Imperial Earth
Duncan Makenzie is the latest generation of the 'first family' of Titan, a colonised moon of Saturn. Originally settled by his grandfather Malcolm Makenzie in the early 23rd century, Titan's economy has flourished based on the harvest and sale of hydrogen mined from the atmosphere, which is used to fuel the fusion engines of interplanetary spacecraft. As the plot opens in 2276, a number of factors are combining to make a diplomatic visit to the 'mother world' of Earth a necessity. Firstly, the forthcoming 500th anniversary of US Independence, which is bringing in colonists from the entire Solar System, obviously needs a suitable representative from Titan. Secondly, the Makenzie family carry a fatal damaged gene that means any normal continuation of the family line is impossible—so both Duncan and his "father" Colin are clones of his "grandfather" Malcolm. Human cloning is a mature technology but is even at this time ethically controversial. And thirdly, technological advances in spacecraft drive systems — specifically the 'asymptotic drive' which improves the specific impulse and thrust by orders of magnitude — means that Titan's whole economy is under threat as the demand for hydrogen is about to collapse.
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What Hacker News says
- Well this made my day. Randomly clicking on the covers, I hit on November 1979. It turns out that this issue had an article on software to solve SOMA cubes and Pentominoes written in 6502 machine code and Basic for the Pet PC. When I originally read this, 46 years ago, I had an Apple II+. So I made some adjustments to the code for the Apple in both the machine code and basic and got it working. That article (along with Arthur C. Clarke's Imperial Earth) started my obsession for Pentominoes that exists today. I've taken that code and rewritten and improved it in Fortran, Pascal, C, C++, and Python. I'd copied that article and carried it with me for years until it got lost in an office move. What a treat to stumble across it today!
- Why do I get the feeling he's telling me to get off his lawn? I found Bret Victor's article informative and inspiring. This just feels like a grumpy rant, and it adds nothing.
On the matter of digital surfaces, I found the description of an object which changed surfaces in Arthur C. Clarke's Imperial Earth fascinating. It essentially "worked" by transmitting electric pulses through the skin that simulated the feelings - the actual object didn't change. I wonder if there's research in that area.
- Cambridge Analytics shows that there's no "seeking out", instead it enters your feed on Facebook and other sites. That you don't go looking, but it's recommended. And CA did quite well doing this, so it's not a myth or hyperbole.
We must learn from history. Not wave it away.
I think the novel was Imperial Earth, but I'm not sure.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imperial_Earth
It's not the highlight of that novel, but I recall the person selected being upset, as it would interfere with their research work. And then some line about "that's why you're perfect, you don't want the job" or something similar.
But not 100% on this, it's just what Google hands me and seems to sync up.
It could have been by an obscure author, which would never show in Google results. I think around 2002 or so, I downloaded a massive txt archive of sci-fi books. As in, 1k authors+. Lots of them I couldn't find in any store. I think I've read some of each author, so it's unclear to me which it may be. And of course, I'd just buy used books by the armful back in the 90s.
Anyhey, good luck.
- Look up the AT&T "You Will" advertising campaign sometime. This ran beginning in 1993, and I remember seeing at least a few of the spots at the time.
What these ads (and much speculative fiction, say, Arthur C. Clark particularly the "newspads" (tablet computers) in 2001 and "minisecs" (smartphones) in Imperial Earth) portrayed was capabilities without consideration of commercial and market imperatives. Capabilities promised empowerment and enablement. Markets delivered enshitiffication and enclosures of commons.
And as Timothy B. Lee noted, "the ads were mostly wrong about one thing: the company that brought these technologies to the world was not AT&T". AT&T's networks deliver much of the content and messaging which was portrayed, but the services themselves are not rooted in AT&T, either the original firm or its remonopolised successor organisation.
<https://www.vox.com/2014/9/6/6113853/we-live-in-the-future-a...>
Microsoft's vision was portrayed as well in the Bill Gates book The Road Ahead, published about the same time (1995). Again, it envisioned much, but little of that vision was delivered directly by Microsoft (though much of it was in fact experienced on computers running Microsoft's operating system, at least until the smartphone revolution supplanted it).
- Science fiction (novels, short stories, or by the 1950s films, and 1960s telvision) doesn't have a primary goal of predicting the future but rather of selling entertainment. To the extent it is speculative, it's almost always discussing contemporary circumstances sufficiently distant setting (in time and space) to be able to comment on it in a way which both minimises social censure and reaction and gives a potential for a fresh perspective (in the best cases). Of course, much of it is simply, or at least largely, escapist space opera / space westerns (Buck Rogers, Star Wars, Battlestar Galactica (original series). And yes, some of the escapist content does have real science or predictive value.
