Electronic Life 197
| Electronic Life: How to Think About Computers | |
| author | Michael Crichton |
| pages | 209 |
| publisher | Ballantine Books |
| rating | 4 |
| reviewer | stern |
| ISBN | 0394534069 |
| summary | May be worth thumbing through for a glance of what the future was supposed to have been. |
Crichton was already successful as a novelist, having published The Andromeda Strain, The Great Train Robbery, Congo, and other books. Several of these had already been made made into movies. Of course he would become vastly more famous later, with Jurassic Park and the television show E.R.
Electronic Life is written as a glossary, with entries like "Afraid of Computers (everybody is)" "Buying a Computer" "Computer Crime," and so forth. The book shows signs of being hurridly written, as few of the entries reflect any research. The computer crime entry, for example, is three pages long and contains only four hard facts -- specifically, that institutions were then losing $5 billion to $30 billion a year on computer crime, that Citibank processed $30 billion a day in customer transactions using computers, that American banks as a whole were moving $400 billion a year in the U.S., and that the Stanford public key code (not otherwise described) was broken in 1982. No examples of computer crime are given, though by 1983 such accounts were appearing in the mainstream press, and dedicated books on the topic had been around for at least a decade (I own one British example dating to 1973). Detailed descriptions of such capers make for good reading, so Crichton's failure to include any tells us that he did not take the time to visit the library when he wrote this book.
Electronic Life is of interest to modern readers in only two respects: first, Crichton's descriptions of then-current technology provide an amusing reminder of how far we have come. Second, and more significantly, Crichton's predictions for the future are worth comparing with what has actually developed.
As an example of the first sort of passage, on page 140 he points out that if you ask your computer to compute 5.01*5.02-5.03/2.04*100.5+3.06+20.07-200.08+300.09/1.10, there will be a noticable delay as it works out the answer. Later he suggests that a user would do well to buy a CP/M based system, because of all the excellent applications for that platform.
Crichton writes science fiction, and he knew very well that computers would soon do more than was possible in 1983. Such predictions are largely absent from this book, but a few entries do let us see what he expected for the future (other resurrecting dinosaurs, I mean). First, Crichton correctly expected that computer networks would increase in importance. He saw this as a matter of convenience -- computers can share pictures, which you can't do with a verbal phone call, and computer networks can operate asynchronously, so you can leave information for somebody and have have them pick it up at their convenience.
He also makes predictions for computer games, first explaining that there are several types of games:
- Arcade Games (which are in turn split into 'invader games', 'defender games', and 'eating games'.)
- Strategy Games (chess, backgammon, etc.)
- Adventure Games (text-based interactive fiction)
Most interestingly in his predictions, Crichton clearly expected that computers would soon be as normal as home appliances like washing machines. He never anticipated that, through vastly increased numbers and reduced cost, they would become omnipresent and perhaps invisible.
The book is little more than a collection of off-the-cuff musings, and as such the most interesting entry is probably "Microprocessors, or how I flunked biostatistics at Harvard" in which Crichton lashes out at a medical school teacher who had given him a 'D' fifteen years earlier.
This book is a curiosity, not worth buying at a garage sale unless you are a Crichton completist.
Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.
Nostalgia (Score:1, Interesting)
I read Michael Crichton's book a few years ago and I'd just like to share my memories.
Re:Nostalgia (Score:2, Interesting)
I recall playing VT100 invaders on a PDP 11/50, which was pretty darn cool. Among other games, all we lacked was 3D and third dimension thinking. The logic behind the games still remains pretty much the same. (The fellow who wrote NBA JAM originally cut his teeth writing squash and tennis games to play on VT52 terminals)
Still, those behemoth VAXen, PDP, System 370s, etc. did introduce those of us to tried, to writing multiplayer/multi access applications.
Re:Nostalgia (Score:1)
Re:Nostalgia -- (Score:2, Interesting)
I dunno (Score:2, Interesting)
As an example of the first sort of passage, on page 140 he points out that if you ask your computer to compute 5.01*5.02-5.03/2.04*100.5+3.06+20.07-200.08+300.09 /1.10, there will be a noticable delay as it works out the answer.
