Sci-Fa

Zorks. Borgs and solar systems. Mother ships and Planet Zyclone and teleportation. Androids and cyborgs and robots and superhuman strength. Jetpacks and light-sabres and Snork guns and pulsar beams and Xanatron. All those “trons” and “orks.” Those Science Fiction (SF) writers spared nothing-they were creative as hell, they imagined like no-one else did, they created cults. Sci-fi created a culture-a culture far removed from the goings-on on boring Earth. Those writers, some of them brash and in the limelight, some bespectacled and room-bound, were all creators of universes. They rambled.

But sometimes they told the truth. About the future.

What drove those science fiction authors to imagine weird stuff? Weird stuff apart, how did they manage to tell us tales of things to come? How does, as the popular phrase goes, “science fiction become science fact”? Why is sci-fi some kind of benchmark, as in “the truth today is stranger than science fiction”?

But these are idle questions, and the idea here is to explore stuff people said that is now fact, some stuff that will-in our limited opinions-remain in the clichéd realm of science fiction, and what debates are currently on about our future as a race. Think gizmos, universes, teleportation. But forget the Zorks. We made that up.

The Man, The Machine, The Cliché
We’d be insulting your awareness if we were to tell you that androids, cyborgs, robots, and other superhuman stuff is the most common theme in SF. (Actually, these share top spot with space travel.) It’s quite simple, really-if you’ll let us be analytical. Desire drives imagination, and what desire is stronger than to be stronger, mightier, faster, …? As for space travel, the underlying motif is freedom… but we digress.

Here’s Edward Ellis, in The Steam Man of the Prairies (1868), about a robot of a sort: “It was about ten feet in height, measuring to the top of the ‘stove-pipe hat,’ which was fashioned after the common order of felt coverings, with a broad brim, all painted a shiny black. The face was made of iron, painted a black color, with a pair of fearful eyes, and a tremendous grinning mouth.” Note the language, note that it’s stuff like this that made illustrators do all those tin-can robots, and note the lack of imagination: the excerpt screams, “Mechanical Man!”… and little else.
And now here we are: ten feet? No, EveR-2 Muse is petite. (Digit, February 2007… remember? Take vitamin supplements.) Face of iron? Not quite… EveR-2 Muse has a face of real flesh. Black? No, let’s not get into racism and racist stuff… fearful eyes? Well, The Muse is supposed to have sensitive eyes (though she does end up having fearful eyes, in the sense of being as dead-looking as they are). A “tremendous grinning” mouth? EveR-2 Muse has a sweet, lipsticky mouth.

Much more importantly, the Steam Man was imagination, but EveR-2 Muse is a flesh-but-not-blood robot that exists.

There is, obviously, the “stronger and mightier” theme in the Steam Man: he possesses exceptional strength, so much so that he pulled a chariot in his role as Horse. Besides, he is 10 feet tall. Refer Virtual Weapons In Real Life, Digit, July 2007-the US now has an exoskeleton for soldiers that allows them to lift very heavy things,run very fast, and leap into the air like no-one leapt before.

Biological evolution is too slow for the human species. Over the next few decades, it’s going to be left in the dust”
Ray Kurzweil, Inventor and Futurist

Coming back, that steam-powered concoction was not called a robot; the first mention of the word was in the play R.U.R. (Rossum’s Universal Robots) (English edition 1920) by a certain Karel Capek (don’t blame him-he didn’t name himself). Here, too, the robots are simply human-like machines. They also happen to be slaves, but badly-treated ones. Then someone gives them emotions, they revolt, kill most people, and take over. Bring on the clichés… but it wasn’t a cliché in 1920!

No history lessons here, so we won’t tell you why they were called “robots.” Figure that one out. But we dug up this one about digging machines-that they feature in H G Wells’ War of the Worlds-and here’s one line: “So far as I could see, the (digging machine) was without a directing Martian at all.” Meaning some directing was required, so the machine was self-directing… meaning it had some intelligence. That might be (in our opinion) the first mention of a “real” robot. This, in addition to the “taking over” theme, would involve some talk of AI. We’ll come to that in a bit.

