In 1968, Stanley Kubrick Makes Predictions for 2001: Humanity Will Conquer Old Age, Watch 3D TV & Learn German in 20 Minutes

in Film, Sci Fi | April 19th, 2022

kubricklist

Image by Moody Man, via Flickr Com­mons

1968. Rev­o­lu­tion was in the air and the future seemed bright. That year, Stan­ley Kubrick released his mas­ter­piece 2001: A Space Odyssey – a big-bud­get, exper­i­men­tal rumi­na­tion on the evo­lu­tion of mankind. The film was a huge box office hit when it came out; its mind-bend­ing meta­physics res­onat­ed with the culture’s new­found inter­est in chem­i­cal­ly altered states and in spir­i­tu­al­i­ty.

In the Sep­tem­ber issue from that year, Play­boy mag­a­zine pub­lished a lengthy inter­view with Kubrick. Even at a time when pub­lic fig­ures were sup­posed to sound like intel­lec­tu­als (boy, times have changed), Kubrick comes across as insane­ly well read. Dur­ing the course of the inter­view, he quotes from the likes of media crit­ic Mar­shall McLuhan, Win­ston Churchill, and 19th Cen­tu­ry poet Matthew Arnold along with a hand­ful of promi­nent aca­d­e­mics.

Kubrick is char­ac­ter­is­ti­cal­ly cagey about offer­ing any expla­na­tions of his enig­mat­ic movie but he does read­i­ly expound on philo­soph­i­cal ques­tions about God, the mean­ing of life (or lack there­of) and the pos­si­bil­i­ty of extrater­res­tri­al life. But per­haps the most inter­est­ing part of the 17-page inter­view is his vision of what 2001 might look like. It’s fas­ci­nat­ing to see what he got right, what might be right a bit fur­ther into the future, and what’s com­plete­ly wrong. Check them out below:

“With­in ten years, in fact, I believe that freez­ing of the dead will be a major indus­try in the Unit­ed States and through­out the world; I would rec­om­mend it as a field of invest­ment for imag­i­na­tive spec­u­la­tors.”

“Per­haps the great­est break­through we may have made by 2001 is the pos­si­bil­i­ty that man may be able to elim­i­nate old age.”

“I’m sure we’ll have sophis­ti­cat­ed 3‑D holo­graph­ic tele­vi­sion and films, and it’s pos­si­ble that com­plete­ly new forms of enter­tain­ment and edu­ca­tion will be devised.”

“You might have a machine that taps the brain and ush­ers you into a vivid dream expe­ri­ence in which you are the pro­tag­o­nist in a romance or an adven­ture. On a more seri­ous lev­el, a sim­i­lar machine could direct­ly pro­gram you with knowl­edge: in this way, you might, for exam­ple, eas­i­ly be able to learn flu­ent Ger­man in 20 min­utes.”

“I believe by 2001 we will have devised chem­i­cals with no adverse phys­i­cal, men­tal or genet­ic results that can give wings to the mind and enlarge per­cep­tion beyond its present evo­lu­tion­ary capacities…there should be fas­ci­nat­ing drugs avail­able by 2001; what use we make of them will be the cru­cial ques­tion.”

“The so-called sex­u­al rev­o­lu­tion, mid-wifed by the pill, will be extend­ed. Through drugs, or per­haps via the sharp­en­ing or even mechan­i­cal ampli­fi­ca­tion of latent ESP func­tions, it may be pos­si­ble for each part­ner to simul­ta­ne­ous­ly expe­ri­ence the sen­sa­tions of the oth­er; or we may even­tu­al­ly emerge into poly­mor­phous sex­u­al beings, with male and female com­po­nents blur­ring, merg­ing and inter­chang­ing. The poten­tial­i­ties for explor­ing new areas of sex­u­al expe­ri­ence are vir­tu­al­ly bound­less.”

“Look­ing into the dis­tant future, I sup­pose it’s not incon­ceiv­able that a semi­sen­tient robot-com­put­er sub­cul­ture could evolve that might one day decide it no longer need­ed man.”

