SciFi history?

[DMcCunney]

Originally Posted by GeoffC

SciFi is easier to say ....

Than Scientifiction? Yes.

Than SF? No.
______
Dennis

[DMcCunney]

Originally Posted by nyrath

Yes, it was coined by a man I really respect, the late David Potter.

I miss him.

Yes, Gharlane was a reason for actually reading rec.arts.sf.written. His presence markedly improved the signal-to-noise ratio.

I miss him too.
______
Dennis

[Roger Parkinson]

Originally Posted by sabredog

Another soon to be realised technology I first read about in books by H Beam Piper.

He described starships and domed/new colonies using "carniculture vats" to grow meat products in order to feed crew or colonists.

I read on a local news site that scientists have developed means to grow meat in vats to feed the words starving millions within 50 years.

Interesting...

I'd be interested to see a link to that site.

I've been thinking lately wouldn't it be cool to have a box or a tank of some kind that you just shovel waste into and it puts out some kind of edible gloop and maybe clean water. While I am dreaming let's have generate enough heat to power small appliances, eg charge the phone battery etc.

Then have them so cheap that you could drop them into disaster areas, meanwhile the rest of us would keep one in a cupboard in case we had a local emergency. Though if it were algae-driven you'd have to feed it sometimes or it would die.

[GeoffC]

Some of the storylines by Darrell Bain mention plants that have been engineered to produce 'meat'; his spaceships have converters to take raw material and produce food, whilst others may create spare parts for machinery...."The Long Way Home" includes the latter two.

[brecklundin]

hands down this has been one of my all time interesting threads on MR and the first of any note in over a year...very intersting stuff early on and it stayed interesting for a while.

[WillAdams]

John Varley had genetically engineered plants and animals in his Titan/Wizard/Demon trilogy to produce:

- meat (which could be harvested w/o killing the producing animal)
- pre-formed lumber (and the bark could be used for strapping and the stump would ooze glue for a couple of hours)
- radios (seeds would transmit message back to the plant which would then re-broadcast back to the other seeds if sufficiently beautiful)
- hand grenades (largish seeds which would explode)
- pepper spray analogue (a reptile which would squirt an anesthetizing liquid when squeezed and was sufficiently docile to be carried until needed)

and of course a living space station which housed all of the above.

William

[Ravensknight]

Originally Posted by DMcCunney

Than Scientifiction? Yes.

Than SF? No.
______
Dennis

WRONG!

I find sie fie flows much more easily off my tongue than does ess eff.
So now that an unstoppable force [me] has met an immovable object [you], where do we go from here?

[nyrath]

Originally Posted by Roger Parkinson

I've been thinking lately wouldn't it be cool to have a box or a tank of some kind that you just shovel waste into and it puts out some kind of edible gloop and maybe clean water. While I am dreaming let's have generate enough heat to power small appliances, eg charge the phone battery etc.

Then have them so cheap that you could drop them into disaster areas, meanwhile the rest of us would keep one in a cupboard in case we had a local emergency. Though if it were algae-driven you'd have to feed it sometimes or it would die.

NASA would love to have a box like that as well. The technical term is "closed ecological life support system" or CELSS.
http://www.projectrho.com/rocket/rocket3g.html#cess

The idea is to reproduce in miniature the situation we have on Earth.

Human urine, faeces, and exhaled carbon dioxide are fed to Spirulina algae. The algae consumes the wastes along with energy from sunlight, and makes more algae along with exhaled oxygen. Humans then inhale the oxygen and eat the algae. Then you repeat the cycle.

As a rough guess, about 12 liters of algae will produce enough food to feed one person, every day.

[Roger Parkinson]

Originally Posted by nyrath

NASA would love to have a box like that as well. The technical term is "closed ecological life support system" or CELSS.
http://www.projectrho.com/rocket/rocket3g.html#cess

The idea is to reproduce in miniature the situation we have on Earth.

Human urine, faeces, and exhaled carbon dioxide are fed to Spirulina algae. The algae consumes the wastes along with energy from sunlight, and makes more algae along with exhaled oxygen. Humans then inhale the oxygen and eat the algae. Then you repeat the cycle.

As a rough guess, about 12 liters of algae will produce enough food to feed one person, every day.

Interesting link, thanks. I hadn't given any thought to producing oxygen as well. Wow! And we get food without slaughtering something with a nervous system. That seems both efficient and nice (though I'm not a vegetarian I have sympathies in that direction).

[Phogg]

Originally Posted by Ravensknight

Ok. I've been reading SciFi since the late 80's. Never once have I heard "Scifi" used as a derogatory term.

I remember more of the experiences WW describes.
I heard it a lot when I started reading science fiction in the 60s.
This is perhaps a generational thing now.

I think Science fiction underwnt a social normalization in the late 70s, with Star Wars, Battlestar Gallactica, Logans Run, and other special effects heavy offerings making science fiction a cash cow in the box office and in the Nelson ratings.

[nyrath]

Originally Posted by Roger Parkinson

Interesting link, thanks. I hadn't given any thought to producing oxygen as well. Wow! And we get food without slaughtering something with a nervous system. That seems both efficient and nice (though I'm not a vegetarian I have sympathies in that direction).

Thank you, the link is to my website. NASA of course is interested in producing oxygen because there ain't no air in space. Such a system designed for use by disaster victims here on Earth do not need do worry about that, so can be much simpler.

[Strolls]

Originally Posted by Worldwalker

Here's a question: What if you're writing a story right now which is set at a time in which eggbeaters didn't exist and your character invents an eggbeater -- is that science fiction?

I can't believe you all missed this! This would surely be called alternate history, wouldn't it?

[DMcCunney]

Originally Posted by Ravensknight

WRONG!

I find sie fie flows much more easily off my tongue than does ess eff.

I'll take your word for it, since it's your tongue. I don't understand why you find it so, but no matter.

So now that an unstoppable force [me] has met an immovable object [you], where do we go from here?

We annihilate each other in a total matter->energy conversion, and Life As We Know It ends?

How about you pronounce it Sie Fie, and I pronounce it Ess Eff, we agree we're referring to the same thing, and we don't get into the definition of SF....
______
Dennis

[DMcCunney]

Originally Posted by Strolls

I can't believe you all missed this! This would surely be called alternate history, wouldn't it?

Yes, but it leads to the trickier question of whether that's SF.

For example, consider Robert Harris's _Fatherland_. It's a mystery set in 1964. A police inspector is investigating the death of a government official. He finds himself involved in high level conspiracies as another government agency takes over the case and rules the death suicide.

The inspector works for a German police agency. The group that takes over the investigation is the Gestapo. In Fatherland's timeline, The Axis won WWII, and Nazi Germany dominates Europe, in a tense nuclear standoff with the United States.

It's certainly alternate history. You can make a case that it's not SF.
______
Dennis

[mike_bike_kite]

Originally Posted by DMcCunney

Yes, but it leads to the trickier question of whether that's SF.

For example, consider Robert Harris's _Fatherland_....It's certainly alternate history. You can make a case that it's not SF.
______
Dennis

It sounds very much like Philip K Dick's The man in the high castle written in 1963. Perhaps it would be better to call Harris's novel derivative alternative history