Tuesday, July 30, 2013

Accidental steampunk

    Or maybe retroactive? I read a lot of John D. MacDonald and Dick Francis. The former died in 1986; the latter survived until much more recently, but his best work covered most of the same years. It's kind of weird as a person born in 1962 who is generally technophobic to see how much like retroactive science fiction '60s and '70s novels are.
    I'm sure like everything else I've mentioned this already, but it's surprisingly jarring to run into "Hey, I gotta find a pay phone" as a plot point or industrial archaeology type references to computers. My favorite was the early '80s Dick Francis novel that revolved around a gambling program saved to cassette tape. The novel fast-forwards to 1995 when it's no problem at all to find a computer that reads cassette tapes. Everybody remembers that, right?
    Buffs might enjoy MacDonald's televangelist novel, "One More Sunday," which features a lot of cutting edge 1984 computer technology and predictions about the near future. (Does anyone remember bubble memory?) MacDonald and Francis were both pretty obviously gadget junkies, and of course both were really, really rich and could thus indulge this habit. And I'm sure their ideas were in tune with the technology writers of their time. It's just really, really hard to predict the ways of future technology. I'm reminded of the awesome (but apparently apocryphal) Bill Gates quote about 640K of memory ought to be enough for anybody. I'm sure he meant bubble memory.

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