21–30 of 44 posts
Kind of hard for SF stories featuring organic life (i.e. humans) to be based around Jupiter because of the planet's incredibly strong magnetic field and hence killing radiation belts - like the Van Allen belts around Earth, but much worse. Probes to the Jovian system have to be heavily hardened.
It is always fascinating to see how much influence authors and scientists have had on each other throughout history. You sometimes see clear examples of how fiction fuels technology, and sometimes technology inspires fiction. As a writer who hasn’t been published yet, I find that most of my stories start by imagining where today’s science might take us next, though every now and then, I catch a glimpse of something t…
as a high schooler I took a summer class in “reading & writing scifi” offered by MIT Junction. it was very influential on my intellectual development and after that I focused myself on learning software and electronics, the only crafts I saw that could give me the power to pull parts of the visions into the present. a few weeks ago I started on a focused read of historical scifi, in chronological order, that had some…
It is always fascinating to see how much influence authors and scientists have had on each other throughout history. You sometimes see clear examples of how fiction fuels technology, and sometimes technology inspires fiction. As a writer who hasn’t been published yet, I find that most of my stories start by imagining where today’s science might take us next, though every now and then, I catch a glimpse of something t…
I find Charles Stross' blog to be quite informative.
He has a tendency to predict a thing, write a book demonstrating how it will be good, and then absolutely hate the real world implications of the technology.
Famously he picked up Nick Szabo's old whitepaper on smart contracts, and envisaged a world where the technology would be used to disrupt an evil US government. Making it too hard for them to examine complex business structures.
By the time we got smart contracts, he was dead set against their use. And has written a lot about how corporations are in fact evil AI running on the operating system of the government.
He also has a variant of crypto currency in one of his novels, used to trade at light speed (so incredibly slowly) against distant space colonies. He is quite anti crypto, and I believe if such a system were deployed he would be quite against it.
The problem I guess is that its fun to imagine a thing, but not as fun always to live with it.
The author of that article somehow managed to miss the most famous Jupiter story of all. Arthur C. Clarke's "A Meeting with Medusa." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Meeting_with_Medusa That novella was so enduringly influential that noted SF authors Stephen Baxter (a collaborator with, and sort of heir to, Clarke,) and Alastair Reynolds wrote a very good sequel a few years ago: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Medus…
https://scifi.stackexchange.com/questions/177/why-is-the-des...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Thanks for your comment, that’s exactly what I was wondering about. For me, I actually tend to see things the other way around where authors often inspire tech. Example, engineers who watched Star Trek as kids and ended up designing the first flip phones. Sometimes we build things simply because technology finally makes them possible, and only later do we realize it’s straight out of a story we grew up with. Especial…
while i agree in principle, you seem to make it sound like without a science fiction story, some things would not have been invented. but i disagree with that. the thing is that science fiction is the imagination of humans of how the future could look like but new ideas in tech come from the same source. that is, while star trek may have predicted phones and tablets they were not invented because of star trek. they w…
In my case, my imagination pulled me into writing, where I conjure things up, so I definitely feel that inspirational side, even if the ideas themselves aren’t always “original.” To the creator, though, they can feel original.
As I write fiction, I notice I often end up predicting futures where humans might go next. So you’re right, writing can be as much about prediction as inspiration. But I also like to think that, every now and then, a truly new paradigm emerges, something unpredictable, that most people didn’t even realize was needed until it existed. Sometimes, society doesn’t know what it needs until it’s already here.
Thanks for the link, really interesting list!
It is always fascinating to see how much influence authors and scientists have had on each other throughout history. You sometimes see clear examples of how fiction fuels technology, and sometimes technology inspires fiction. As a writer who hasn’t been published yet, I find that most of my stories start by imagining where today’s science might take us next, though every now and then, I catch a glimpse of something t…
>Is the future mostly written by visionaries in fiction, or by the engineers and scientists bringing it to life? I find Charles Stross' blog to be quite informative. He has a tendency to predict a thing, write a book demonstrating how it will be good, and then absolutely hate the real world implications of the technology. Famously he picked up Nick Szabo's old whitepaper on smart contracts, and envisaged a world wher…
I’m dreading the day I hear, “I’m sorry Ed, I’m afraid I can’t do that.” (kidding).
Kind of hard for SF stories featuring organic life (i.e. humans) to be based around Jupiter because of the planet's incredibly strong magnetic field and hence killing radiation belts - like the Van Allen belts around Earth, but much worse. Probes to the Jovian system have to be heavily hardened.
Are the moons toast from it too? Which ones would be amenable to life?
Kind of hard for SF stories featuring organic life (i.e. humans) to be based around Jupiter because of the planet's incredibly strong magnetic field and hence killing radiation belts - like the Van Allen belts around Earth, but much worse. Probes to the Jovian system have to be heavily hardened.
Well, life on Jupiter is possible, but "organic" life seems way less likely. "Organic" means carbon compounds, and there's not a whole lot of carbon on Jupiter.
It is always fascinating to see how much influence authors and scientists have had on each other throughout history. You sometimes see clear examples of how fiction fuels technology, and sometimes technology inspires fiction. As a writer who hasn’t been published yet, I find that most of my stories start by imagining where today’s science might take us next, though every now and then, I catch a glimpse of something t…
>Is the future mostly written by visionaries in fiction, or by the engineers and scientists bringing it to life? I find Charles Stross' blog to be quite informative. He has a tendency to predict a thing, write a book demonstrating how it will be good, and then absolutely hate the real world implications of the technology. Famously he picked up Nick Szabo's old whitepaper on smart contracts, and envisaged a world wher…