Hard call: I'd have to say it all depends on the author's intent.
Let's see ... at the time he wrote "Neuromancer" William Gibson had never used a computer -- he wrote it on a manual typewriter (and used the royalties to buy an Apple IIc). His creative vision was more one of social atomization and a particular aesthetic in a multi-national dominated future than it was informed by actual technology. Despite which, his creative vision of "cyberspace" got taken seriously enough as a visual metaphor that I remember sitting in on a debate at the W3C conference in 1996 between folks proposing that VRML should follow a Gibsonian model, and those who thought "Snow Crash" was the way forward. (Neal Stephenson's followers won the day. See also "Second Life", I guess ...)
That's an example of "influencing". "Neuromancer" was very influential, but hardly predictive.
Actual predictive SF is much, much rarer, but if we ever get a space elevator you can probably blame Arthur C. Clarke ("The Fountains of Paradise"), which is an old-school didactic hey-why-don't-we-do-this-the-numbers-check-out work of prediction in fiction drag. Or maybe Andy Weir's "The Martian".
Written SF has traditionally been utter rubbish at predicting developments in the IT/computing sector, with notable exceptions -- for example the novella "True Names" by Vernor Vinge. (I've attempted this too but I'm not going to bang my own drum here.)
All other metrics aside, Heinlein always impressed me not only for being something of a polymath, but for his prescience in some areas.
In particular, I often find myself citing his depiction in _Friday_ of its titular character using a multimedia hyperlink system which seems analogous to the web and media-rich hypertext generally. (He gets wrong that it's an exclusive closed private system... that is wrong... isn't it...)
It's not the depiction of hypertext research that I find compelling...
...it's his dead-on intuition that such systems will naturally lend themselves to browsing by associate leap, far afield from the original research topic. And that serendipity and unanticipated (and unsought) correlations will prove both more compelling to users and more illuminating that narrow document retrieval would be.
Whether that same book paints a reasonable depiction of the current devolving global political climate is another question... but one which also continues to come up in idle conversations...
Btw @cstross just finally read Saturn's Children, Neptune's Brood, and the connective-tissue short work whose name escapes me. I greatly enjoyed the winks esp. in SC to _Friday_ etc. Thanks!
cstross|10 years ago
Let's see ... at the time he wrote "Neuromancer" William Gibson had never used a computer -- he wrote it on a manual typewriter (and used the royalties to buy an Apple IIc). His creative vision was more one of social atomization and a particular aesthetic in a multi-national dominated future than it was informed by actual technology. Despite which, his creative vision of "cyberspace" got taken seriously enough as a visual metaphor that I remember sitting in on a debate at the W3C conference in 1996 between folks proposing that VRML should follow a Gibsonian model, and those who thought "Snow Crash" was the way forward. (Neal Stephenson's followers won the day. See also "Second Life", I guess ...)
That's an example of "influencing". "Neuromancer" was very influential, but hardly predictive.
Actual predictive SF is much, much rarer, but if we ever get a space elevator you can probably blame Arthur C. Clarke ("The Fountains of Paradise"), which is an old-school didactic hey-why-don't-we-do-this-the-numbers-check-out work of prediction in fiction drag. Or maybe Andy Weir's "The Martian".
Written SF has traditionally been utter rubbish at predicting developments in the IT/computing sector, with notable exceptions -- for example the novella "True Names" by Vernor Vinge. (I've attempted this too but I'm not going to bang my own drum here.)
aaroninsf|10 years ago
In particular, I often find myself citing his depiction in _Friday_ of its titular character using a multimedia hyperlink system which seems analogous to the web and media-rich hypertext generally. (He gets wrong that it's an exclusive closed private system... that is wrong... isn't it...)
It's not the depiction of hypertext research that I find compelling...
...it's his dead-on intuition that such systems will naturally lend themselves to browsing by associate leap, far afield from the original research topic. And that serendipity and unanticipated (and unsought) correlations will prove both more compelling to users and more illuminating that narrow document retrieval would be.
Whether that same book paints a reasonable depiction of the current devolving global political climate is another question... but one which also continues to come up in idle conversations...
Btw @cstross just finally read Saturn's Children, Neptune's Brood, and the connective-tissue short work whose name escapes me. I greatly enjoyed the winks esp. in SC to _Friday_ etc. Thanks!