SciFi history?

[mike_bike_kite]

I was just reading Time for the Stars by Robert A. Heinlein (1956). The crew on the space ship are out in deep space and needing to either grow or recycle everything to survive. It made me smile to be reading a SciFi story on electronic paper about the crew of some future space craft who were having to recycle paper for their morning newspaper

[banjobama]

Ha ha ha. Silly readers of words on paper!

[K-Thom]

Why, on a long-term space odyssey it even could make sense to rather use recycled paper than an electronic reading device, which might be much more complicated and energy-consuming to recycle.

[speedtouch]

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

[WillAdams]

It was hard to imagine that the large devices which filled the basement of a university or office or government building and output to paper tape and were input to punch cards would become small, personal and ubiquitous.

I'm trying to think of the first such instance, but blanking --- anyone?

William

[mike_bike_kite]

Originally Posted by K-Thom

Why, on a long-term space odyssey it even could make sense to rather use recycled paper than an electronic reading device, which might be much more complicated and energy-consuming to recycle.

I can't see that:

• There's the extra weight and volume of the books (at least 1000:1).
• This means more fuel will be required by the ship.
• Recycling paper results in approx 30% loss each time which means fresh paper will always be required.
• A fully grown tree can be turned into 300 new paperback books.
• But recycling needs machinery and a lot of energy.
• If you like to read on white paper then you'll also have to factor in the use of bleaches.
• But most of all I just can't picture the star ship enterprise with a large paper based library.

Assuming ereaders can be made unbreakable then the only ongoing cost is their electricity. The electronics should also be unbreakable, if they're not then it doesn't bode well for life aboard the spaceship.

[HamsterRage]

It's fun to go back and read hard SciFi from the 30s to the 50s just to see how much they missed. EE Doc Smith stuff is especially cool for that.

Miniaturization seems to have completely passed by most authors. They make everything huge to accommodate the gigantic machines.

[mike_bike_kite]

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 certainly wasn't putting Heinlein down for missing future inventions but SciFi aims to show us the future and sadly the world really hasn't changed that much since the whole genre began. It was just quite nice to suddenly come across an example where reality had actually outpaced fiction for once.

Originally Posted by WillAdams

I'm trying to think of the first such instance, but blanking --- anyone?

The Commodore Pet came out in 1975. If you like the history of personal computers then this coffee table book is great Digital Retro.

[curtw]

According to this reference, the first science fiction writer to posit an electronic book was Stanislaw Lem, in Return From the Stars, in 1961. Just five years (and a fantastic paradigm shift) from your Heinlein book.

I love this...

I spent the afternoon in a bookstore. There were no books in it. None had been printed for nearly half a century. And how I have looked forward to them, after the micro films that made up the library of the Prometheus! No such luck. No longer was it possible to browse among shelves, to weigh volumes in hand, to feel their heft, the promise of ponderous reading. The bookstore resembled, instead, an electronic laboratory. The books were crystals with recorded contents. They can be read the aid of an opton, which was similar to a book but had only one page between the covers. At a touch, successive pages of the text appeared on it. But optons were little used, the sales-robot told me. The public preferred lectons - like lectons read out loud, they could be set to any voice, tempo, and modulation. Only scientific publications having a very limited distribution were still printed, on a plastic imitation paper. Thus all my purchases fitted into one pocket, though there must have been almost three hundred titles. My handful of crystal corn - my books. I selected a number of works on history and sociology, a few on statistics and demography, and what the girl from Adapt had recommended on psychology. A couple of the larger mathematical textbooks - larger, of course, in the sense of their content, not of their physical science. The robot that served me was itself an encyclopedia, in that - as it told me - it was linked directly, through electronic catalogs, to templates of every book on earth. As a rule, a bookstore had only single "copies" of books, and when someone needed a particular book, the contents of the work was recorded in a crystal.

The originals - Crystomatrices - were not to be seen; they were kept behind pale blue enamel the steel plates. So a book was printed, as it were, every time someone needed it. The question of printings, of their quantity, of their running out, had ceased to exist. Actually, a great achievement, and yet I regretted the passing of books.

[sabredog]

I well remember Starman Jones by Robert Heinlein where the ships astrogators had to be mathematical geniuses, using logarithmic tables to calculate hyperspace jumps. They even used slide rules before card inputting to the ships computer.

Well I remember using log tables at school and later professionally! Slide rules...nope....

It is a good book though!

[BenG]

We had lessons in high school about using slide rules but that was just as hand held calculators were making an appearance so it was never put to any practical use even though the calculators were pretty expensive at that time. I think one guy in the pre-calculus class had one, but was allowed to use it on tests.

[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

[sabredog]

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

I remember that reference and use it often when discussing the modern PDA and smart phone. It is the first reference I remember for the device that everyone uses now, but then it was really science fiction.

I do not recall authors like H Beam Piper using hand held computers at all in their stories. Though James Blish did mention a "cat's brain computer" in the screenplay short story adaptation of the Star Trek episode "Miri" published in the early 70's. However that was the size of a modern desktop printer.

In the old ST Classic episodes, books were read on moniitors rather than hand held devices

The Star Trek Padd was used to read books in STTNG, but that was much later on.

[curtw]

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

The same site says that your memory is accurate: Pocket Computer originated with The Mote in God's Eye

[sabredog]

It was also mentioned in some detail in the Mote in God's Eye setting novel "King David's Spaceship" One of the middies was using it to call the Imperial Naval destroyer orbiting Prince Samual's World. That book, written in the early 80's, was an expanded version of the three part serial "A Spaceship for the King" which was written way back in 1971, before Mote I believe.