Re: 100 megaton bombs atop Saturn V rockets
From: Andre Lieven (dg411_at_FreeNet.Carleton.CA)
Date: 07/11/04
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Date: 11 Jul 2004 17:40:03 GMT
"Christopher M. Jones" (marmiteNOTSPAM@dualboot.net) writes:
> Scott Ferrin wrote:
>> Actually it fits completely. To someone from 1930 a nuclear power
>> aicraft carrier and all that goes would it would seem like something
>> from science fiction.
>
> It would have seemed beyond much of the science fiction
> of the time. I have a theory on science fiction,
> incidentally. If you look at the early science fiction
> from the late 19th and early 20th centuries a lot of it
> is pretty straightforward, but certainly quite
> fantastical for the time. Submarines, flying machines,
> trips to the Moon, artificial satellites, beam weapons,
> automated computers, even two-way radios. At the time
> a lot of this stuff was really far out, crazy stuff.
> But technology quickly outpaced that era of science
> fiction. Within the lifetimes of many of those authors
> we had trips to the Moon, nuclear power, nuclear
> weapons, aircraft, jet aircraft, guided missiles, radar,
> television, digital computers, etc. We had not only
> matched science fiction, in some cases we had vastly
> exceeded it. As a consequence of this, I believe,
> science fiction authors had to up the ante, pushing the
> implausability out further, with teleportation, faster
> than light travel, humanoid robots, and whatnot.
Well, a lot of those concepts were already present in 1930s,
and 1940s SF. See Asimov's robots, and Doc Smith's Skylarks,
for just two.
Rather, the need in hard SF to move outside of the Solar
System, was a more basic one, the need to tell stories in
locations that the Solar System just didn't offer. Barsoom
was right out, as of the Campbell era.
So, in order to tell human stories set outside of the Solar
System, FTL, et al, became necessary tools to move the
story along, much as Roddenberry, et al, used teleportation
to move their teevee drama along, without killing ten minutes
of screen time, per week, landing the starship...
> It no
> longer paid to write reasonably "hard" scifi because
> then your predictions would be surpassed by reality far
> sooner than you'd expected. Ignoring some of the laws
> of physics is the best way to avoid that fate, but even
> that is hardly foolproof.
Yet, the rules of physics are still " open " enough, in
some of those areas, that using those plot devices isn't
always a violation of said laws.
> Besides which, a lot of the recent scifi already feels
> dated just from the incidental elements. We may not
> have developed warp drive but our computers and
> communications are a whole lot better than what is
> portrayed in most scifi over a few decades old, to
> name but two nearly omnipresent elements in most any
> scifi story.
Sure. The development of computing power, and electronic
miniaturisation, were but two tech " surprises " to old
time SF. There will be more, as few writers can be fully
versed in all the sciences, plus come complete with
Crystal Ball(tm).
SF often is about possible bits of the future, not The
Future. If the latter were true, I want my Thunderbird 2 !
<g>
Andre
--
" I'm a man... But, I can change... If I have to... I guess. "
The Man Prayer, Red Green.
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