For such a famous­ly pes­simistic film­mak­er, Kubrick’s vision of the future is remark­ably groovy – lots of sex, drugs and holo­graph­ic tele­vi­sion. He wasn’t, of course, the only one out there who thought about the future. You can see more bold pre­dic­tions below:

Isaac Asi­mov Pre­dicts in 1964 What the World Will Look Like Today — in 2014

Arthur C. Clarke Pre­dicts the Future in 1964 … And Kind of Nails It

Wal­ter Cronkite Imag­ines the Home of the 21st Cen­tu­ry … Back in 1967

The Inter­net Imag­ined in 1969

Mar­shall McLuhan Announces That The World is a Glob­al Vil­lage

Note: Note: An ear­li­er ver­sion of this post appeared on our site in Novem­ber 2014.

Jonathan Crow is a Los Ange­les-based writer and film­mak­er whose work has appeared in Yahoo!, The Hol­ly­wood Reporter, and oth­er pub­li­ca­tions. You can fol­low him at @jonccrow.

by | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

The First Work of Science Fiction: Read Lucian’s 2nd-Century Space Travelogue A True Story

in History, Literature, Sci Fi | March 9th, 2022

Late in life, Kings­ley Amis declared that he would hence­forth read only nov­els open­ing with the sen­tence “A shot rang out.” On one lev­el, this would have sound­ed bizarre com­ing from one of Britain’s most promi­nent men of let­ters. But on anoth­er it aligned with his long-demon­strat­ed appre­ci­a­tion of genre fic­tion, includ­ing not just sto­ries of crime but also of high tech­nol­o­gy and space explo­ration. His life­long inter­est in the lat­ter inspired the Chris­t­ian Gauss Lec­tures he deliv­ered at Prince­ton in 1958, pub­lished soon there­after as New Maps of Hell: A Sur­vey of Sci­ence Fic­tion, a book that sees him trace the his­to­ry of the genre well back beyond his own boy­hood — about eigh­teen cen­turies beyond it.

“His­to­ries of sci­ence fic­tion, as opposed to ‘imag­i­na­tive lit­er­a­ture,’ usu­al­ly begin, not with Pla­to or The Birds of Aristo­phanes or the Odyssey, but with a work of the late Greek prose romancer Lucian of Samosa­ta,” Amis writes. He refers to what schol­ars now know as A True Sto­ry (Ἀληθῆ διηγήματα), a novel­la-length fic­tion of the sec­ond cen­tu­ry that has every­thing from space trav­el to inter­plan­e­tary war to tech­nol­o­gy so advanced — as no less a sci-fi lumi­nary than Arthur C. Clarke would put it much lat­er — as to be indis­tin­guish­able from mag­ic. At its core a work of fan­tas­ti­cal satire, A True Sto­ry “delib­er­ate­ly piles extrav­a­gance upon extrav­a­gance for com­ic effect” in a rather un-sci­ence-fic­tion-like man­ner.

“Leav­ing aside the ques­tion whether there was enough sci­ence around in the sec­ond cen­tu­ry to make sci­ence fic­tion fea­si­ble,” Amis writes, “I will mere­ly remark that the spright­li­ness and sophis­ti­ca­tion of the True His­to­ry” — as he knew the work — “make it read like a joke at the expense of near­ly all ear­ly-mod­ern sci­ence fic­tion, that writ­ten between, say, 1910 and 1940,” which he him­self would have grown up read­ing.

In the video by at the top of the post, film­mak­er Gre­go­ry Austin McConnell sum­ma­rizes Lucian’s entire trav­el­ogue, not neglect­ing to men­tion the riv­er of wine, the tree-shaped women, the cities on the moon, the army of the sun, the bat­tle­field-spin­ning space spi­ders, the dogs who ride on winged acorns, the float­ing sen­tient lamps, and the 187 and ½ mile-long whale.