Considering I got my first computer in 1980 (A 4Mhz Z80-based TRS-80), I think I can say with some credibility that there would not have been a delay computing that, even using interpreted Basic.
On the other hand, those systems were amusingly slow by todays standards. As evidence, I submit that under interpreted Basic, I had memorized how to produce a 1 second delay loop:
Yes, 500 empty loops took 1 second.
Re:I dunno (Score:5, Funny)
Yes, 500 empty loops took 1 second.
With most of the old basic interpreters, FOR/NEXT loops were slightly faster if the loop variable wasn't given after the NEXT statement. Therefore, if your code had looked like this:
FOR I = 1 TO 500:NEXT
You might have been able to squeeze a 1 second delay into 0.9 seconds.
Re:I dunno (Score:2, Interesting)
500 empty loops took 1 second.
A modern Palm OS machine running Cbasic computes this loop about 20 times faster (10,000 loops per second). On a 1 GHz desktop, the C compiled loop
i = 1000000000;
do {
} while (--i);
executes in one second.
Byte magazine ran an April 1st article where they predicted that by 2000, PC's would be 107 MHz, switch selectable to 4.77 MHz. The joke part was the switch selectable feature, which was used to allow games that depended on the original PC's performance to continue to run. Naturally, a 486 clocked at 4.77 MHz was still much faster than an 8088 clocked at 4.77, so the switch was already an anachronism. But by 2000, a cheap PC was much faster than predicted.
An interesting question is what performance is enough? In 1981, we'd run 30+ users on a 1 MIPS machine with 4 MB RAM. 1 MIPS is enough to do word processing and surf the web, but not enough to do full screen video. A PII/350 is enough to do full screen video. Is it enough to cope with current bloatware?
Most of my cycles go to search for aliens.
Re:I dunno (Score:1)
This operation contains floating-point arithmetic. On just about all computers of the day, FP units were emulated.
Now, think about how many dozens of cycles a FP divide STILL takes us today with pipelined FP units. Now, consider that these processors run at 1/10000 the processing power of today's chips, and FP numbers have to be emulated by the ALU.
We're talking TENS OF THOUSANDS if not HUNDREDS OF THOUSANDS of cycles for a single FP divide.
The FP multiplications also take a sizeable amount of time, but nowhere near the time the divide takes. All the addition/subtraction also require emulated FP. Considering a speed of only 4MHz, the above would definitely take a noticable chunk of a second, maybe even more than a second if my efficiency guesses are much worse.
Re:I dunno (Score:2)
We're talking TENS OF THOUSANDS if not HUNDREDS OF THOUSANDS of cycles for a single FP divide.
What the hell are you talking about? It's not done using repeated subtraction, you know. As someone who has written a floating point package, I can say with certainty that it's not even near that (I can't give you a number because it depends heavily on what the assembly language has for operations).
Put it his way: does it take you thousands of steps to do a long division? No? Then what makes you think a computer needs thousands of steps?
Hint: it's a matter of shifting and subtracting. What makes it slower than multiplication is that you have to do test-and-borrow stuff.
Hell, my little FOR loop above is doing 1000 floating point add/subtracts per second on top of the overhead of the Basic interpreter (which is by far the most significant), although adds/subtracts are obviously faster than multiple/divides.
Re:I dunno (Score:3, Informative)
A 4MHZ Z80 didn't even approach .5 MIPs.
Have you programmed in assembly for a Z80? I have. At least do some research before spouting off bullshit. If you would care to look at the Z80 instruction set [geocities.com], you'll notice that the number of cycles for most instructions is -- one or two. The longest is typically 4, although some are 5.
Remember, if you're faced with irrational numbers ( like the example above ), it's going to cost you a lot more cycles using shifts and adds to take it out to the full 24 bits of precision.
