28 August 2013

Birthdays
J. August Richards b. 1973 (Angel)
Jack Black b. 1969 (King Kong)
Billy Boyd b. 1968 (Lord of the Rings)
Melissa Rosenberg b. 1962 (writer Twilight)
Brian Thompson b. 1959 (Star Trek, Buffy, The X-Files)
Vonda N. McIntyre b. 1948
(won 1979 Hugo and Nebula for Dreamsnake)
(won 1998 Nebula for The Moon and the Sun)
Jack Kirby b. 1917 died 6 February 1994
Jack Vance b. 1916 died 23 May 2013  (The Dying Earth)

Interesting mix today with four actors and four writers/creators. I chose Kirby for the Picture Slot because I grew up with Marvel Comics and in the 21st Century, there are a lot less science fiction fans who sneer at the comic books and do not want to have their genre associated with mere "entertainment for children".

Many happy returns of the day to the living.

Prediction: The teleautoscope. It will no doubt have some name equally barbarous. It will be an instrument for seeing by electricity. Whatever is before the transmitting teleautoscope will be visible before the receiving teleautoscope wirelessly en rapport with the former. Thus by telephone, by phonograph, and by teleautoscope, a wireless conversation will combine all the advantages of a personal interview and a written correspondence.

Predictor: T. Baron Russell from A Hundred Years Hence, published in 1905

Reality: Reading closely, Russell is talking about a TV phone more than he is about broadcast TV. In either case, this is pretty darned science fiction-y for a guy writing in 1905.

We will meet a lot of people from this era predicting the future who base wonderful future technology on telephones instead of radio. While Marconi had done his experiments by the time Russell is writing this, the big splash of practical public use of radio doesn't come about until after World War I.

Looking on day ahead... INTO THE FUTURE!

An exact date from a movie, the start of everything going to hell.

Join us then... IN THE FUTURE!

13 April 2013

Birthdays
Erick Avari b. 1952
Ron Perlman b. 1950

With today's choices of birthdays, the Pretty Girl rule is rendered moot, so I give the picture this year to Ron Perlman, who has had more roles near the top of the bill than Mr. Avari, who is also a terrific actor. In genre, Perlman's best known roles are his title characters, Beauty and The Beast on TV and Hellboy in the movies.

For anyone uncertain, on the TV show he was the second billed character, not the first. I have to say without any ill will, there is a line in the song Goin' Out West by Perlman lookalike Tom Waits that I think best describes him.

My friends say I'm ugly, I got a masculine face.

Many happy returns to both gentleman.

  

Prediction: In 1946, the United Kingdom goes to war with Nicaragua.

Predictor: Stella Gibbons in her novel Cold Comfort Farm, published 1932

Reality: Cold Comfort Farm may be the oddest piece of predictive fiction I have ever come across. Ms. Gibbons sets her story about twenty years ahead for just a few toss-off gags that are completely unnecessary to the plot.

The idea of the futuristic setting with several events that might surprise her readers is that the surprises are mostly noticeable in London but completely unseen in the countryside where most of the story takes place.  Besides the war, fashionable Mayfair has become a slum and Gibbons writes about TV phones and air-taxis, which sounds very close to flying cars, though they could just as easily be planes for hire.

Cold Comfort Farm is one of those odd pieces of fiction, a parody that is now more famous than the genre it originally set out to skewer. Many British works of fiction follow the hopeful young lady from a good family who has fallen on hard times, cast out to be taken in by odd relatives, usually living far out in the country. In the early 1930s, these books were waggishly called the Loam And Lovechild genre, owing a great deal to the writings of Jane Austen, the Bronte Sisters and Thomas Hardy, though most of the work of the late 1920s and early 1930s was not of the same level as literature. Ms. Gibbons makes her heroine Flora Poste not a helpless waif sure to be seduced and abandoned, but a charming young woman with nearly superhero levels of kindness and cleverness, much more like Jeeves than like Lizzie Bennett. Her own marital status is not a Problem To Be Solved in the book. Men fall all over her and she has no interest in picking any of them until she helped all the people she believed needed her help. As for being adorable, the 1995 version of the film had Kate Beckingsale as Flora, and in that era she was at the top of the Adorable Ingenue list in Britain at that time.

It should also be noted that in the 1995 film, the action takes place in the 1930s, not the 1950s and all the futuristic embellishments are completely ignored.

Looking one day ahead... INTO THE FUTURE!



Instead of seeing what the early 1930s thought the 1950s would look like, we return tomorrow to our series written in 1988 looking forward to the wonderful advancements of... 2013!
 

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!