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The sci-fi legends who shaped today's tech
Posted on 20 Nov 2009 at 16:17
However, it was with the Cyberpunk movement that sci-fi really met the computing world head-on. Spearheaded by William Gibson’s Neuromancer, Cyberpunk revelled in a synthesis of Raymond Chandler and Philip K Dick, taking stylistic cues from Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner – an adaptation of Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? – and its combination of neon-lit future and urban decay. Neuromancer was particularly influential.
If Gibson didn’t coin the term “cyberspace” in his debut novel or the short stories that preceded it, he certainly popularised it, and this is where the concept of the internet as an alternate reality where lives can be transformed began.
Gibson helped focus the geek imagination on the possibilities of online worlds and global networks, and on the convergence of hi-tech and the human body; issues that would be further explored in The Matrix in 1999 (the film’s title is itself employed by Gibson as another name for cyberspace).
The motherlode
Yet Neuromancer is far from being the most influential novel in the history of IT. For that, we need to look to Neal Stephenson’s 1992 book, Snow Crash. Stephenson isn’t only an excellent writer, but a computing enthusiast and knowledgeable programmer – the sort of guy who plays with Mathematica in his spare time. Blessed with a big imagination and a sense of what makes the geek heart tick, Stephenson expanded on the ideas of Gibson and Vinge with a vision of how a virtual-reality-based internet, dubbed the Metaverse, might look. In doing so, he helped popularise the use of the word “avatar” as an online persona while inspiring two major Web 2.0 enterprises, and the online world from a major games console.
The most obvious sign of Snow Crash’s influence is Linden Labs’ Second Life. While Linden founder Philip Rosedale claims that his creation predates Snow Crash, he’s admitted that reading the novel helped crystallise ideas. “When Snow Crash came out, I was already really intent on the idea of creating a virtual world like Second Life,” Rosedale told the New York Times in 2007. “But Snow Crash certainly painted a compelling picture of what such a virtual world could look like in the near future, and I found that inspiring.”
Despite this, and the fact that chapters of the novel were made available within Second Life, Stephenson himself has always played down the link. “I have nothing negative to say about it,” Stephenson said in an interview with the Chicago Tribune, before explaining that “every hour I spend in a virtual reality is an hour I’m not spending reading Dickens or visiting Tuscany”.
The second real-life product spun from Snow Crash also becomes obvious once you recall the book’s vision of “Earth”, a 3D, global information tool that combines data feeds with geographical information:
“Hiro turns his attention to Earth. The level of detail is fantastic. The resolution, the clarity, just the look of it tells Hiro, or anyone else who knows computers, that this piece of software is some heavy shit. It’s not just continents and oceans. It looks exactly like the earth would look from a point in geosynchronous orbit directly above LA, complete with weather systems and vast spinning galaxies of clouds, hovering just above the surface of the globe, casting gray shadows on the oceans-and polar ice caps, fading and fragmenting into the sea.”
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They probably have run out of steam - they being the authors of yesterday - we're now waiting for the new authors to set the scene no matter how radical or bizarre their ideas will be - as long as they entertain and use a bit of magical hardware in some new innovative (or not) way. But I do hope that they will remain brave no matter how ridiculous their ideas seem today or for that matter tomorrow ;)
By nicomo on 20 Nov 2009 
There are no multitouch displays in Minority Report. He never touches them.
By bogus39 on 22 Nov 2009
Problem with sci fi
Sf is full of fantastic ideas and has some excellent writers, though it's fair to say that readers of sf are looked down upon by the literary establishment. More on this here:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/booksblog/2009/jan
/28/science-fiction-genre
Generally though, sf has moved on, predicting another gadget is not riveting stuff, so you get people like Greg Egan looking at harder stuff, like the fundamental laws of physics and using that to provide drama. (He does it well, unlikely as that sounds).
If you wanted a taste of modern sf (which declares itself as such), then you could by any one of a number of end-of-year short sf compendiums, or you could subscribe to the like of Interzone or Locus.
By RichardFletcher on 22 Nov 2009
true history of viruses
Pleasant to see someone finally copping to what many have known for decades, indeed, for a lifetime.
But they get some stuff wrong. I note especially:
"However, it was The Shockwave Rider’s description of a self-replicating program that could propagate across a network, destroying all bonds of secrecy, that had unintended results."
Huh? I predicted computer viruses in 1969, published it in a short story in 1970 ("The Scarred Man" in VENTURE) AND also propagated the first virus on the DARPA net.
I sent a memo announcing this and at a meeting, the DARPA folk at Livermore said, sure, you can do that--but why would anyone else? The story describes exactly why (calling them viruses, and predicting software to block them, the first called Vaccine).
The rest of this description, of the 1982 CPU counter, is also far off the mark.
By GregoryBenford on 25 Nov 2009
FICTION HAS SEEN THE TECH FUTURE
_The Wrist-Radio/CellPhone
in Dick Tracey comic.
_The networks and database
of Orwell's 1884.
Any more ?
+++++
By denlile on 26 Nov 2009
Bullshit
Was this article originally intended for Viz. It's just a series half assed ideas that vaguely fit a model of old sci-fi new technology. I'm currently not aware of any all knowing AI and certainly not one that fit's into a handset that exists outside of time and space.
By dodge1963 on 2 Dec 2009
Yes I agree. I think the main reason is that technology briefly caught up with SF and today's tech wizards are pushing blue sky thinking way ahead of what's possible (quantum computing, nanabots, robotics, flying robots etcetc). With string theory and quantum physics people are already theorising about things being in two places at once, multiple universes, particles having an unlimited number of states.
The problem is that these guys are way ahead of the SF writers.
But don't worry - SF writers WILL catch up and move ahead. Technology has just caught them by surprise that's all.
Dave
By zzdave on 3 Dec 2009
Here's A Challenge
Go to http://www.worldlifesite.com, get that sci-fi and read it all the way through. Then post here on whether or not you think the sci-fi in that first installment doesn't allow for an imagination to ponder on the possiblities of future technologies.
By YouRJoking on 28 Dec 2009
For more details about purchasing this feature and/or images for editorial usage, please contact Jasmine Samra on pictures@dennis.co.uk
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