Huh?? Whether a number is irrational or not is totally irrelevent. It's just bits to the FP package. The only thing that can somewhat affect performance (although not much for multiplication, somewhat more for division) is the difference in magnitude of the exponent. Even that's not a huge deal, though.
All those "easy" shifts and adds take multiple clock cycles each.
Shifts are two cycles, adds are 1 cycle.
Add that to the OS overhead, and suddenly it takes the OS almost a second to parse, caluculate, and cough up the answer
Look, I used the bloody machine for years. I wrote a floating point package for a Z80. You don't know what you're talking about. 1 second to execute that line is absolutely absurd.
You're making me want to break out my old TRS-80 just for the hell of it.
different MIPS definitions (Score:2)
Re:different MIPS definitions (Score:2)
http://telnet.hu/hamster/vax/e_1977.html
The 11/750 we had at college was only about
Re:I dunno (Score:3, Funny)
Sounds about right. You're talking about Java, right?
Oh, BASIC.
Nevermind...
Remember when... (Score:5, Funny)
Also, our computer only had three bits of memory, so we really had to write everything down on little bits of paper, which was a problem because our wpare squirrels kept carrying them away and hiding them.
THOSE were the days...
Re:Remember when... (Score:2, Funny)
I'm going to get multi-headed squirrels for my next box. Possibly with a clear case cover and blinkenlights (so you can see the squirrels at work).
On the death of video games... (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:On the death of video games... (Score:3, Insightful)
As for Atari (Computer, not Games), if they hadn't shelved the 7800 for two years (it was manufactured and ready to ship, but they warehoused it at the last minute), or even if they hadn't refused the option on the NES, they might still be around today, and not just a name that changed owners twice so far.
Re:On the death of video games... (Score:1)
Re:On the death of video games... (Score:2)
Jurrasic Park [ign.com]
Re:On the death of video games... (Score:2)
Sure, hardware where the only means interaction was a joystick were well on their way out - it's only in the relatively recent past that consoles have made a return. The 80s and 90s were absolutely the realm of the home computer (as defined by including a keyboard), due to the fact that a few hackers could program them, and the rest of the world could play the games they created. The keyboard was less important for the many, but without it, the few couldn't produce the stuff that the many used.
With that in mind, Crichton's guess was pretty short-sighted even at the time.
It's rather the same way that after the crashes of Pets.com and other similar crap ideas, ppl spouted a load of nonsense about "the web is bad for business". The problem isn't the medium, the problem is that a bunch of business majors went hog-wild, didn't think the problem through, and consequently cratered their companies. Early-80s consoles had exactly the same problem due to the management of the various companies all doing *really* dumb things.
Grab.
my office co-workers (Score:5, Funny)
I guess my office is stuck in the 1980s...
Crichton & Timeline (Score:3, Interesting)
**Were** intimidating? (Score:3, Interesting)
Not technically just, but interesting (Score:3, Interesting)
Congo (Score:5, Informative)
The expedition team in in the Congo in Africa, using satellite communication to the United States. Because bandwidth was so limited, their messages were abbreviated to IM-Speak and beyond ("HLO. HW R U DOIN? MY NAM IS MKL CRITN.", etc.). Makes sense, I supposed. Along with this, though, they needed to do digital cleanup of a moss-covered wall, so they took digital video of the wall, sent it via satellite to the U.S. where it ws processed, and received the results back in Africa, in real time. Right.
Re:Congo (Score:1)
Movies (Score:2, Interesting)
Re Congo specifically: it has been said that the only way to enjoy that movie is, with a group of friends, have everyone pick a character. If your character survies, you "win". Win what, I don't know, but it at least keeps you paying attention.
All in all, I suppose this is why I own a crudload of books and about 5 movies, and the movies were gifts.
Re:Movies (Score:2)
Congo was one of his best??? (Score:2)
Have you read _Andromeda Strain_ or _The Great Train Robbery_?
Re:Congo was one of his best??? (Score:2)
Chrichton always screws up the tree for the forest (Score:4, Interesting)
Jurassic Park: Yeah, we can re-create extinct animals and basically fuck with genetics all we want. So what do we do with it? Open a zoo.
