Posts tagged ‘Arthur C. Clark’

PRDICTIONS IN SCIENCE FICTION

                        PREDICTIONS IN SCIENCE FICTION

It is a well-known fact that writers of science fiction have been known to predict the future. In the story which will follow is a series of posts, in which I predict the past.

Two famous writers of science fiction have shown foresight in predicting the future in their work, Issac Asimov, and Arthur C. Clarke.

Asimov, in his work, saw the move from incandescent bulbs to fluorescent bulbs and on to LED bulbs. Also, the introduction of robots in his work is well-known.

Arthur C. Clarke had a host of predictions of the future in his work. In the world of computers, he predicted the Yk2 scare in the 1990 novel The Ghost from the Grand Banks.

In Clarke’s 1972 novel Rendezvous with Rama, astronomers were involved in a defense system against asteroid collisions with Earth, detected an alien spaceship. The world is now concerned with a collision with an asteroid and the U.S. has already sent a spacecraft on a successful mission to nudge an asteroid and changed its path.

Clarke also predicted the various uses of satellites. He saw groups of satellites being used for data transmission, phone calls and TV transmissions.

This article is a preamble for my short story, The Superior Species. In this story, through cloning, neanderthals are produced with surprising results. I first submitted this story on July 21, 2006. Since then, the view of neanderthals as brutes has been changing.

It’s been found that neanderthals buried their dead, made jewelry, and manufactured tools. And may have been able to speak.

What really caught my attention was the cover of The New York Times Magazine section published on January 15, 2017. It depicts an obvious caveman holding the hand of a modern-day man. The caveman is wearing a T shirt with the saying, I’M WITH STUPID, with an arrow pointing to modern man.

I will be offering The Superior Species in a series of posts. Hope you follow and enjoy the story.

February 7, 2024 at 8:41 pm Leave a comment

ARTHUR C. CLARK AND I: WE THINK THE SAME BUT HE IS THE BETTER WRITER

I’m sure you’ve read multiple blogs and messages wishing you ‘Happy New Year’.  Well of course I wish you that, but I also wish you a ‘Productive New Year’.  Whatever you do, do more of it and do it well.  Make this a year you’re proud of and can look back on with happiness.  I’m going to try to accomplish those goal.  We’ll see what happens.

 

He is the better writer by about 100 orders of magnitude, but I’m trying to catch up.

But seriously, I am in the process of reading his novel, The Songs of Distant Earth.  I was lucky enough to be able to search a mass of science fiction novels donated to a small local library.  Books for which no room existed.  When I saw this novel in the boxes of donations, I immediately acquired the book to bring home.  I’m happy I did for now a novel I planned to write, formally on the back burner, is now going into the incinerator.

Let me explain.

I had written a short story, December Omen, as yet unpublished.  I will try to find this work a home in the coming year.  The work dealt with the end of the world, not a unique subject, but I thought I had a lock on a new scenario.  Turns out, Clark beat me to it.  We both end the world, but by different means.  We both send mankind into the cosmos in order to survive.  I through frozen embryos; Clark through genetic material and robotic factories to manufacture mankind on some remote Earth-like planet.

At this point, let me include a fact I know I read somewhere.  Whether it is reality or conjecture I do not remember.  Chalk that up to maturity (senility).  The article dealt with DNA, a very stable molecule, and the possibility to incorporate information using its structure.  What a concept!  How much information could reside in a gram of DNA?

However, what inspired this piece was a common scenario in both our stories.  In the new planet was created no religions would exist.  For reasons look at today’s newspaper or read a little history.  I could not believe Arthur C. Clark and I had the same thoughts.  The commonality, unfortunately, ends in that single instant.

January 4, 2016 at 7:14 pm Leave a comment

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