Skip to main content

Visions of Tomorrow - Stephen Webb ***

This wasn't the book I expected it to be from the subtitle 'exploring classic Sci-Fi stories through the lens of modern science'. For me, to be 'classic' something has to be both relatively old and high quality. Without the quality part, 'dated' might be a better word - and that's primarily what we get here. I had the same problem with the recent book Classic Science Fiction Stories, so I can't really blame Stephen Webb, but I had in mind a kind of 'science of' book for Golden Age SF. Instead we get end of the nineteenth/early twentieth century proto-SF, often with very little science to be 'science of' with.

The problem with this approach, for me, is illustrated by the best story (as a pure story) in the collection, G. K. Chesterton's The Tremendous Adventures of Major Brown, which first appeared in 1903. This is part of Chesterton's entertaining 'Club of Queer Trades' series of stories, using a Sherlock Holmes-ish approach, where each story is related to investigating someone employing a one-off and unusual way of making money. It's an enjoyable story with Chesterton's usual flair. But I seriously doubt the assertion that it 'delves into augmented, virtual and mixed reality technologies.' What it actually is based on is a company that presents customers with live adventure experiences - no technology required.

This approach of pinning a modern technology to a historical conception that vaguely resembles it is reminiscent of books that suggest, say, that an event in the Bible was an account of an alien abduction. To be fair to Webb, not all the parallels are quite so laboured. The closest to having a genuine feel of science and technology predicted is Edward Bellamy's 1898 story With the Eyes Shut, which genuinely does present a set of future technologies (that have somehow become commonplace in the story without the narrator realising, for reasons that aren't explained). This prefigures everything from talking books to mobile phones. (Oddly, Webb's main 'modern science' bit from this one is 'the future of science publishing'.) However, many stories merely feature tiny references, often based on what feels like magic rather than science to act as a starting point for discuss modern science or technology. So, for example,  Edward Sabin's supposedly humourous 1902 story The Supersensitive Golf Ball describes a magic golf ball that only does well if the player doesn't swear at it. We are told this features 'machine learning and AI' - it really doesn't.

Most of the stories are painfully slow and laboured. Unfortunately, because these tedious tales take up most of the space, Webb only has room for a couple of pages each on the science or technology, which inevitably feels superficial - and given the frailty of most of the connections, it's hard to take much interest in it. It doesn't help that even the most scientific-sounding of the stories can rapidly descend into fantasy. Miles Breuer's 1930 The Gostak and the Doshes makes a big thing of explaining Minkowskian spacetime, only to both have the scientist dismiss Einstein ('Why should the speed of light be fixed?' - a question that shows the author had zero understanding of the science) and to then envisage a mental means of undergoing a highly unlikely dimensional translation.

A final moan - I've had to look up all those dates above. The book, bizarrely, doesn't say when the stories date from, which would have been very useful to give the reader context. There's a good idea in here struggling to get out - but the chosen stories don't deliver, while the science coverage is far too much of an overview. Our reviewer much preferred Webb's earlier book, All the Wonder that Would Be which is more about the perhaps easier job of identifying the differences between science fiction's future science and reality.

Paperback:   
Kindle:  
Using these links earns us commission at no cost to you
These articles will always be free - but if you'd like to support my online work, consider buying a virtual coffee or taking out a membership:
Review by Brian Clegg - See all Brian's online articles or subscribe to a weekly email free here
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Laws of Thought - Tom Griffiths *****

In giving us a history of attempts to explain our thinking abilities, Tom Griffiths demonstrates an excellent ability to pitch information just right for the informed general reader.  We begin with Aristotelian logic and the way Boole and others transformed it into a kind of arithmetic before a first introduction of computing and theories of language. Griffiths covers a surprising amount of ground - we don't just get, for instance, the obvious figures of Turing, von Neumann and Shannon, but the interaction between the computing pioneers and those concerned with trying to understand the way we think - for example in the work of Jerome Bruner, of whom I confess I'd never heard.  This would prove to be the case with a whole host of people who have made interesting contributions to the understanding of human thought processes. Sometimes their theories were contradictory - this isn't an easy field to successfully observe - but always they were interesting. But for me, at least, ...
Post a Comment
Read more

The AI Paradox - Virginia Dignum ****

This is a really important book in the way that Virginia Dignum highlights various ways we can misunderstand AI and its abilities using a series of paradoxes. However, I need to say up front that I'm giving it four stars for the ideas: unfortunately the writing is not great. It reads more like a government report than anything vaguely readable - it really should have co-authored with a professional writer to make it accessible. Even so, I'm recommending it: like some government reports it's significant enough to make it necessary to wade through the bureaucrat speak. Why paradoxes? Dignum identifies two ways we can think about paradoxes (oddly I wrote about paradoxes recently , but with three definitions): a logical paradox such as 'this statement is false', or a paradoxical truth such as 'less is more' - the second of which seems a better to fit to the use here.  We are then presented with eight paradoxes, each of which gives some insights into aspects of t...
Post a Comment
Read more

Einstein's Fridge - Paul Sen ****

In Einstein's Fridge (interesting factoid: this is at least the third popular science book to be named after Einstein's not particularly exciting refrigerator), Paul Sen has taken on a scary challenge. As Jim Al-Khalili made clear in his excellent The World According to Physics , our physical understanding of reality rests on three pillars: relativity, quantum theory and thermodynamics. But there is no doubt that the third of these, the topic of Sen's book, is a hard sell. While it's true that these are the three pillars of physics, from the point of view of making interesting popular science, the first two might be considered pillars of gold and platinum, while the third is a pillar of salt. Relativity and quantum theory are very much of the twentieth century. They are exciting and sometimes downright weird and wonderful. Thermodynamics, by contrast, has a very Victorian feel and, well, is uninspiring. Luckily, though, thermodynamics is important enough, lying behind ...
Post a Comment
Read more