Having "solved" time travel, in Timeline, what's it going to be used for? Stock market speculation? Changing history in a big land grab? No, an amusement park.
Chrichton stories are all about getting super powers, and then using them to order a pizza.
In regards to the games references... (Score:5, Insightful)
News, TV, Movies, Sports, Games...most all consumer products in some way pander to our need to make ourselves happy and distract us from the day to day.
Face it folks...immersive games are here to stay. They are the electronic crack of the 21st century.
Re:In regards to the games references... (Score:2)
Re:In regards to the games references... (Score:2)
The "Don't worry, be happy" phase we're going through now will eventually turn around.
Intimidating Computers (Score:3, Insightful)
Hello? Computers are still pretty intimidating for non-technical people in the early 2000s!
That's why Code Red/[insert name of favourite virus here], etc. proliferated so widely. Most people don't understand computers even to the level where they know how (or why) to install security patches.
Re:Intimidating Computers (Score:2, Insightful)
What do you mean you didnt have... (Score:1)
Re:What do you mean you didnt have... (Score:1, Interesting)
We live in interesting times. Where other sciences have reached maturity, and breakthroughs come slow and are profound, computer science is still young. There's so much to learn, so many ideas that haven't even been touched upon. Our breakthroughs will not change the world overnight, but they have and will continue to come much quicker.
In a best case scenario, I've only lived a quarter of my life. And I'm astonished. I sit back after playing the latest game and think, "Man, I remember back when everything was all pixellized.. And we thought the graphics were so realistic!"
I look at Windows XP, and think, "We wouldn't have dreamed some of these things were possible back then, now we take them for granted."
On a tangent, I think that's one of the lures of Linux. People who missed the original revolution due to being too young/too technically inept/etc., can take part in building something from the ground up.
Anyway, ten years ago, who the hell would've dreamed we would be able to watch movies on our PC?
Staggering.
Predictions... (Score:2, Interesting)
Most interestingly in his predictions, Crichton clearly expected that computers would soon be as normal as home appliances like washing machines."
It's amusing to look back at how wrong he or others (Bill Gates with "nobody will ever need more than 64Kb" (paraphrase)) have been wrong about their predictions, but it all goes under the heading of "Hindsight is 20/20", and I don't think we can fault Crichton for that.
Re:Predictions... (Score:2)
``I think there is a world market for maybe five computers''
Thomas Watson, IBM, 1943
an all Asimov books with their 'computers as big as a city'... those were the days...
Re:Predictions... (Score:2)
That might have been true, for computers with the price/performance ratio of 1943.
Re:Predictions... (Score:1)
and were the responsibility of trained personnel. (Score:1, Troll)
I didn't think they hired just anyone off the street to run these things.
Oh wait... I forgot about those MCSE's.
Perhaps they DO just hire any bum off the streets afterall...
Re:and were the responsibility of trained personne (Score:2)
Reminds me of my grandma (Score:5, Interesting)
Anyway. My grandma's problem wasn't that she was scared of using a computer. She'd say, "You don't know what you're talking about. I used to *run* a computer. I know all *about* computers. What the hell do I need a computer for?"
She used to be the administrator in charge of the computer for the Grand Rapids Police Department. In the 1950s. Punch cards. Hehe. Old people are funny.
Re:Reminds me of my grandma (Score:1)
Re:Reminds me of my grandma (Score:2, Interesting)
I imagine that someday my grandchildren will have jobs that I am unable to understand the need for.
I doubt it (Score:2)
I think the main difference is that my parents received a much more comprehensive education than my grandparents, and consequently didn't treat new technology as some sort of voodoo.
Re:Reminds me of my grandma (Score:2)
Heh, heh......I ain't laughing. I still find rubber bands in my moving boxes from the days of punch cards.
