7 March 2013

Birthdays
Peter Sarsgaard b. 1971
Matthew Vaughn b. 1971
Donna Murphy b. 1959
Elizabeth Moon b. 1945 (won 2004 Nebula for The Speed of Dark)

We have a same year, same day pair. Sarsgaard is an actor whose best known work in the genre is as the villain in the unfortunate Green Lantern from 2011, while Vaughn is a writer and director, notably of X-Men:First Class and Kick-Ass. 

But being a guy, I chose the picture of Donna Murphy from Star Trek: Insurrection, where she played Picard's love interest.

 

Prediction: 2001: The United States and the Soviet Union form an alliance to counteract the growing power of the Chinese.

Predictor: Arthur C. Clarke in the 1968 book adaptation of 2001: A Space Odyssey

Reality: By 2001, the Soviets went back to being the Russians, and while the U.S. isn't exactly allies with either, we are much closer to the Chinese, mostly because we owe them a lot of money.

In 1968, it wasn't clear how big a deal the Chinese would become, so ACC gets some credit for that.

Looking one day ahead... INTO THE FUTURE! Yet another French postcard, the kind men like. And women like, too, if they want to know what life will be like... IN THE YEAR 2000!
   
 Join us then... IN THE FUTURE! 

24 February 2013

 Birthdays
Edward James Olmos b. 1947

...in the year 2001!

-->Predictor:   Gen. Carlos Romulo (Philippine delegate to the United Nations):

Colonialism will have ended...

Instead of 35 million increase a year, world population will increase by 100 million a year...

I might be able to talk to Manila from New York with something I have in my pocket...

Predictor: Oliver Read (editor Radio & Television News):

All rails and planes will be radio-controlled...

Long distance shipping by rockets...

Atomic energy supplies electrical power, solar radiation supplies heat...

Telephones with attached TVs are the standard...

Trips to the moon and Mars should be a reality...

Anti-gravity devices will allow us to float from place to place...

Electronic devices will be able to pick up and decode thought waves...

Reality: The general is obviously not a tech guy and Mr. Read definitely is, but the general gets two out of three (the actual increase per year in 2001 is closer to 70 million), while being generous, Read gets the first one then misses six straight. Planes are more like in constant radio contact rather than truly radio controlled. Rockets use a hell of a lot of fuel and are very hard to land, solar radiated heat is still a very small part of the grid, TV phones exist but aren't standard, space travel, not so much. Anti-gravity was a popular concept in mid-century sci-fi, but that's just a sign that these guys didn't really understand Einstein's ideas about gravity very well. Being anti-gravity means being anti-geometry, and not in the sense that you really didn't enjoy geometry class. 

And then there's electronic telepathy. Well, not yet, not close and - if Odin, Vishnu and the little baby Jebus are kind - not in my lifetime.

 Looking one day ahead... INTO THE FUTURE! We finish off the Amazing Stories predictions. A numbers guy doesn't do that well with numbers and a guy who makes pencils tells us... PENCILS ARE AWESOME!

Hard to argue with that.

 
Join us then... IN THE FUTURE!

23 February 2013

Birthdays
Dakota Fanning b. 1994
Kelly Macdonald b. 1976
Majel Barrett-Roddenberry b. 1932 died 12/18/2008  

I love Kelly Macdonald's work, but most of it is not in the sci-fi genre. Ms. Roddenberry, on the other hand, did little else but work on sci-fi TV shows, so she earns a photo.
 

What life will be like... in the year 2001!

Predictor: Leo Cherne (Executive Director, Research Institute of America)
Everyone has access to free power created by solar, atomic energy will be widespread...
The average American will have a 24 hour work week, 6 hours a day four days a week...

Predictor: Hubert J. Schlafly (engineer)
Systematic information will be in a form instantly available for response to remote inquiry...
By 2001, we may be in the dot and dash stage of the electrical transmission of solid matter.

Reality: Solar power is not in the universal access phase and atomic power had some big setbacks. People don't have 24 hour work weeks, except those unlucky bastards working at companies trying to deny them access to health care, so Dr. Cherne lays a big goose egg.

Mr. Schlafly on the other hand gives a pretty good description of the Internet in the statement I underlined. He doesn't say exactly how it will take place and the word "computer" is nowhere to be found, but that isn't surprising. 1956 is akin to the Dark Ages when it comes to computers. As for the electrical transmission of matter, we are a long way away from replicators, but maybe we could count 3D printers as the early starting point, "the dot and dash" stage as Schlafly puts it.

Just don't expect one to give you "Earl Grey tea, hot" anytime soon. Just sayin'.


Looking one day ahead... INTO THE FUTURE! The editor of Radio & Television News gets a lot of stuff wrong and a UN delegate from the Philippines gets a lot of stuff right.

Join us then... IN THE FUTURE!

22 February 2013

Birthdays
-->

Dichen Lachman b. 1982

Jeri Ryan b. 1968

Julie Walters b. 1950

That's a Whedonverse/Star Trek/Harry Potter trifecta for ya, you betcha! Some people may disagree with my selection of just a facial portrait of the lovely Ms. Ryan, but so many of the body shots of her as Seven of Nine lack subtlety, if you get my drift.