This clear­ly isn’t what we’d now call “hard” sci­ence fic­tion. So how, exact­ly, to label it? Such argu­ments erupt over every major work of genre fic­tion, even from antiq­ui­ty. A True Sto­ry con­tains ele­ments of what would become com­e­dy sci-fi, mil­i­tary sci-fi, and even the fan­ta­sy-and-sci-fi-hybridiz­ing “space opera” most pop­u­lar­ly exem­pli­fied by Star Wars and its many sequels. Cat­e­go­riza­tion quib­bles aside, what mat­ters about any work in the broad­er tra­di­tion of “spec­u­la­tive fic­tion” is whether it fires up the read­er’s imag­i­na­tion, and Lucian’s work has done it for not just ancients but mod­erns like the 19th-cen­tu­ry artists William Strang and Aubrey Beard­s­ley, whose illus­tra­tions from 1894 edi­tions of A True Sto­ry appear above. Now that “sci­ence fic­tion rules the cin­e­mat­ic land­scape,” as McConnell puts it, who will adapt it for us post­mod­erns?

Relat­ed con­tent:

When Astronomer Johannes Kepler Wrote the First Work of Sci­ence Fic­tion, The Dream (1609)

Mythos: An Ani­ma­tion Retells Time­less Greek Myths with Abstract Mod­ern Designs

The Ency­clo­pe­dia of Sci­ence Fic­tion: 17,500 Entries on All Things Sci-Fi Are Now Free Online

Every Pos­si­ble Kind of Sci­ence Fic­tion Sto­ry: An Exhaus­tive List Cre­at­ed by Pio­neer­ing 1920s Sci­Fi Writer Clare Winger Har­ris (1931)

Isaac Asi­mov Recalls the Gold­en Age of Sci­ence Fic­tion (1937–1950)

Free Sci­ence Fic­tion Clas­sics Avail­able on the Web

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities, the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

by | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

The Dune Encyclopedia: The Controversial, Definitive Guide to the World of Frank Herbert’s Sci-Fi Masterpiece (1984)

in Books, Literature, Sci Fi | February 22nd, 2022


When David Lynch’s Hol­ly­wood ver­sion of Dune opened in the­aters in 1984, Uni­ver­sal Stu­dios dis­trib­uted a print­ed a glos­sary to keep its audi­ences from get­ting con­fused. They got con­fused any­way, in part because of the film’s hav­ing been hol­lowed out in edit­ing, and in part because the sheer elab­o­rate­ness of Frank Her­bert’s alter­nate real­i­ty pos­es poten­tial­ly insur­mount­able chal­lenges to faith­ful adap­ta­tion. Even many of the orig­i­nal Dune nov­els’ read­ers need­ed more help than a cou­ple pages of def­i­n­i­tions could offer. Luck­i­ly for them, the same year that saw the release of Lynch’s Dune also saw the pub­li­ca­tion of The Dune Ency­clo­pe­dia, autho­rized by Her­bert him­self.

“Here is a rich back­ground (and fore­ground) for the Dune Chron­i­cles, includ­ing schol­ar­ly bypaths and amus­ing side­lights,” Her­bert writes in the book’s intro­duc­tion. “Some of the con­tri­bu­tions are sure to arouse con­tro­ver­sy, based as they are on ques­tion­able sources.” He could­n’t have known how right he was. Today The Dune Ency­clo­pe­dia stands as what Inverse’s Ryan Britt calls “the most con­tro­ver­sial Dune book ever”; long out of print, it may well also be the most expen­sive, with a cur­rent Ama­zon price of $1,300 in hard­cov­er and $833 in paper­back. (You can also find it online, at the Inter­net Archive.)

Still, The Dune Ency­clo­pe­dia has its appre­ci­a­tors, not least the direc­tor of the lat­est (and most suc­cess­ful) cin­e­mat­ic attempt to real­ize Her­bert’s vision. As Brit tells it, “an anony­mous (though pre­vi­ous­ly reli­able) source stat­ed that Denis Vil­leneuve is a big fan of The Dune Ency­clo­pe­dia. But when he tried to plant ref­er­ences to the book in the new film, his ‘hand was slapped by the estate.’ ” The rea­son seems to involve the Ency­clo­pe­dia’s con­flicts with the nov­els: not those writ­ten by Her­bert him­self but, accord­ing to the Dune Wiki, “the lat­er two pre­quel trilo­gies and sequel duol­o­gy writ­ten after Frank Her­bert’s death by Bri­an Her­bert (Frank Her­bert’s son) and Kevin J. Ander­son, which they state com­plete the orig­i­nal series.”

