So my dear friend Roger Carasso has started his own blog. Maybe this means he’ll have less time to post comments here? I think of all the people I have ever talked to, his worldview and mine are most diametrically opposed. And yet he’s a pretty smart guy. And yet I’m a reasonably smart guy. But we can’t both be “right”, can we? Proof that intelligence is no defence against delusion.
So I was reminded by someone to check out the earlier failed electric scooter Segway predecessors, especially Clive Sinclair’s C5. I actually saw one of these joyless little machines once, buzzing along the road beside me at a brisk walking pace, and was out of my mind with joy. But I was only 13: young, dumb, and full of come… and easily excitable. What’s their excuse?
So according to Cringely, SBC are now trying to extract money from websites that use active buttons to refresh content. I kid you not, they claim SBC now possesses a patent that gives them a piece of the action from, well, basically every website in the world with button bar navigation. Good luck with that! I think SBC will have as much luck enforcing this patent as did BT when it tried to claim that it owned hyperlinking.
Before it gets dismissed, of course, their legal blue meanies will cause as much damage and sabotage as they can. They’ve already tried leaning on one website – a bunch of people that sell kids’ educational toys. Their attractiveness is undoubtedly based on the fact that they’re a small outfit with minimal legal resources and their website uses a lot of buttons along the top bar.
So apparently the stuff I used to do (multimedia) has officially become creaky enough to be catalogued in museums. Apparently, this is a _vital_ pre-broadband era where some of the first widely available ideas of ‘virtual reality’ and cinema-quality 3D graphics for the home were being explored. I still have some original Voyager Company multimedia CD-ROMs and although getting them to work on recent operating systems is indeed a chore, they are true works of art. With basically no consumer-level broadband, the goal was to use the CD-ROM’s 650MB (in those days an almost unimaginably huge amount!) to transfer and retail what we now recognize as thematic websites.
So I read this, and I wrote this, and someone responded with this, so I wrote this:
this is an account of the Future History sub-genre only.
So Brian Aldiss’s Galaxies Like Grains of Sand is not “future history”?
And Sam Delany’s Trouble on Triton: An Ambiguous Heterotopia is not “future history”?
And Greg Egan’s Permutation City is not “future history”?
And Ken McLeod’s The Cassini Division is not “future history”?
Interesting… but incorrect. Let’s not kid ourselves, SF is not really about embarassing ourselves by trying to predict the future (that’s why we have futurists), but instead it’s about holding up a metaphorical mirror to contemporary social trends. By choosing to ignore or elide around enormous swathes of left-of-centre polemic and fiction, the US-centric, Gersback/Heinlein influenced “scientification” constructs an ideological homogenization filter that seeks to whitewash the genre while directing social trends concordantly.
In this SF is distinct from many other genres, which seek to influence (whether consciously or unconsciously) current social trends by reflecting on an idealized metaphor of the past, whether recent or distant. SF just flips this mirror around.