Many happy returns to all three actresses.

Today's predictions from the 1956 30th Anniversay issue of Amazing Stories come from their contest winner Clarence W. Van Tilburg.  He made a passel of predictions, so instead of spooning them out one by one, I give all of them here with a reality check after each one in italics and parentheses.

Medicine
1. Great strides in mental therapy. "Psi" professions operating on a solid premises. (He means psychiatry and psychology. We definitely have better drug choices and the definitions of mental illness are certainly improving.)
2. Banking of human organs; artificial culture of tissues; universal extension of preventative medicine.  (Good calls.)
3. Life expectancy 88 for women 80 for men in US and many other countries, world average 70. (A little high on all, but in the ballpark. The male-female dichotomy has shrunk instead of expanded.)

World Politics
1. The big four: USA, USSR, China, India, India leader of the Asian Commonwealth from Iran to Malaya. (Bold, but not quite right. In 1956, it still wasn't obvious how well Germany and Japan would in the next fifty years. India is a leader in the developing world to be sure, but there is no Asian Commonwealth.)
2. All Central America coalesced into a single political unit. (Swing and a miss.)

Science, Industry, Technology
1. Maximum work week in US and Canada: 20 hours. (Don't we wish?)
2. Top industry: Leisure. (Not as big as oil or food production.)
3. US and USSR have manned satellites and have reached the Moon. (Yes on the manned satellites, only the US made it to the Moon with a manned expedition.)
4. Seas mined in earnest for rare elements and food. (Certainly more than in 1956, but not as much as many people hoped. Petroleum isn't that rare. Yet.)
5. Desalted sea water used for irrigation and industrial purposes. (Some, but not much.)
6. Direct conversion of sunlight into power and synthesis of food on commercial scales. (Yes on solar power and there are a lot of synthetic ingredients in food.)
7. Atomic power in world-wide use. (Yes.)
8. Long-distance travel almost entirely by air at supersonic speeds. (Yes to almost all, supersonic, not so much.)
9. Privately owned helicopters commonly used, heliports on every large building. (It's close enough to get the Flying Cars HELLZ YEAH label. Regular readers will know how I feel about discussing reality and flying cars in the same sentence.)
10. Plastic glass and light metals common in building construction. (True enough.)
11. Moving sidewalks common. (That's a swing and a miss.)
12. Shortwave cooking common. (We call it microwave. Definitely a hit.)
13. Great increase in telescope range, boundaries of universe still unknown. (Exactly right.)

 Looking one day ahead... INTO THE FUTURE! More from Amazing Stories, a couple of pointy headed intellectuals take their shot, and one of them gives a description of a vague thing that could just be the Internet.  That's a terrific guess from the vantage point of 1956.

Join us then... IN THE FUTURE!

21 February 2013

Birthdays
Ashley Greene b. 1987
Kelsey Grammer b. 1955
Anthony Daniels b. 1946
Alan Rickman b. 1946

Today we get birthdays of actors from the Twilight, X-Men, Star Wars and Harry Potter series. I love same date, same year birthdays. C-3PO and Snape! Who knew?

Alan Rickman gets the picture because All Sentient Beings Love Alan Rickman.
  

What life will be like... in the year 2001!

Predictor: Robert A. Heinlein in the 30th Anniversary issue of Amazing Stories, 1956

Predictions: lab outpost on Pluto...
the Sahara Sea...
Telepathy for military purposes...
We finished World War III with 100,000,000 more people than when we started...
Five billion sometime in the 21st Century...
Still no cure for the common cold.
 
Reality: I found this picture of Heinlein weeks ago, but decided to use another because this makes him look ridiculous. With this set of predictions, I realized I should have two pictures, The Sensible Heinlein and The Ridiculous Heinlein.

This set of predictions deserves this awful sports coat.

We don't have a lab outpost on the Moon, much less Pluto. We didn't flood the Sahara. We don't use ESP for military purposes. We didn't have World War III, we passed five billion in the 1980s.

He's right about the common cold, though.  I don't know how he does it.

 Looking one day ahead... INTO THE FUTURE! Still plumbing the depths of this issue of Amazing Stories, a reader named Clarence W. Van Tilburg wins the prediction contest and while not perfect, he does a hell of a lot better than Heinlein.

Join us then... IN THE FUTURE!

20 February 2013

Birthday
Pierre Boulle b. 1912 died 1/30/1994
 Boulle was credited with the screenplay for The Bridge Over the River Kwai, which was actually written by blacklisted writers Carl Foreman and Michael Wilson, the credit was changed posthumously in 1980. He did write the original novel.

He is mentioned here because of his other best known novel, Planet of the Apes.

   

What life will be like... in the year 2001!

Predictor: Lilly Daché (milliner and fashion expert)
Contra-magnetism will mean fabrics will repel dirt...
Whites and pastels will be worn in all seasons...

Predictor: Herb Score (pitcher, Cleveland Indians)
Plastic domes over stadiums keep out bad weather...
Parking not a problem, fans come in on helicopters...
No vendors in the stands, vending machines on the back of every chair...