Androids are automatons that resemble human beings in the essential aspects, and so “android” is a generic term. But cyborgs are augmented in some way; they are super, well, super-something… either their senses are more acute, or they can live a thousand years, or something like that. But you already know, if you’ve been reading Digit. Refer a couple of our past issues.

Then take this one, from Cloak of Anarchy, 1972, by Larry Niven: “…when Ron was flush with money… he’d bought an implant-watch. He told time by one red mark and two red lines glowing beneath the skin of his wrist.” Fa-sci-nating? No-one’s done this, but we can. If a cyber-punk called Stelarc could implant an entire ear into his forearm (Digit, July 2007), why not a little watch with glowing hands? Stelarc’s ear is clearly visible, meaning it’s pretty close to the surface of the skin. A watch wouldn’t be too hard. Ask a medical expert if you don’t believe us. That guy went ahead and did it; you could if you wanted to. Not that you do.

“You got a logic in your house. It’s got keys instead of dials and you punch the keys for what you wanna get. It’s hooked in to the tank… Say you punch ‘Station SNAFU’ on your logic. Relays in the tank take over an’ whatever vision-program SNAFU is telecastin’ comes on your logic’s screen. Or you punch ‘Sally Hancock’s Phone’ an’ the screen blinks an’ sputters an’ you’re hooked up with the logic in her house an’ if somebody answers you got a vision-phone connection. But besides that, if you punch for the weather forecast, that comes on the screen too. The tank is a big buildin’ full of all the facts in creation an’ all the recorded telecasts that ever was made-an’ it’s hooked in with all the other tanks all over the country-an’ everything you wanna know or see or hear, you punch for it an’ you get it. Very convenient. Also it does math for you…”

First mention of the Internet? Could be. Computers in the house; connected to a server; podcasts; voice chat; a weather widget; Google servers that host much of the info we have access to; and servers connected to each other. And what else is the Internet?

1946! The mind boggles!
The Internet is quite something else when it comes to foresight: no-one knows what’ll happen the day after tomorrow. Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson-1992-actually foresees Second Life!

“Hiro sees two young couples, probably using their parents’ computers for a double date in the Metaverse, climbing down out of Port Zero, which is the local port of entry and monorail stop. He is not seeing real people, of course. This is all a part of the moving illustration drawn by his computer according to specifications coming down the fiber-optic cable. The people are pieces of software called avatars. They are the audiovisual bodies that people use to communicate with each other in the Metaverse.”

Stephenson’s “Metaverse” is, of course, the Internet. Specifically, the part of the Net that hosts virtual life.

Still, as far as we know, no-one predicted the magnitude of the speeds we have today on our undersea cables-or the volume of the traffic-or even that they would be under the sea. Sci-Fa.

Artificial Idiots
It’s time we quoted Arthur C Clarke, an SF god. Here’s from The City and the Stars, 1956: “…the all-but-infinite intellect of the Central Computer. It was difficult not to think of the Central Computer as a living entity, localized in a single spot, though actually it was the sum total of all of the machines in Diaspar. Even if it was not alive in the biological sense, it certainly possessed at least as much awareness and self-consciousness as a human being.” Primitive, simplistic, almost child-like.

But then here’s from Ralph 124c 41 , by Hugo Gernsback, 1911, in relation to voice recognition: “…she called out sharply: ‘Lux!’ The delicate detectophone mechanism of the Luminor responded instantly to her command; the room was flooded at once with the beautiful cold pink-white Luminor light…” 1911 for voice recognition is prodigious indeed. But we’re still at 99.8% accuracy or thereabouts, and that’s the theoretical figure-and remember, 99.8 is very different from 99.9 is different from 99.99. Sad.

Let’s cease and desist. They imagined what was to come; it turned out to be harder than anyone had imagined; and it didn’t come.

Nobel Laureate Herbert Simon, an authority on AI and a pioneer in the field, said that by 1985, machines would be capable of doing any work a man could do. KRASH, KA-BOOM, and PLONK are the sounds of that ludicrously optimistic prediction falling flat-nuff said. Sci-Fa-not.