But in balance it's an exceedingly poor prospecting ground for hard-nosed, realistic, and/or accurate predictions. For much the same reason that most space ships are laid our horizontally, with gravity working on the frontal rather than coronal plane is that sets built on Earth are far more easily built and filmed that way, SF addresses its creations, narrative, and audience-appeal needs over any putative scientific or prophetic accuracy.
And sure, there are notable counterexamples.
E.M. Forster's The Machine Stops is frighteningly accurate in a world much like that of the 2010s / 2020s.
Arthur C. Clark in some works hits on some remarkably accurate depictions of at least parts of a future world. Imperial Earth envisions both handheld computers and a culture obsessed with recording every passing moment in a way that's nearly selfie-culture (though he seems to have missed influencers). 2001: A Space Odyssey predicts tablet computers and video telephony with reasonable accuracy (though all but completely ignores their social implications).
Orson Scott Card's Ender's Game presages blogging to some degree (though generally overstating its influence, as Randall Munroe spoofed: <https://www.xkcd.com/635/>).
And there's a whole slew of dystopian SF which has materialised in some form or another, from Ray Bradbury ("The Veldt"), Philip K. Dick (too many to mention), William Gibson, Neal Stephenson, etc., etc., etc. I and others suspect that's to some extent less prophetic than direct stimulus, with contemporary techbros aping their favourite adolescent sci-fi universes without asking "are we the baddies?" or whether they should.
But if you want hard predictions about the future, it's probably better to look to the literature which specifically and seriously attempts to do this, outside of a fictional context.
One such book is Alvin Toffler's Future Shock, now 54 years old.[1]
I'd read that, for the first time, on its 50th anniversary. I was struck by much, and found it on balance to have stood the test of time quite well, and much better than is typical for the genre. As to accuracy, there seem to be three general cases:
- Specific proponents of specific technologies virtually always overestimated the acceptance and impact of those technologies. The notable exception is, of course, information technology, though even for it the specific ways in which it has and hasn't advanced is worth close study.
- Virtually all of the social dynamic predictions seem laughably modest today --- developments in racial, gender, and sexual equality and acceptance, amongst others. Though on reflection this isn't so much that the predictions were bold, but that they've come to pass. We are on the far side of the singularity for these changes, for the most part. What was written in the context of a world in which these changes lay in the future reads much differently now that the inflection points are in the past. At the same time, it's also clear that such changes need not be permanent, and that perhaps such dynamics tend more towards cyclical patterns or pendulum swings, with greater and lesser liberalisation at different points in time.
- Much of the psychological and sociological concerns over advancing technology, faster paces of change, and an ever-growing onslaught of information seem to me to have been extraordinarily prescient, and largely born out. The disruptive effects, both on a personal psychological level and on a collective sociological one, appear to be profound, and we're still in the midst of discovering just how much so.
In thinking about how technological change manifests, I've come up with an ontology of the types of technological mechanisms which operate: fuels, materials, information (receipt, processing, storage, transmission), networks, systems, process knowledge, causal knowledge, power transmission and transformation, and hygiene (dealing with unintended consequences).[2]
Much of the Industrial Revolution (~1800 -- 1950 or so) was fundamentally grounded in new fuels (coal, petroleum, natural gas) and power transmission and transformation (particularly electricity and magnetism), with strong secondary effects through improved and expanded materials (Bessemer steel, aluminium, plastics), communications (telegraph, telephone, radio, television) and recording (rapid print advancements, photography, phonography, film). Since 1950, it's been information technology which seems to have been in the forefront, making some profound advances (overall processing and storage capacities) whilst remaining stubbornly stagnant in others (forecasting, meaningful automation and controls). Networks and systems have been primary secondary effects.
Hygiene is the ninth factor I'd come upon, and falls out of the recognition that all technologies have both intended and unintended effects. As technologies increase in complexity, I strongly suspect the latter dominate, exacting something of a drag on overall progress.
The element that's missing from my typology is the interaction between technology and society as a whole. I don't have much to say on that at the moment, though I feel it's quite significant. I'm noting that lapse for the moment.
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Notes:
1. <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Future_Shock> <https://archive.org/details/isbn_0553132644>
2. I've written on this a few times at HN and elsewhere, searching Algolia for "tech ontology" or "technological ontology" should turn up some references. I'm increasingly feeling that the idea probably needs a book-length treatment discussing each mechanism, how it applies (some of the mappings I make may strike some as obscure, e.g., that knowledge is in some ways a network function, as expressed in the phrase "web of knowledge"), and what the capacities and limitations of each mechanism are.
- The book "Imperial Earth" by Arthur Clark featured a circular cycle track on a low-gravity spaceship.
The main protagonist was trying to train for earth gravity so he cycled around it very fast until he felt 1G
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