My co-worker is better! (Score:2)
She's this lovely lady in her sixties. She's doing office admin work here in our small office, just for spending money for when she flies to Palm Springs every winter. Until this job, she hasn't touched a computer in literally decades! It took her a while to get used to the idea of a mouse and a GUI, not to mention the flakiness of Office, but she's learning great. However, she used to be a crackerjack COBOL and FORTRAN programmer, so once in a while she still amazes me. She says she misses the old UNIX command line, and all that came with it.
Boy was she mad when she found out she couldn't have a look at the source code for MS Word, to see where the bugs were!
Bork!
Re:My co-worker is better! (Score:2)
Re:Reminds me of my grandma (Score:2)
To this day he does all of his taxes with a pencil and accounting paper and when my mother bought him a calculator in the early 80s it collected dust as he said, "What do I need a calculator for? I have the most powerful calculator in the world on the top of my head!"
He says that today about PCs
Re:Reminds me of my grandma (Score:2)
There's wisdom in age, but there's a lot of madness too.
funny book (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:funny book (Score:2)
Why would you want that? Do you not remember how in the 80's, every brand of computer (Apple, Atari, Commodore, etc) was incompatible? Often older models weren't compatible with newer ones -- C64 and VIC-20, Apple 2 and GS, etc.
Even now architectures chage quickly -- look at the changes of video cards and CPUs over the past 5-10 years. If you write code for a specific graphics card or CPU, it would be "out of date" in just a few years. Consider this: in 20 years, we've gone from 8 bit CPUs on the desktop to 32 bit CPUs. AMD's Hammer has the potential to make 64-bit desktop computers common. For most people knowing the specifics about the CPU is more info than is needed -- let the compiler do the optimizations.
Twitch Games (Score:1)
>there are indications that the mania for twitch games may be fading."
To be fair to Crichton, he was basicaly right for about 10 years. It wasn't untill Doom and the orriginal PLay Station that computer games were noticed by the mass market and became more than children's toys, or a specialist niche hobby.
I haven't read the book, but I'd like to know how long the reviewer thinks the book remained relevent? Anything over a decade would be pretty impressive.
Simon Hibbs
Re:Twitch Games (Score:1)
Re:Twitch Games (Score:2)
I guess you are right, if you choose to completely ignore the millions of dollars that went into Amiga games. Thousands where made, some sold a million. In fact in the late 80's/early 90's the PC was the complete laughing stock of the gaming community (4096 color Amiga or 16 (fixed) color EGA PC?). It wasn't until Doom that people even started switching.
Re:Twitch Games (Score:2)
Spectrum, C64, Amiga, Atari ST - they all had a totally mass market for games.
Then as now, the core market was the same - mostly teenage boys. Sure, there's plenty of adults today with PS2s and hardcore gaming rigs, but there were similar adults back then with the latest home computer (eg. the Amiga A2000). This is especially the case for the Amiga, which was *way* ahead of the PC but got slammed by Commodore screwing up and going bankrupt by investing in too many shit projects. For an example, StarGlider 2 was 5 years ahead of X-Wing, and conventional flight sims were ahead by a similar amount. The area which saw particularly impressive advances was the graphical adventure area, which was the precursor to all the Tomb Raider stuff - the Amiga and Atari ST were the prime movers in this.
Remember that Doom was a 2-D hack which just looked like 3-D. It wasn't until Quake that 3-D cards became required. The Amiga had 3-D games throughout though - the only thing that wasn't invented was the first-person shooter. Had some bright spark come up with that (and they certainly had platforms that'd support it!) then things would have been quite different. The only issue was that one type of game, it was nothing to do with the platform.
Grab.
on my P4 1.6GHz... (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:on my P4 1.6GHz... (Score:1)
5.01*5.02-5.03/2.04*100.5+3.06+20.07-200.08+3
-80.80
scale=5
5.01*5.02-5.03/2.04*100.5+3.06
-126.79155
It'd be nice to get something like the right answer.
Now, it's the robots (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:Now, it's the robots (Score:2)
Re:Now, it's the robots (Score:2)
Got to watch out for those robots. At least they sell Robot Insurance [robotcombat.com].
