SciFi history?

[dacattt]

Popping out of lurkdom...


Pre-1975... in the Trek universe there was...

- Spockies / Kirkies - you know them, the ones that camped at the actors houses.
- Trekkies - rabid fan
- Star Trek Fan (sophisticated, cool, "liked" but was cautions about sharing level of enthusiasm)

There was definitely a gap for a word in the middle... so in early '75, in a senior English class in an all girls high-school... da kids made up a new word...

- Trekker (non-rabid fan)

Caught on like wild fire because there was that gap in the language. (And we we doing slave-labor at that point for Bjo who took it to Nimoy who loved it and used it everywhere to help separate out fan types... and now it's even in the dictionary w/ the correct meaning.)

History can be stranger than fiction.

-Cat-
(heading back under my rock.. sorry about the overuse of smilies)

[WillAdams]

Naturally, my comment ``the Greeks invented everything...'' is in a strictly literary discussion (how a society could exist w/o soap baffles me).

An alternate history w/ China / Korea ascendant would be an interesting one --- I'd certainly read it. (Have recently taken up archery again and a Korean or Mongolian horse bow is the next style of bow I want to buy (or make)).

William

[Jadon]

There are a decent number of stories with China as the world's greatest nation, few with Korea ascendant, many more with Japan. Two series based on the voyages of the Treasure Fleet turning out differently are Chris Roberson's Celestial Empire tales and Aliette De Bodard's Xuya Stories, says uchronia.net. Haven't read them, though I've read the "Japanese-flavored Aztec Empire" Sixth Sun series by Thomas Harlan (and googling, I see the third volume came out a year ago and I didn't notice it).

[DMcCunney]

Originally Posted by WillAdams

An alternate history w/ China / Korea ascendant would be an interesting one --- I'd certainly read it. (Have recently taken up archery again and a Korean or Mongolian horse bow is the next style of bow I want to buy (or make)).

David Wingrove did a projected 9 book series set in a future world dominated by China. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chung_Kuo

Supposedly, Corvus/Atlantic books are planning to re-release the entire series in 2011.

William Keith's "Warstrider" series takes place in a future in which Japan dominates Earth, and a group of colonists descended from North Americans in a distant system rebel against the empire. Keith has broader territory in mind, as the protagonists must first deal with unfriendly aliens, then forge an uneasy alliance with the empire to face a machine civilization unfriendly to organic life. Keith has come up with some of the weirdest aliens I've seen in SF, like the Xenos, which live in the crust of planets, one per planet, divide the world into rock and not-rock, and are unaware any life other than them exists.
______
Dennis

[jeffcobb]

My first present to myself upon getting my first ereader a few years back was getting the whole (to my mind) Isaac Asimov collection. I had taken a year off of work (moved to a new state) and spent much of it reading from one end to the other...It is amazing how much stuff he got right back in the 50s...

[Solitaire1]

DMcCunney wrote as part of a post:

Originally Posted by DMcCunney

Lester Del Rey's "Helen O'Loy", published in 1938, though she's not exactly a fantasy wife.

Helen O'Loy reminds me of the anime My Dear Marie (a three-episode OAV originally released in 1996). To summarize: A young man is afraid to approach the girl that he likes. Since he's an amateur mad scientist his solution is to build a robot duplicate of her so he can learn how to approach the real girl. But the duplicate doesn't turn out the way that he expected.

[WillAdams]

I picked up the first few of the David Wingrove novels, but given the unpleasant aspects of it, and the ``nuking the fridge'' story-ending, have never been able to invest the effort to read them.

The Roberson stories look interesting and have added them to my Amazon wish list.

Thanks!

[BenG]

Kim Stanley Robinson's "The Years of Rice and Salt" features an ascendent Asia.

BTW, while I may write SciFi or SF, when speaking I almost always say "Science Fiction".

[crich70]

You have to remember that the villain in the last movie wasn't part of the Romulan military, but was a miner. So his ship would be a lot different from what we have usually seen. I don't want to go into too much detail for fear of spoiling the plot for anyone who hasn't seen it but there was no way he [the villain] could have gotten hold of a bird of prey
and have the story make sense.

Originally Posted by Penforhire

Ever see the original Star Trek Technical Manual from 1975? That was a book I spent a LOT of time with in my youth.

The last movie did an excellent job of laying the groundwork for a new series or, more likely, movies because of the explicitly changed timeline. Can't say I liked the Romulans though (Bird of prey! Not an f'ing squid of prey).

[williemeikle]

Originally Posted by WillAdams

mike_bike_kite --- thanks, but I was more looking for the reference which curtw made, for the ebook reader, save I was thinking more of the ubiquitous small hand-held computer --- the first reference I'm thinking of for that would be Niven & Pournelle's _The Mote in God's Eye_ which was from 1974, but surely there were others between 1961 and 1974.

William

Star Trek had their "tricorders" and such in the late '60s...

[Steven Lyle Jordan]

Originally Posted by Fat Abe

Using some sources mentioned in this thread, I've been searching for origins of the concept, "Fantasy Wife".

In Thea von Harbou's Metropolis (1924), the scientist Rotgang creates a robot to replace Hel, the woman he lost to Joh Frederson, and who died giving birth to Frederson's son. Rotgang intended to put Hel's face on the robot and keep her for himself, before Frederson forced him to use the robot for other ends.

[HistoryWes]

Originally Posted by speedtouch

Well, because electronic readers weren't thought of back then when the book was written. Paper was the medium of information transfer.

I'm not sure about that either, but in Imperial Earth, Arthur C. Clarke wrote about devices that sound a lot like today's smartphones.

[crich70]

Yep and they had the communicator (which looks a lot like modern cell phones) and of course computer disks which predated the 3.5" floppy not to mention medical sensors which have their real life counterpart in the Intensive Care Units of many hospitals today. They consulted experts on what was coming in the near future when they created the original series.

Originally Posted by williemeikle

Star Trek had their "tricorders" and such in the late '60s...

[mike_bike_kite]

the 3.5" floppy

it's odd how nothing dates a film quite so much as seeing a character insert a floppy into a computer. I was watching "Office Space" (not a SciFi film but good nevertheless) and everything felt "here and now" until he grabbed that floppy. Perhaps film writers should always avoid screen shots of operating systems, holding any form of media or mentioning storage capacities etc - remember the film Jonny Mneumonic (SciFi but useless) where Jonny can only store 160GB before his brain explodes or something - pure scifi history.

[Penforhire]

And real-life people should avoid saying things like, "640 KB is more memory than anyone will ever need," ha ha.