Mission of Gravity Q4: What do you think of the analog future?


When I read tales of this vintage, I'm always struck by things they didn't predict. In Mission of Gravity, slide rules are a thing. As is film, developing and projecting. Does it make you pause when people light-years away don't have pocket calculators or video phones? Were there any other "anachronistic" moments that struck you?


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    When I read older SF, part of me just filters out most of the older descriptions of technology. Though I can't help but smile a bit at slide rules being mentioned.

    It doesn't bother me unless the technology is in focus. When it's in focus, it's kind of ruinous. Here the technology of the "flyers" isn't in focus. The technology of the people of the planet very much is, and so it should be- that's the focus, and it's a good one.

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    I too chuckled at the slide rules. It certainly doesn’t bother me that someone failed to predict the future. The prevalence of computing and mobile phone use is probably the single most unanticipated technology from the 50s and 60s.
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    Another typical failure is the power of networked (and hence cloud) computing - most older SF authors assumed that computers would have to just get bigger and bigger in order to be more powerful, and totally missed the opportunities of doing things in parallel.
    We had similar comments about The Patterns of Chaos, by Colin Kapp, which had slide rules, and computers drawing things out on graph paper whilst calculating interstellar jumps through hyperspace.

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    I designed a SF game where a contragravity/FTL drive was discovered right after WWII, and play runs from the 1950s to the 1980s. Slide rules and mechanical calculators were what you had to use until late in the setting. I like that! It's interesting and fun!

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