Though co-signed by the The Dune Ency­clo­pe­dia’s main author, lit­er­ary schol­ar Willis E. McNel­ly, Bri­an Her­bert and Kevin J. Ander­son­’s let­ter declar­ing the work’s de-can­on­iza­tion omits the fact “that the Ency­clo­pe­dia is and always was a fal­li­ble in-uni­verse doc­u­ment that open­ly mis­rep­re­sents known his­to­ry and adds his­tor­i­cal embell­ish­ments.” It is, in oth­er words, a book about Dune as well as a part of Dune. Not every book in our real­i­ty offers a per­fect­ly true account of his­to­ry, of course, and the same holds for the real­i­ty Frank Her­bert cre­at­ed. This form implies the con­tin­u­ing pos­si­bil­i­ty of expand­ing Dune’s lit­er­ary uni­verse by writ­ing the books that exist with­in it, not just ency­clo­pe­dias and scrip­ture but, say epic sci-fi nov­els as well. What fan, after all, would­n’t want to read the Dune of Dune?

Relat­ed con­tent:

Why You Should Read Dune: An Ani­mat­ed Intro­duc­tion to Frank Herbert’s Eco­log­i­cal, Psy­cho­log­i­cal Sci-Fi Epic

Rare Book Fea­tur­ing the Con­cept Art for Jodorowsky’s Dune Goes Up for Auc­tion (1975)

The Dune Graph­ic Nov­el: Expe­ri­ence Frank Herbert’s Epic Sci-fi Saga as You’ve Nev­er Seen It Before

The Glos­sary Uni­ver­sal Stu­dios Gave Out to the First Audi­ences of David Lynch’s Dune (1984)

The Dune Col­or­ing & Activ­i­ty Books: When David Lynch’s 1984 Film Cre­at­ed Count­less Hours of Pecu­liar Fun for Kids

The Ency­clo­pe­dia of Sci­ence Fic­tion: 17,500 Entries on All Things Sci-Fi Are Now Free Online

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities, the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

by | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

The Matrix Regurgitated — Pretty Much Pop: A Culture Podcast #113

in Film, Podcasts, Pretty Much Pop, Sci Fi | January 7th, 2022

In light of the release of The Matrix Res­ur­rec­tions, we talk through the fran­chise as a whole. What made the first one remark­able, and does that a bar that any sequel can reach? We talk through the choic­es that fed into the new film, why peo­ple don’t seem to care about their matrix fam­i­lies, the end­less fight scenes, and more. Who will choose the blue pill?

This very spe­cial hol­i­day episode of Pret­ty Much Pop reunites the full sea­son one pan­el: Mark Lin­sen­may­er, Bri­an Hirt and Eri­ca Spyres, and fea­tures the pod­cast­ing debut of Mark’s son Abe Lin­sen­may­er.

Some arti­cles we con­sid­ered includ­ed:

This episode includes bonus dis­cus­sion you can access by sup­port­ing the pod­cast at patreon.com/prettymuchpop or by choos­ing a paid sub­scrip­tion through Apple Pod­casts. This pod­cast is part of the Par­tial­ly Exam­ined Life pod­cast net­work.

Pret­ty Much Pop: A Cul­ture Pod­cast is the first pod­cast curat­ed by Open Cul­ture. Browse all Pret­ty Much Pop posts.

by | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

Rare Book Featuring the Concept Art for Jodorowsky’s Dune Goes Up for Auction (1975)

in Books, Film, History, Sci Fi | November 9th, 2021


Denis Vil­leneu­ve’s new adap­ta­tion of Frank Her­bert’s Dune has made a decent­ly promis­ing start to what looks set to shape up into an epic series of films. But how­ev­er many install­ments it final­ly com­pris­es, it’s unlike­ly to run any­where near as long as Ale­jan­dro Jodor­owsky’s ver­sion — had Jodor­owsky actu­al­ly made his ver­sion, that is. Pre­vi­ous­ly fea­tured here on Open Cul­ture, that project promised to unite the tal­ents of not just the cre­ator of the Dune uni­verse and the direc­tor of The Holy Moun­tain, but those of Mœbius, H.R. Giger, Sal­vador Dalí, Pink Floyd, Orson Welles, and Mick Jag­ger. Even David Lynch’s Dune, for all its large-scale weird­ness, would sure­ly play like My Din­ner with Andre by com­par­i­son.