Pick on Crichton if you must... (Score:4, Interesting)
A more enlightened approach would have been to observe what people were actually doing and how a vastly faster computer of small size might be useable to them, in ways other than balancing their checkbook.
Science fiction and some really old comic books are amazingly on target, frequently, although they still depicted computers as being massive things.
...but go back and read McLuhan afterward. (Score:2)
Relatedly, I have an issue of Amazing Stories with prognostications on "Life In The Year 2000." I'm still waiting for the 4-day, 20-hour, full-pay workweek, the spray-washable house, and the cheap energy [publicpower.ca]. The moral of the story is, you may get some of it right some of the time, but you're never going to be 100% on the money.
My generation was so lucky... (Score:5, Funny)
Just the perfect time for that expert blend of
1. Low self esteem
2. Teenage years
3. Dawn of the PC.
to bring us to where we are now...still dateless and coding.
Geek used to be a 4 letter word, now it's a six figure one.
Re:My generation was so lucky... (Score:2)
Now, there's so many layers that it's kind of intimidating to a new developer...
Ladybird for managers (Score:1)
- It is difficult today to remember how intimidating computers were for non-technical people in the early 1980s [...]
... this reminds me of one of my favourite bits of "latter-day aracana": Back in the olden days, when small computers were bigger than large cars, Managers of large companies introducing the behemoths were on occasion given (children's) Ladybird [kinetonbooks.co.uk] books, specifically the one [digibarn.com] titled "The Computer [commscene.com]" as a primer.(Come to think of it - I wonder who had the means to put them through the embarassement
Oh, the irony (Score:4, Funny)
20 years ago: Prepare now, for computers will become an important part of your life.
Today: Those of us who use computers most often today tend to have no life.
games won't last... (Score:4, Insightful)
crichton's take on video games reminds me of what some futurists said around the birth of the television.
they said that the television was going to be a great instrument of education, and bring thousands into enlightenment.
yeah, right. -insert ironic tv laugh track here-
i guess crichton fell into the same trap as many futurists: technology as savior. a lot of us see new technology and envision how it will improve us all.
meanwhile, some guy somewhere is writing the first donkey kong game. somewhere there must be a graph comparing how many cpu cycles of all of the processors ever made have been spent playing games versus other computer-related exploits. it would be an interesting comparison. as a victim of civilization iii, i can attest to the fact that a lot of the good electronic life is spent taking a lot of digital crack.
5.01*5.02-5.03/2.04... (Score:2)
press enter.
-126.79217967914438502673796791444
I love fast machines.
Cool
Re:5.01*5.02-5.03/2.04... (Score:2)
Re:5.01*5.02-5.03/2.04... (Score:2)
Get what you pay for?
I actually just love the fact that Calc will take something like this via cut and paste and do the math correctly.
SORRY (Score:2)
<TROLL ON>
Get what you pay for?
</TROLL OFF>
as a joke...
friggin preview...
Crichton on copyright reform (Score:5, Insightful)
Perhaps the most interesting part of this book is where Crichton discusses copyright. He takes the opinion that copyright will need serious reform as the amount of electronic content increases because of the simple fact that people want to copy (he cited the success of VHS over laserdisc to support this position). This jumped out at me because I read the book back when Napster was at its peak. Unfortunately, Crichton seems to have underestimated the power of the entertainment industry - the DMCA is almost the exact opposite of what he envisioned as the future of digital content. Maybe Crichton's next novel will be about a group of people who narrowly escape death while attempting to view copyrighted material they legally purchased...
Reasearch quality in Crichton books always high (Score:2, Informative)
I have not yet read Electronic Life, but I have always been impressed with the level of research Crichton's narratives display, and while this was one of his earlier works, I wouldn't be suprised if he decided not to include all the material his research revealed for the sake of readability.
