Having had the death of a canine family member in the recent past (hard to believe it's been more than a year now! Seems like only a few weeks ago that I was sniveling in the (human) canned meats aisle while buying her last meal), I completely understand if you say this is getting too personal. But I would like very much to see photos of Arf in his doggy prime.
]]>The difference between the techies and the clueless is that the former sees it coming. You probably read about speech recognition years before Siri showed up, and appreciate that google is doing something similar - so to you Siri is an evolutionary technical triumph pushing back the boundaries of user interfaces. Some people don't have that background and can only see it as magic out of nowhere.
As to the fad for failed-technology dystopias, I don't know; perhaps part of technical training that we don't think about much is the subtle lessons that machines sometimes break down, when they don't work there's a reason, and that a properly trained and equipped person can usually deal with the problem.
]]>Anyway, my thought regarding transrealism is . . . why not write a story about a dog? Only, he's not a dog, he's an alien. Bonus! Your doggy alien isn't any smarter than Arf was - but where Arf really wanted that chicken and couldn't get it because he couldn't "see" that all he needed to do was go around the other way, your alien has that "easy upgrade" for intelligence.
There have been quite a few authors using their dogs to tell a story (and cats, mustn't slight the cats), but in terms of characterization, they don't see to be very good at getting it right. The Call of the Wild might have been a quintessential Boy's book, but as far as dissecting the doggy psyche . . . meh. What a coup for the transrealists if they can actually publish such a book first!
]]>How do I know this? Because this sort of nonsense came up all the time in the old Usenet discussion groups. The last time for me was sometime in 1996 when I asked these worthies to actually name a book they had read with angsty English prof characters doing their angsty thing after which much angst ensued.
I think that after much mumbling and shuffling, maybe two books were finally named, one by me and the other by James Nicoll. Nothing at all from the usual complainers, who seemed mainly to be demanding more women like late period Heinlein used to write 'em.
Iow, frozen in time, and no more than five years after the first Moon landing :-(
]]>For decline try Detroit as a model - 2 million, down to 800 000 & shrinking
]]>But...it's interesting that you use aqueducts as an example. Are you familiar with the Eifel Aqueduct? To sum up its history briefly: It was built by the Romans, semi-broken in 260AD and never repaired, and forgotten for centuries. The locals raided parts of it for stone, and nobody else knew or cared. After a while Europe got more populated, and in the 1930s there was again a city in the area needing water; a team of surveyors looking for a good route for a water system poked a hole into the old channel...where they found the water was still running. Not being crazy, the 20th century team arranged for a pickup pipe to be installed and service picked up pretty much where it had left off nearly 1800 years earlier.
Darned if I know how to fit that into an SF tale, but it's a lovely little piece of technology history.
]]>That's about right. And I hope you'll all forgive me for not wanting to stick around in the tar pit with the sinking dinosaurs.
I maintain that if fiction is about anything (other than raw entertainment) it's about the study of the human condition. And science fiction is about the study of the human condition under circumstances that have been modified by science or technology (fictional or otherwise) that either doesn't exist yet or which is just coming into view.
It's possible to write SF with no human condition -- no humans -- but it's very difficult to keep it interesting.
]]>And now I think of it, one of the stories was from sometime in the early '60s and was about a robot rocket mail carrier. It was written long after Clarke first published his idea of synchronous communication satellites, and not long before Telstar 1 was orbited. International teletype transmission was fairly common by then, and I think fax transmission of photographs had been experimented with. That's a real failure in prediction, eh? We've got the drones for that job, but they're used to deliver bombs, not letters.
]]>The human condition is defined by the interior landscape, and its frontier with the exterior -- its environment. To the extent that we are changing our environment, that means the frontier is changing. For example, those older mainstream authors who are uncomfortable with computers or mobile phones are unlikely to tell us anything interesting about the social interactions of kids who grow up with social networking and texting. They're still human, but the cognitive landscape they inhabit may be radically different from that of their elders, just as the cognitive landscape of a 1940s-born Eng. Lit. major is different from that of their 1840s equivalent. If for no other reason than antibiotics and the germ theory of disease having banished childbed fever and the 10% mortality rate associated with giving birth, and the 50% mortality rate among children ... thus leading to radically different family sized (and hence social norms).
Put it another way: a mainstream novel set in the US mid-west in the 1960s, with antibiotics and electricity and a 2-kid nuclear family would read like the most exotic imaginable science fictional future to a reader in the 1860s.
]]>Rudy, are you familiar with autofiction? It's common in contemporary French writing. Your transreal writing strikes me as the exact same thing, except with a SF bent. :^)
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