[ih] Fiction->History

[mfidelman at meetinghouse.net (Miles Fidelman)]

A few more obvious ones comes to mind:

"The Moon is a Harsh Mistress"

"Colossus: The Forbin Project" - and lots of variants on that theme (up 
to, and including, the Terminator movies -- and what with automatically 
swarming drones now a reality, somehow Skynet seems to loom on the near 
horizon!)

"Shockwave Rider" - which seemed to get an awful lot of things right, 
for its time

Miles Fidelman

Bill Ricker wrote:
>
> On Wed, Sep 23, 2015 at 10:27 PM, Larry Sheldon <larrysheldon at cox.net 
> <mailto:larrysheldon at cox.net>> wrote:
>
>
>         Fiction->History
>
> ?There are two sorts of SciFi (aside from the Fantastic) - those that 
> aren't facts yet?
> ?but likely will be if we persevere, and ?those that could be facts if 
> we screw things up even worse. Those writing near-term SF are well 
> advised to leverage  William Gibson's aphorism "The future is already 
> here - it's just not evenly distributed" to sniff out what is in the 
> labs and the pockets of the early adopters.
>
>     ?
>     In 1977 there was a book titled ?The Adolescence of P-1? (Thomas
>     Joseph
>     Ryan)
>
>
> I thought I remembered this was either serialized or first appeared as 
> a novella in one of the magazines before release as a book, but Google 
> finds no proof of that? Odd.
>    There was a flurry of pre-cyber-punk AI / rogue-programmer stories 
> in Analog in the late 70's, i recall one featured a female hacker but 
> i forget the title, and that it was the month before or after P-1 so 
> it seemed a trend.  ?
>
> There are plenty of listicles that catalog SciFi 
> stories/concepts/widgets that became reality -- partly through 
> invention of the engineering fact being easier after invention of the 
> idea as fiction, as testified to by the inventor of Cellphones being 
> inspired by Kirk's (Roddenbery's) communicator -- but has this been 
> treated in the full academic style as literature-and-society  or 
> history of science? I don't know. ?I am remiss in not surveying 
> academic treatment of ? SciFi as LitCrit in between Padlipsky's thesis 
> (latterly of MULTICS and this I-H list) and Gannon's [1] /Rumors of 
> War/ [2] and Pournelle's SIGMA [3], which respectively study and 
> practice influence of SF on military and government policy.
>     If there isn't yet an academic study of the influence of P-1 and 
> the following Cyber-punk movement on Silicon valley et al in any/all 
> aspects (network, OS, application, User interface), it's due, it's ripe.
>     If we don't get an answer on this list, i can ask Chuck Gannon and 
> network through my other SF&F friends to see who if anyone is working 
> such.
>
> ? (I do highly recommend /Rumors of War/, particularly if you admired 
> MAP's literary writing style as i do and are interested in social 
> impact of early English-language SciFi on the military.) ?
>
> ? [1]? http://www.charlesegannon.com/BioTop.html
> [2] http://isbn.nu/9780742540354
> [3] ? 
> http://www.onthemedia.org/story/129496-science-fiction-in-the-national-interest/transcript/ 
> ?
>
> -- 
> Bill Ricker
> bill.n1vux at gmail.com <mailto:bill.n1vux at gmail.com>
> https://www.linkedin.com/in/n1vux
>
>
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-- 
In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice.
In practice, there is.   .... Yogi Berra