Has Sci-Fi Run Out of Steam? 479
Barence writes "Science fiction has long inspired real-world technology, but are the authors of sci-fi stories finally running out of steam? PC Pro has traced the history of sci-fi's influence on real-world technology, from Jules Verne to Snow Crash, but suggests that writers have run out of ideas when it comes to inspiring tomorrow's products. 'Since Snow Crash, no novel has had quite the same impact on the computing world, and you might argue that sci-fi and hi-tech are drifting further apart,' PC Pro claims. Author Charles Stross tells the magazine that he began writing a sci-fi novel in 2005 and 'made some predictions, thinking that in ten years they'd either be laughable or they'd have come true. The weird bit? Most of them came true already, by 2009.'"
PC Pro just needs to read more Sci-Fi (Score:4, Informative)
They mentioned Vernor Vinge, but only referenced his earlier work. One of his later stories, Rainbow's End, predicts a ubiquitous Augmented Reality, which we're only starting to see gimmick implementations of now.
Plenty mainstream TV shows (Score:2, Informative)
Not enough predictions, try John Scalzi (Score:3, Informative)
Re:I think this is a false premise (Score:5, Informative)
Yes. Robert Goddard, the father of rocketry, said he was inspired by Jules Verne and other early scientifiction stories.
Re:Sci-fi not predicting far enough? (Score:1, Informative)
Re:Cold fusion is by definition no energy source (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Sci-fi not predicting far enough? (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Sci-fi not predicting far enough? (Score:4, Informative)
And that's why I liked last year's Moon [imdb.com].
Maybe it's the publishing side that's the problem (Score:4, Informative)
This is based partially on what I see in bookstores and partially on my own experience, which I discuss extensively in Science fiction, literature, and the haters [jseliger.com]. It begins:
If the publishing system itself is broken and nothing yet has grown up to take its place (I have no interest in trolling through thousands of terrible novels uploaded to websites in search of a single potential gem, for those of you Internet utopians out there), maybe the source of the genre's troubles isn't where PC Pro places it.
Re:"It's not realistic enough" is the real killer (Score:3, Informative)
>>>Back in the old days of Sci Fi, we didn't have everybody and their brother who were "internet experts" on anything and everything.
That's funny because I was just reading an Isaac Asimov book where he published the first letter he ever wrote (from the 1930s). It was criticizing one of the writers in "Amazing" for not telling realistic plots based upon science. Point - Critics have always existed in this genre even in the "dark days" before internet or television. In that case it did result in improved story-telling as the genre moved into the 1940s and 50s
Re:Sci-fi not predicting far enough? (Score:3, Informative)
Close, but not quite.
Deus ex machinis
Dei ex machina
Dei ex machinis
You need the ablative case with "ex", which is easy to confuse with the nominative in the singular, but not the plural.
Re:Sci-fi not predicting far enough? (Score:5, Informative)
The correct plural form of deus ex machina is deii ex machina, not deus ex machinas. OMG, they dont seem to teach anything in Latin classes these days.
They sure don't! The only Latin plurals that have -ii are the ones where there's already an -i- in the word, like radius => radii.
Deus, as it happens, is one of the very very few irregular nouns in Latin, and the plural [tufts.edu] can be either di or, less often, dei.
In answer to the sibling AC who asked if di ex machina wouldn't imply a whole bunch of gods hanging from a single crane: the answer is no. In Latin that kind of construction is distributive, i.e. the usual implication is that there's one machina for every deus.