Alas, none of us will ever get to see Jodor­owsky’s Dune, now one of the most sto­ried of all unmade films. But one of us — one of the deep-pock­et­ed among us, at least — now has a chance to own the book. Not Her­bert’s nov­el: the book assem­bled cir­ca 1985 as a pitch­ing aid, meant to show stu­dios the exten­sive pre-pro­duc­tion work Jodor­owsky, pro­duc­er Michel Sey­doux, and their col­lab­o­ra­tors had done.

“Filled with the script, sto­ry­boards, con­cept art, and more, the book is basi­cal­ly as close as any­one can get to see­ing Jodorowsky’s ver­sion of Dune,” writes io9’s Ger­main Lussier. “But, of course, the direc­tor and his team only cre­at­ed a hand­ful of copies and this was decades ago. This isn’t a book you can just get on Ama­zon.”


But you can get it at Christie’s, on whose auc­tion block it’s expect­ed to go for between €25,000 and €35,000 (around USD $30,000–40,000). Reck­on­ing that only ten to twen­ty copies were ever print­ed, the house­’s list­ing describes the book as “an extra­or­di­nary arti­fact” from “a doomed project which inspired legions of film-mak­ers and movie­go­ers alike.” Despite all of Hol­ly­wood ulti­mate­ly pass­ing on this enor­mous­ly ambi­tious adap­ta­tion, “all of this was not in vain.” Jodor­owsky him­self claims that, though unre­al­ized, his Dune set a prece­dent for “a larg­er-than-life sci­ence fic­tion movie, out­side of the sci­en­tif­ic rig­or of 2001: A Space Odyssey.” Its influ­ence, accord­ing to Christie’s, is present in 1970s films like Star Wars and Alien. Would it be too much to sense a trace of the Jodor­owskyan in Vil­leneu­ve’s Dune as well?

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The 14-Hour Epic Film, Dune, That Ale­jan­dro Jodor­owsky, Pink Floyd, Sal­vador Dalí, Moe­bius, Orson Welles & Mick Jag­ger Nev­er Made

Mœbius’ Sto­ry­boards & Con­cept Art for Jodorowsky’s Dune

Mœbius & Jodorowsky’s Sci-Fi Mas­ter­piece, The Incal, Brought to Life in a Tan­ta­liz­ing Ani­ma­tion

The Dune Graph­ic Nov­el: Expe­ri­ence Frank Herbert’s Epic Sci-Fi Saga as You’ve Nev­er Seen It Before

Ale­jan­dro Jodorowsky’s 82 Com­mand­ments For Liv­ing

Watch the First Trail­er for Dune, Denis Villeneuve’s Adap­ta­tion of Frank Herbert’s Clas­sic Sci-Fi Nov­el

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities, the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

by | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

Hear Brian Eno’s Contribution to the Soundtrack of David Lynch’s Dune (1984)

in Film, Music, Sci Fi | November 2nd, 2021

Though released just a few weeks ago, Denis Vil­leneu­ve’s Dune seems already to have gar­nered more crit­i­cal acclaim than David Lynch’s 1984 adap­ta­tion of the same mate­r­i­al. This com­par­i­son is, of course, unfair: Lynch was work­ing under dif­fer­ent con­di­tions in a dif­fer­ent time, not to men­tion with a marked­ly dif­fer­ent cin­e­mat­ic sen­si­bil­i­ty. And in fact, Lynch’s ver­sion of the ambi­tious, saga-launch­ing nov­el by Frank Her­bert does have its fans, or at least view­ers will­ing to praise cer­tain of its aspects. Lovers of 1980s music, for exam­ple, val­ue its score com­posed by the vir­tu­osic rock band Toto — with the excep­tion, that is, of a track from Bri­an Eno, Roger Eno, and Daniel Lanois.

