Six scientists tell us about the most accurate science fiction in their fields

http://io9.com/5644435/five-scientists-tell-us-about-the-most-accurate-science-fiction-in-their-fields

by te_platt • 16 years ago

20 19 16 years ago

Here's a vote for David Brin's novel "Earth"... full of amazingly prescient ideas regarding the social effects of communication technology, transparency... and especially his Helvetian War* as part of the backstory, though presented as metaphor... it's beginning to look entirely too possible!

* A 'financial war' when transparency results in the world population finding out that a lot of crooks have a lot of the world's wealth!

torial• 16 years ago

For anyone that picks up the book, it is worth slogging through the boring first quarter of the book. After that point, each chapter gets better than the previous.

artied• 16 years ago

This is oxymoronic - the point of 'sci-fi' is not to be accurate. If it has a single 'point of reference' it is to inform our thinking about this world by depicting alternative realities that illuminate our awareness of this reality....IMHO

TGJ• 16 years ago

I've always found sci-fi to be examples of upcoming technology and their possible implications on humanity.

CWuestefeld2• 16 years ago

That's one purpose. My own suggestion elsewhere in this thread, Rainbows End, fits into this category.

On the other hand, I'm pretty sure that George Lucas never meant to tell us that we'd be playing with light sabers. Frequently, the futuristic technology of sci-fi is nothing more than a literary device allowing the author to contrive a situation or theme that wouldn't be possible with more mundane environments.

barrkel3• 16 years ago

I fully agree with you. Sci-fi isn't about predicting the future; to me, it's about accentuating a particular aspect of our current world, magnifying its significance, and letting the consequences play out, thus revealing something about ourselves that probably wasn't obvious before.

Philip K. Dick put it another way: in sci-fi, the main character isn't a person, but an idea. But an idea as a main character is only interesting if it's relevant to us, today, right now.

plnewman• 16 years ago

From the article:

"My favorite along these lines is a classic, Cyril Kornbluth's "The Marching Morons." It's the original version of "Idiocracy" — the basic idea is that selection now favors the stupid, and so if we go forward in time, that's what we'll see. The concept is simple and well-drawn; the consequences unexpected."

I would say the current state of American politics is a warning sign for this condition.

edit: quote was taken from John Hawks, Paleoanthropologist, University of Wisconsin, Madison:

lukifer• 16 years ago

The hidden assumption of "Idiocracy" is that survival of the fittest is the only selection mechanism. Even if survival and breeding become trivial, sexual selection will continue, and many intelligent people will only want to mate with others of their kind, even if they become overwhelmed numbers-wise.

I understand, though, that the film is an allegory, and as such it succeeds admirably. In terms of the downward trajectory of our political and cultural discourse, it is disturbingly spot-on. Reminds me a little of the prescience of "Network": http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_%28film%29

hugh32• 16 years ago

And how will this help?

I suppose you could model this in a simple way. First you could assume that the IQ of a child is the average of the IQs of its parents (don't bother telling me that's a false assumption, of course it is, but we're making a simple model here). Then, you could put in certain assumptions about the likelihood of two people meeting, and the likelihood of them mating if they do (lots of adjustable parameters here including the unwillingness to mate with somebody too much smarter or dumber than yourself). Throw in additional "dumb people breed more" parameters and see what happens to the simulation.

Under certain values of the parameters, you'll just see a slide into idiocracy. But if you make people pickier about their mating partners you might wind up seeing a split into two entirely separate breeding populations -- one smart, one dumb. It would be an interesting set of simulations to do.

barrkel3• 16 years ago

You only need a small difference in relative fitness for an allele to completely wipe out another over a relatively short timespan; the only counteracting agent I think is the increased global mobility of intelligent people such that it's reasonable for them to cover vast distances to still find one another, so we may instead end up with a two-class strain.

On the other hand, religious zealots opposed to birth control may get the upper hand. I don't think there's a necessary intrinsic correlation between religious zealotry and intelligence. Religion by itself is largely about ingroup / outgroup dynamics and power structures, which don't seem to have necessary positive or negative relationships with intelligence.

eqdw• 16 years ago

"...great reading on dystopian robotics include Brian Herbert and Kevin Anderson's Dune prequel trilogy on the Butlerian Jihad"

Clearly you didn't read the same books I did? "Great"? REALLY?

kujawa• 16 years ago

I really don't know why this is being downvoted so harshly.

Kevin J. Anderson's writing is horrific. He's an absolute hack. Brian Herbert should be ashamed at what he's doing to his father's good name, allowing this incompetent fuckwit to befoul his legacy.

I bought the first of the Butlerian Jihad books, even knowing how horrible a writer KJA is, because the topic interested me so. I couldn't make it more than about 15 pages.

It's a minor literary tragedy.

CWuestefeld2• 16 years ago

I nominate Vernor Vinge's Rainbows End. In particular, his theme of ubiquitous connectivity and access to information struck me as remarkable realistic. Of course, Vinge is a Comp Sci professor, so I would expect his treatment of related concepts to be well done.

orangecat• 16 years ago

Agreed. Along the same lines, Halting State by Charles Stross.

Dylanlacey• 16 years ago

And how. I thought this book was even more entertaining because of how '5 minutes from now' it felt. He strikes me as someone with their finger on the pulse (god I hate that phrase) of the internet and it's various subcultures, as well.

jancona• 16 years ago

Brave New Work doesn't assume genetic determinism at all. All the manipulations to produce the different castes are environmental, either prenatal (exposing the fetus to radiation, chemicals, etc.) or as the result of behavioral conditioning.

hugh32• 16 years ago

(I'm going to assume you meant Brave New World rather than some other thing I haven't heard of...)

You're right, though; I just went back and re-read the first chapter, there's no mention of the different castes being differentiated until after fertilization. Of course there's much we know now that Huxley didn't know about genetics, so if you were to try to start up a Brave New World society then genetics would be the right place to start.

Other technological problems with BNW include the attempts to teach values by subliminal messages during sleep, which afaik have now been pretty much proven to be a bunch of hooey.

The main problem, I think, is that you'd almost certainly always wind up with an overlap between your castes -- your smartest gammas would be smarter than your dumbest betas. That's not necessarily a big problem, though.

pjscott• 16 years ago

In the field of computers, James Schmitz wrote some surprisingly prescient stuff. He sometimes mentioned a device called a ComWeb, which looks and acts a lot like a modern computer with Internet access. You can make phone calls with them, or look up information, or read email, or play online board-games, or do various other things. They're not a major part of any of his plots; he just mentions them, as casually as someone today might mention sending an email.

He wrote this in the 60s and 70s.

Six scientists tell us about the most accurate science fiction in their fields

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