Jurassic Park stands out in my mind as the most well researched work of Crichton's, so much so that most people I know who didn't enjoy reading it say it was because he dwelled on the science in favor of the narrative too often. I like Crichton's approach personally, because for me it grounds the story better in the science of today, and shows the reader how his world developed out of our own without fantastic leaps of science. Authors like Gibson, who write great narrative and have turned out to be prescient about technology but never dwelled on how their world came to be out of the one we live in, have always felt more like fantasy than science fiction to me. This is because I don't feel as connected to their world without them illustrating a plausible course of events that could lead society from where it is down a path to the world that they envision.In any case, I was already planning to purchase Crichton's newest work, Prey [amazon.com], but now I 'll have to go grab this one as well.
Troll or no? Re:Reasearch quality in Crichton... (Score:2)
If it is a troll, comparing Crichton to Gibson is a masterstroke!
Re:Troll or no? Re:Reasearch quality in Crichton.. (Score:2, Interesting)
It is not meant as a troll. Don't get me wrong, I like Gibson. But he tends to do a lot of hand waving - explaining how AI, surgical and cybernetic augmentation, private space stations and VR so immersive that it can kill you came to be common place are glossed over. It is left as an excerise for the reader's imagination how all this came to be. Crichton on the other hand ties all of his science fiction to science fact; insects in amber to DNA to supercomputing gene sequencers to overambitious developers and their patented living creations.
I don't fault Gibson at all, because the world he created was so far removed from the one that he actually lived in, but for me the suspension of disbelief is much more easily conjured when I start in the concrete and fact-based and am lead to the what-if through the narrative. Gibson had no choice but to start with the what-if, and for that reason I could never feel as immersed in his world as I can in Crichton's. At the same time, Gibson scores more points than Crichton for his prophetic prediction of the 'Net, and as of yet no T-Rex's or Compy's have shown up on the mainland ;)
As much catching up as reality has done since Neuromancer and its sequels were conceived, the reader has to invent for himselfs the paths that lead from the world as we know it to the world in which Gibson's characters operate. Crichton draws that path much more clearly, and for that reason I find it much plausible. I will be the first to admit that plausible doesn't directly equate to enjoyable, as I enjoy George Lucas' to no end, but in my mind.
Star Wars and Neuromancer are in my opinion great works of technologically themed fantasy, whereas I think of Jurassic Park and Andromeda Strain as great science fiction. The distinction between science fiction and fantasy have been as hotly debated on /. before. I don't consider myself on expert on either, but perhaps this better states my opinion on the matter.
Re:Troll or no? Re:Reasearch quality in Crichton.. (Score:2)
Gibson, meanwhile, belongs to that group of SciFi writers who prefers to focus on how individuals and societies might be changed by some future technology, and never mind how the tech got there or how it works. For my taste, Gibson is also much better at developing interesting characters--so much so that the "Virtual Light" trilogy took me a little while to warm up to. It was very character focused, and the blinkenlights were kept more in the background than I was used to. Nowadays, though, my fave "SciFi" author is Iain (M.) Banks, whose stories are all people/societies, and when the tech comes up at all it's usually just handwaving on the order of "here's a glossy brochure about technobabble, but let's set that aside for now and talk about the characters some more".
Re:Troll or no? Re:Reasearch quality in Crichton.. (Score:2)
Science fiction???? (Score:4, Insightful)
He does? I've never seen any. He writes technological thrillers. From Andromeda Strain (a good one) to ER (a mediocre one).
Re:Science fiction???? (Score:2)
Eh? Most of Crichton's works are based on science that either doesn't exist yet, or hasn't been used in the ways he's conjuring it up... that's what defines science fiction.
Jurassic Park (dinosaurs haven't been cloned), Andromeda Strain (more back then, before we saw ebola), Sphere (alien object that can manifest our subconscious thoughts) - all great sci-fi works, even though they aren't set in a futuristic outer-space setting.
I kinda wish ER were sci-fi - it'd make it more interesting. "Patient is a three-year-old android, with possible faulty bios. Somebody get me some nanoprobes!"
Re:Science fiction???? (Score:2)
His work usually has science or technology *in* it, but it takes more than just that before I'd call him a science fiction writer. It hard to write contemporary fiction that doesn't after all.