Bri­an Eno in par­tic­u­lar is cred­it­ed with pop­u­lar­iz­ing ambi­ent music, and “Prophe­cy Theme,” heard on the Dune sound­track album as well as in the film itself, con­jures up an atmos­phere as effec­tive­ly as any oth­er piece of his work in the genre. “David flew me to Los Ange­les to see Dune,” Eno recalls in a New York Times inter­view about his recent­ly released com­pi­la­tion Bri­an Eno (Film Music, 1976–2020), which includes the track.

“It wasn’t fin­ished then. And I don’t know whether his inten­tion or his hope was that I would do the whole sound­track, but I didn’t want to, any­way. It was a huge project, and I just didn’t feel like doing it. But I did feel like mak­ing one piece for it, so that’s what I did.”

Dune was indeed a for­mi­da­ble under­tak­ing, and one that ulti­mate­ly proved too big for Lynch. Some fans would argue, even after the suc­cess­ful first install­ment from Vil­leneuve, that it’s too big for any film­mak­er. But the world Her­bert cre­at­ed, one both sweep­ing and uncom­mon­ly detailed, has inspired many a cre­ator to pro­duce impres­sive work for projects both real­ized and unre­al­ized. Per­haps it counts as a missed oppor­tu­ni­ty that the lat­est Dune film, with its appar­ent clean-slate approach to pre­vi­ous attempts at adap­ta­tion, did­n’t com­mis­sion a score from Eno, whose sig­na­ture son­ic tex­tures could nice­ly have com­pli­ment­ed Vil­leneu­ve’s instinct for the sub­lime. But then, a stu­dio can’t go far wrong with Hans Zim­mer either.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Hear Hans Zimmer’s Exper­i­men­tal Score for the New Dune Film

Bri­an Eno Once Com­posed Music for Win­dows 95; Now He Lets You Cre­ate Music with an iPad App

The Glos­sary Uni­ver­sal Stu­dios Gave Out to the First Audi­ences of David Lynch’s Dune (1984)

The Dune Col­or­ing & Activ­i­ty Books: When David Lynch’s 1984 Film Cre­at­ed Count­less Hours of Pecu­liar Fun for Kids

A Side-by-Side, Shot-by-Shot Com­par­i­son of Denis Villeneuve’s 2020 Dune and David Lynch’s 1984 Dune

Bri­an Eno Reveals His Favorite Film Sound­tracks

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities, the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

by | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 1 ) |

How Neal Stephenson’s Sci-Fi Novel Snow Crash Invented the “Metaverse,” Which Facebook Now Plans to Build (1992)

in Books, Sci Fi, Technology | October 21st, 2021

What­ev­er the ben­e­fits and plea­sures of our cur­rent inter­net-enriched world, one must admit that it’s not quite as excit­ing as the set­ting of Snow Crash. Orig­i­nal­ly pub­lished in 1992, that nov­el not only made the name of its author Neal Stephen­son, it ele­vat­ed him to the sta­tus of a tech­no­log­i­cal Nos­tradamus. It did so, at least, among read­ers inter­est­ed in the inter­net and its poten­tial, which was much more of a niche sub­ject 29 years ago. Of the many inven­tions with which Stephen­son fur­nished Snow Crash’s then-futur­is­tic 21st-cen­tu­ry cyber­punk real­i­ty, few have cap­tured as many techie imag­i­na­tions as the “meta­verse,” an enor­mous vir­tu­al world inhab­it­ed by the avatars of its users.

“Lots of oth­er sci­ence fic­tion media includes meta­verse-like sys­tems,” writes The Verge’s Adi Robert­son, but “Stephenson’s book remains one of the most com­mon ref­er­ence points for meta­verse enthu­si­asts.” This holds espe­cial­ly true in Sil­i­con Val­ley, where, as Van­i­ty Fair’s Joan­na Robin­son puts it, “a host of engi­neers, entre­pre­neurs, futur­ists, and assort­ed com­put­er geeks (includ­ing Ama­zon C.E.O. Jeff Bezos) still revere Snow Crash as a remark­ably pre­scient vision of today’s tech land­scape.” It’s rumored that Face­book CEO Mark Zucker­berg will soon announce his com­pa­ny’s intent to change its name to one that bet­ter suits its own long-term plan: to tran­si­tion, as Zucker­berg him­self put it, “from peo­ple see­ing us as pri­mar­i­ly being a social media com­pa­ny to being a meta­verse com­pa­ny.”

