Futurism

[unixronin]

It's 2007.  Where's my flying car, dammit?

No, Möller's ground-effect Jetsons personal flying saucer does not count.  Even if the control system would let you get it above ten feet altitude, it'd probably be almost uncontrollable out of ground effect, and I'll bet it's noisy as hell.

Comments

[house-pundit.livejournal.com]

I admit my ignorance. Stephenson's timeline is smack in the middle of one of my blank spots. Got a URL?

Anyway, most future predictions I've seen from the past (what a mouthful!) have overestimated physics improvements and underestimated infotech and biotech improvements.

Except that they expected a magic bullet cure for cancer, instead of the piecemeal treatments we have now that, for many people and many cancers, together amount to cures.

Geez, and what about Frederik Pohl's Heechee books and organ markets. Yikes!

The problem with writing this shit is that unless a technology is taken for granted in passing and has little to do with the plot, you have to make it have a humongous scorpion sting in its tail. In real life, new technologies frequently have very limited "catches" to them--unless you have a Luddite perspective and just hate change.

Weber is right. Technology is the cure to technology's by-blow environmental (and other) problems.

But unless there's a huge downside, you rarely have a story. If you don't want a downside, a scientific or technological leap usually has to be purely ancillary to the story.

Which is why I like crossovers like spy stories or military stories set in a possible future. You can be more realistic with technological advances' up-sides and down-sides.

Julie

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

Well, Stephenson never stated a specific timeline or specific dates. But my best recollection is that there are references in the text of Snow Crash that place it no earlier than about 2030, and likely in the region of 20 to 30 years later than that. (I'd have to look up the text and find the specific passages referring to the origins of the burbclaves to be able to say more definitely than that.) There are also correlations and side-references between characters in Snow Crash and The Diamond Age that appear to indicate The Diamond Age takes place about 40-60 years after the events of Snow Crash. That gives us a likely estimated window of somewhere around 2070 - 2110 for the events of The Diamond Age.

Of course, someone with connections in the industry could always simply ask Neal Stephenson. :)