Jurrasic Park is a good example. It's related to science fiction but I dont' think it really is. It's King Kong updated with a some technospeak wrapped around to make it seem plausible. The fact that the technospeak is fairly good makes it a better giant monster movie, but not science fiction. The science/technology is there to support the giant monster story. A science fiction story would start the other way around. With a "suppose that you could harvest DNA from extinct species - what would happen?". There are lots of good science fiction stories that could come from that "what if", but none of them are Jurrasic Park. Going from zero to a giant dino amusement park in one go just doesn't make sense. By the time the tech was advanced enough for that it would have crept out and shown up in a million subtle and non-subtle ways through the society. A science fiction writer would have tried to deal with all those things. JP doesn't, because the author isn't interested - he's just trying to make a monster book/movie.
The science/tech is like Batman's utility belt on the old TV series - it just has whatever is needed to get out of the current plothole. I don't consider Batman to be science fiction either, or King Kong, or James Bond. Star Wars gets in, I guess becaue "everyone" considers it science fiction - even though it is devoid of science or the socal effects of science.
Further I don't think Crichton considers himself a science fiction writer. He writes mainstream fiction that tends to use current or very near future technology. If nothing else, he makes *far* too much money to be a science fiction writer
Re:Science fiction???? (Score:2)
You're right: I think most of Crichton's works would fall more under the 'monster' genre, and I would never think of James Bond as sci-fi, despite the definition I gave. Just hadn't thought about that when I fired off my original post.
Jargon (Score:5, Funny)
When I was in mainframes in the early 80's, the mainframe repair guy had a good one.
He was on the phone talking to the refrigerator repair guy and told him:
Tech: "My refrigerator is down."
Repair Guy: (longish pause) "'Down?' where?"
Today, that probably wouldn't have been a big deal.
OTOH, that was also a job that had so conditioned me that I started to type a "9" to get an outside line on my home phone.
(good grief: I'm 34 and talking about the "good old days")
Re:Jargon (Score:2)
When I was in mainframes in the early 80's...
(good grief: I'm 34 and talking about the "good old days")
Good grief, you're referring to working on mainframes (when you were 14!) as the good ol' days :-).
Crichton has a bad track record for science & (Score:2)
Glenn Reynolds [instapundit.com] has been wondering just how much Crichton's new novel (on Nanotechnology) will get wrong or sensationalize [instapundit.com]. The worry being that Crichton could easily cause an anti-nano-science backlash by putting the phear of grey goo into Joe Sixpack...
Gotta credit Peter Norton (Score:4, Interesting)
you show up to work one day and here is a computer sitting at your desk, you haven't seen one before, don't want one AND the boss is expecting you to become vastly MORE productive. now.
Anyway, that is the supposition he started the book from. Good book as I recall, no BS.So where some people saw panic, or hyped everything up others saw and siezed opportunity.
soon to be made into a $90 MM film... (Score:2, Funny)
We used circular slide rules to beat computers (Score:2)
We used to race computers to a solution using a circular slide rule. We won about half the time.
Oh did I mention it was mostly solid analytic geometry problems?
Dude, you forgot Levy's "Hackers" (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Dude, you forgot Levy's "Hackers" (Score:2)
I'll second that. I read that book when I started programming and I was hooked.
Prediction from 1983 (Score:2)
Re:Has no predictions? (Score:5, Funny)
HA! Well we proved him wrong THERE.
didn't we...
didn't I... ?
Re:Has no predictions? (Score:1)
-aiabx
Re:Has no predictions? (Score:1)
Re:lies, damn lies and trolls (Score:1, Offtopic)
Re:Eating Games... (Score:2)
was Pac-Man the first ever game with "powerups"?
Re:Crichton's errors (Score:2)
I remember reading the book some years ago (when I was much younger), and taking it pretty seriously. I'd try reading it again, just to see if the movie's misrepresented his point, but I'm terrified I'd only get about halfway through it before either the laughter or the embarassment killed me.
Other than A Case of Need and The Great Train Robbery, Crichton has certainly earned his place on the NYT Bestseller List. And that's not a compliment.