Bold though this may sound, astute read­ers haven’t for­got­ten that Snow Crash is a dystopi­an nov­el. The meta­verse it presents “is an out­growth of Stephenson’s satir­i­cal cor­po­ra­tion-dom­i­nat­ed future Amer­i­ca,” writes Robin­son, “but it’s unde­ni­ably depict­ed as hav­ing a cool side.” After all, the nov­el­’s pro­tag­o­nist is “a mas­ter hack­er who gets in katana fights at a vir­tu­al night­club,” though his vir­tu­al exis­tence com­pen­sates for a grim­mer real-world lifestyle. “In the book, Hiro lives in a shab­by ship­ping con­tain­er,” Stephen­son says, “but when he goes to the Meta­verse, he’s a big deal and has access to super high-end real estate.” This may sound faint­ly rem­i­nis­cent of cer­tain online worlds already in exis­tence: Sec­ond Life, for exam­ple, whose hey­day came in the ear­ly 2010s.

Though pre­sum­ably more ambi­tious, Zucker­berg’s vision of the meta­verse remains, for the moment, broad­ly defined: it will con­sist, he’s said, of “a set of vir­tu­al spaces where you can cre­ate and explore with oth­er peo­ple who aren’t in the same phys­i­cal space as you.” But as The Verge’s Alex Heath notes in an arti­cle on Face­book’s impend­ing name change, the com­pa­ny “already has more than 10,000 employ­ees build­ing con­sumer hard­ware like AR glass­es” — glass­es, that is, for aug­ment­ed real­i­ty, the over­lay­ing dig­i­tal ele­ments onto the real world — “that Zucker­berg believes will even­tu­al­ly be as ubiq­ui­tous as smart­phones.” It’s not impos­si­ble that he could be lead­ing the way toward the thrilling, dan­ger­ous, and often hilar­i­ous vir­tu­al world Snow Crash held out to us — and in whose absence we’ve had to make do with Face­book.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Sto­ry of Habi­tat, the Very First Large-Scale Online Role-Play­ing Game (1986)

Tim­o­thy Leary Plans a Neu­ro­mancer Video Game, with Art by Kei­th Har­ing, Music by Devo & Cameos by David Byrne

William Gib­son, Father of Cyber­punk, Reads New Nov­el in Sec­ond Life

Sci-Fi Author J.G. Bal­lard Pre­dicts the Rise of Social Media (1977)

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities, the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

by | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 1 ) |

Sci-Fi Pioneer Hugo Gernsback Predicts Telemedicine in 1925

in Health, Sci Fi, Technology | September 13th, 2021

If you’ve ever won­dered why one of sci­ence fiction’s great­est hon­ors is called the “Hugo,” meet Hugo Gerns­back, one of the genre’s most impor­tant fig­ures, a man whose work has been var­i­ous­ly described as “dread­ful,” “tawdry,” “incom­pe­tent,” “grace­less,” and “a sort of ani­mat­ed cat­a­logue of gad­gets.” But Gerns­back isn’t remem­bered as a writer, but as an edi­tor, pub­lish­er (of Amaz­ing Sto­ries mag­a­zine), and pio­neer of sci­ence fact, for it was Gerns­back who first intro­duced the earth-shak­ing tech­nol­o­gy of radio to the mass­es in the ear­ly 20th cen­tu­ry.

“In 1905 (just a year after emi­grat­ing to the U.S. from Ger­many at the age of 20),” writes Matt Novak at Smith­son­ian, “Gerns­back designed the first home radio set and the first mail-order radio busi­ness in the world.” He would lat­er pub­lish the first radio mag­a­zine, then, in 1913, a mag­a­zine that came to be called Sci­ence and Inven­tion, a place where Gerns­back could print cat­a­logues of gad­gets with­out the both­er of hav­ing to please lit­er­ary crit­ics. In these pages he shone, pre­dict­ing futur­is­tic tech­nolo­gies extrap­o­lat­ed from the cut­ting edge. He was under­stand­ably enthu­si­as­tic about the future of radio. Like all self-appoint­ed futur­ists, his pre­dic­tions were a mix of the ridicu­lous and the prophet­ic.

