Tuesday, February 18, 2014
Sci-fi framing: things that sound like total bullshit are actually our reality.
I'm reading William Gibson's Neuromancer for the first time. There's some vague irony in the fact that the book was published in 1984. But, given that perfectly ideal benchmark of time, to modern day, a lot of technology that vastly crossed Clark's "advanced to the point of magic" line in the book are common place, or boardering on commonplace today. Visual displays on hardwired glasses? Global net uplink via satellite? Sense-sharing technology? All of it perfectly prophetic. But it's the little stuff that kills. As my iphone died streaming music from a nearly infinte library of music from a cloud service, I thought to plug it into my laptop for power, one of the most mundane and insignificant moments of my day, and realized, that I just "reached for a specialized power chord designed to tranfer energy or information from nearly any powered device in my house to my pocket computer," (ideally, I mean, I could power my phone off my TV. MY TV.), and how, though that reads exactly like the kind of convenience bullshit description line in this or any work of genre sci-fi, it turns out to be a real moment in my day. Sci-fi, as it pulls on its big boy pants as "speculative fiction," remains the little genre that could. Bravo sci-fi. Bravo and kudos. Live long and prosper.
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