[ih] Fiction->History

Larry Sheldon larrysheldon at cox.net
Thu Sep 24 21:27:28 UTC 2015


On 9/24/2015 10:56, Bill Ricker wrote:
> On Wed, Sep 23, 2015 at 10:27 PM, Larry Sheldon <larrysheldon at cox.net>
> wrote:
>
>>
>> Fiction->History
>>
> ​There are two sorts of SciFi (aside from the Fantastic) - those that
> aren't facts yet​
>
> ​but likely will be if we persevere, and ​those that could be facts if we
> screw things up even worse. Those writing near-term SF are well advised to
> leverage  William Gibson's aphorism "The future is already here - it's just
> not evenly distributed" to sniff out what is in the labs and the pockets of
> the early adopters.
>
>
>>>> In 1977 there was a book titled “The Adolescence of P-1” (Thomas Joseph
>> Ryan)
>>
>
> I thought I remembered this was either serialized or first appeared as a
> novella in one of the magazines before release as a book, but Google finds
> no proof of that? Odd.
>     There was a flurry of pre-cyber-punk AI / rogue-programmer stories in
> Analog in the late 70's, i recall one featured a female hacker but i forget
> the title, and that it was the month before or after P-1 so it seemed a
> trend.

I guess I had forgotten how much there is--I was a Heinlein reader 
sub-teen but in general lost interest in SciFi--this book and "Contact" 
(and maybe "Broca's Brain") are the only ones that come to mind since 
then (unless you want to include George Orwell, Aldous Huxley, Ayn Rand, 
and George Lucas).

I mentioned "P-1" here because it is the only one of the lot (that I can 
remember) where the _network_ is a (the) major protagonist.
  ​


-- 
sed quis custodiet ipsos custodes? (Juvenal)



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