Case in point: Gerns­back the­o­rized in a 1925  Sci­ence and Inven­tion arti­cle that com­mu­ni­ca­tions tech­nolo­gies like radio would rev­o­lu­tion­ize med­i­cine, in exact­ly the ways that they have in the 21st cen­tu­ry, though not quite through the device Gerns­back invent­ed: the “teledactyl,” which is not a robot­ic dinosaur but a telemed­i­cine plat­form that would allow doc­tors to exam­ine, diag­nose, and treat patients from a dis­tance with robot­ic arms, a hap­tic feed­back sys­tem, and “by means of a tele­vi­sion screen.” Nev­er mind that tele­vi­sion did­n’t exist in 1925. Sound­ing not a lit­tle like his con­tem­po­rary Buck­min­ster Fuller, Gerns­back insist­ed that his device “can be built today with means avail­able right now.”

It would require sig­nif­i­cant upgrades to radio tech­nol­o­gy before it could sup­port the wire­less inter­net that lets us meet with doc­tors on com­put­er screens. Per­haps Gerns­back was­n’t entire­ly wrong — tech­nol­o­gy may have allowed for some ver­sion of this in the ear­ly 20th cen­tu­ry, if med­i­cine had been inspired to move in a more sci-fi direc­tion. But the focus of the med­ical com­mu­ni­ty — after the dev­as­ta­tion of the 1918 flu epi­dem­ic — had under­stand­ably turned toward dis­ease cure and pre­ven­tion, not dis­tance diag­no­sis.

Gerns­back looked fifty years ahead, to a time, he wrote, when “the busy doc­tor… will not be able to vis­it his patients as he does now. It takes too much time, and he can only, at best, see a lim­it­ed num­ber today.” Home vis­its did not last anoth­er fifty years, but remote med­i­cine did­n’t take their place until almost 100 years after Gerns­back wrote. Indeed, the web­cams that now give doc­tors access to patients in the pan­dem­ic only came about in 1991 for the pur­pose of mak­ing sure the break room in the com­put­er sci­ence depart­ment at Cam­bridge had cof­fee.

Gerns­back even antic­i­pat­ed advances in space med­i­cine, which has spent the last sev­er­al years build­ing the tech­nol­o­gy he pre­dict­ed in order to per­form surg­eries on sick and injured astro­nauts stuck months or years away from Earth. He would have par­tic­u­lar­ly appre­ci­at­ed this usage, though he isn’t giv­en cred­it for the idea. Gerns­back also deserves cred­it for pok­ing fun at him­self, as he seemed to real­ize how hard it was for most peo­ple to take him seri­ous­ly.

To non-vision­ar­ies, the tech­nolo­gies of the future would all seem equal­ly ridicu­lous today, as in the pages of Gerns­back­’s satir­i­cal 1947 pub­li­ca­tion, Pop­u­lar Neck­an­ics Gagazine. Here, we find such objects as the Lam­pli­fi­er, “the lamp that has EVERYTHING.” Gerns­back­’s love of gad­gets blurred the bound­aries between sci­ence fic­tion and fact, always with the strong sug­ges­tion that — no mat­ter how use­ful or how ludi­crous — if a machine could be imag­ined, it could be built and put to work.

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

The Iso­la­tor: A 1925 Hel­met Designed to Elim­i­nate Dis­trac­tions & Increase Pro­duc­tiv­i­ty (Cre­at­ed by Sci­Fi Pio­neer Hugo Gerns­back)

A 1947 French Film Accu­rate­ly Pre­dict­ed Our 21st-Cen­tu­ry Addic­tion to Smart­phones

Enter a Huge Archive of Amaz­ing Sto­ries, the World’s First Sci­ence Fic­tion Mag­a­zine, Launched in 1926

Sci-Fi Author J.G. Bal­lard Pre­dicts the Rise of Social Media (1977)

Arthur C. Clarke Pre­dicts in 2001 What the World Will Look By Decem­ber 31, 2100

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

by | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 1 ) |

« Go Back — More in this category... »
Quantcast