Reality: We don't have fabrics that repel dirt quite yet, but Ms. Daché gets some points for predicting the "no white after Labor Day" rule would be largely forgotten.

Herb Score gets a point for domed stadiums, but we still don't use helicopters like buses and there are still vendors at ball games. I, for one, kinda like it that way. Sometimes you miss a play when the popcorn guy walks by, but it's part of the ambiance.

Looking one day ahead... INTO THE FUTURE! Even when I mix things up for the sake of variety, we can't escape Robert A. Heinlein, who made a special batch of predictions for this issue of Amazing Stories, almost all of them amazingly wrong.


Join us then... IN THE FUTURE!

19 February 2013

What life will be like... in the year 2001!

Predictor: Sid Caesar, host of the TV variety hit Your Show of Shows
The Pocket TV will be so common people will take it for granted...
Einstein's theory of relativity will be understood by every schoolchild because he will see it on his pocket TV in the helicopter on his way to school.

Predictor: John Cameron Swayze, anchorman and spokesman*
No major war between 1956 and 2001...
Light-weight low priced private air transport...
Cities disperse, the slums will disappear...
 
Reality: The modern high end cell phone is kinda sorta like a pocket TV, though streaming a TV program is an expensive way to use one. Transistor radios hit the market in 1955, so the idea of miniaturization is definitely in the public mind. Also in the public mind in the mid 1950s was that "Einstein's theory of relativity" was the most difficult concept ever devised by man. It is not yet a concept understood by schoolchildren.

Swayze was right about no major war. The middle part of the century was big on the idea that cities were intolerable and had to be abolished. We kinda got over that.

 And then we have the helicopter school bus and "light-weight low priced private air transport", which are both roundabout ways to say... Flying Cars HELLZ YEAH!

It is the express policy of this blog never to discuss reality and flying cars at the same time. So it is written and so it shall be. Amen.

* Some younger readers might need more explanation of who John Cameron Swayze was. He was one of the original anchormen for evening news broadcasts, but by the time I was growing up, he was the spokesman for Timex watches, the commercials that brought us the deathless tagline "It takes a licking and keeps on ticking". Wikipedia says that John Cameron Swayze was a sixth cousin to the now more famous Patrick Swayze, both deceased. I'm not as close to my cousins as some other people are, but "sixth cousin" seems a polite way of saying "not really related at all".

Looking one day ahead... INTO THE FUTURE! Sure, we start the week with predictions about TV, war, city life and flying cars, but tomorrow we get to what really matters: fashion and baseball.

Join us then... IN THE FUTURE!

18 February 2013

Announcing... Amazing Stories Week!

Regular readers will know I have a daily routine Monday through Friday for the predictions, but I came across a great discovery this weekend and I'm going to throw a monkey wrench into the monotonous machine, based on First Rule of Blogging (H.): It's my blog and you are not the boss of me!

My friend Alan Ponder has a terrific collection of old science fiction magazines, the ones printed on pulp paper, known as "the pulps" to their fans. In 1956, Amazing Stories turned 30 and devoted the last few pages of the April issue to predictions from people in many fields of what the world would look like in 2001.

In other words, a big old goldmine for this blog.

I'll be printing the predictions from today to next Monday, starting out with what easily can be considered the wackiest from a guy who made a real effort to be odd and was taken seriously by many people of the time.

It's hard for me to give an modern example to the young people of what he was like. There are people trying to be outrageous for the sake of outrage now, many of them political pundits. But this guy was very different and he had some talent, something most pundits lack completely.
 

Prediction: I believe that art and science will have merged by 2001...

The secret of this harmony can be seen today in cosmic radiation... Beauty is mathematical too - I refer you to the works of Bach - and the beauty of the logarithmic curve of the rhinceros horn, with its repetition in the internal sedillas of the cauliflower can be seen by the aware eye of today and will been seen, and acted upon, by the awakened artists of 2001...

By 2001, such things will have lost their rigidity and gained, instead, have found the unity that is found in cosmic radiation, the cauliflower and the rhinoceros horn.

They will have realized the secret of life, of art, and of power, is viscosity.

Predictor: Salvador Dali, in the 30th anniversary of Amazing Stories, April 1956

Reality check: In the interest of full disclosure, I concede that I did a Dadaist editing job on this famous surrealist's prose. I only published every third sentence in his three paragraph tour de force, but also added his final sentence, the first mention of "viscosity".

Some readers might say, "But, Professor! You shouldn't edit someone's words in such a strange and didactic way. This statement has lost all meaning."

Let me make my case in two parts.

Part 1. See the First Rule of Blogging (H.).

2. I swear on the Collected Works of Leonhard Euler that absolutely no meaning has been removed from Mr. Dali's statement. True, many words have gone missing and yes, those words formed sentences with subjects and verbs. But this edited version makes every bit as much sense as what he wrote and the editors of Amazing decided to publish. If you think this version is meaningless, you would not be convinced much by the full text.

Looking ahead one day... INTO THE FUTURE! The 57th anniversary celebration of Amazing Stories' 30th Anniversary continues, with visits from Sid Caesar and John Cameron Swayze.

Join me then... IN THE FUTURE!