, etc., to suburbanized environments...

You're right that this is an area SF has hardly touched upon. It doesn't have the kewl factor.

[nancylebov.livejournal.com]

I'm not sure that hi-tech life with wild animals is totally lacking in kewl.

While it might be hard to build a whole story around the concept, it would add flavor to a background and could certainly be used to humorous effect.

A fast googling turns up feral monk parakeets in the Sicily, Chicago, Texas, Spain, Florida and New York as well as red-headed conyers in San Francisco and rose-ringed/ring-necked parakeets in the UK. If you want a kewl factor, you can have a feral parrot/coyote conspiracy to take over the world.

Monk parakeets, mostly

Overview of world parakeet and parrot invasion

Four types of parrots in the San francisco area

Given that Philadelphia has deer hunts inside the city

[mouseworks.livejournal.com]

...and deer were exterpiated through most of the North East in the 19th century. Perhaps the more prosperous a civilization, the more it can share, including with critters.

And on the matter of section, a friend said that all the raccoons in her area of Charlotte, NC, were trapped out except for a family that appeared to have fully opposeable thumbs.

We're also mixing things up as never before -- Venus fly traps in California and Florida, huge number of exotics plants and animals everywhere.

Re: Given that Philadelphia has deer hunts inside the city

[nancylebov.livejournal.com]

As for mixing things up, if in the far future every human artifact had disappeared, I think the existance of an intelligent species could be deduced from the shuffling of species from one continent to another.

Deer hunts in Fairmount Park, or in residential areas?

Re: Given that Philadelphia has deer hunts inside the city

[mouseworks.livejournal.com]

Fairmount and Pennypack Parks. No deer appear to be in Center City proper, but the hunt in the Wissihickon is about seven or eight miles from Reading Terminal Market, and about a mile from here. My brother and another person saw foxes around the Philadelphia University Campus and in McMichael Park (couple of blocks surrounded by houses); I've seen opposums in my back yard.

Peregrine falcons have nested on City Hall.

As for the shuffling being a sign on an intelligent species, there's some indication that it's a sign of a species that isn't quite intelligent enough. And some things got themselves over -- the cattle egret seems to have made the jump from Africa to Brazil, then up the coast from there on its own. Fish don't move themselves around quite as easily, though.

Re: Given that Philadelphia has deer hunts inside the city

[nancylebov.livejournal.com]

For me, the interesting question doesn't have to do with shooting deer in large parks that happen to be in city limits, it's finding something to do about deer which I suppose live in small woods but which show up to consume suburban gardens. I've had fantasies of suburbanites doing bow-hunting from blinds in their back yards, but I really don't know whether it's workable.

[sturgeonslawyer.livejournal.com]

Actually building a whole short story around it wouldn't be that hard - though it would probably have to be an Analog-type story, for which I have little tolerance (and less interest in writing). Two obvious Analog story styles come to mind:

1) The Spider Robinson "Just Barely SF" style: Story about an urban exterminator called to deal with some particularly obnoxious feral urban wildlife.

2) Analog absurdism: someone - possibly an exterminator - has to investigate an infestion and findes a ridiculously complicated, baroque system developing, probably involving computer-using raccoons.

What wouldn't sell to modern Analog is a real Campbellian-style story, in which someone rigorously works out "whose ox is gored" by the presence of urban wildlife and tells their story.