The Sword and Laser discussion

I liked the book over all but after reading it I started to think about the lack of cell phones, and artificial insemination. They would have come in handy at several times and also changed the nature of the story.

Was the idea of cell phones not present at the time of writing or was it just not used? To me it seems that the write imagined beyond what was in his time. Call phones not being in the imagination yet.

It got me thinking of other books and what would be absent or outdated tech. In H. G. Wells 'War of the Worlds' the aliens arrive via giant cannons. Today that seems too simple for such an old and advanced race. Where are the rockets?

I also started to wonder 20, 30 years from know reading sci-fi of today what will be missing or just too simple by the real day tech of that time period.

The most prescient prediction about mobile phones that I've read was actually in a novel from the same era as The Demolished Man - it's in Heinlein's novel The Star Beast, published just a year later in 1954.

The first time I read it, as a teenager in the early 80s, I thought the whole concept was a little far-fetched - maybe we'd manage to make phones small enough to fit in a pocket by the era of Star Trek, but this novel was supposed to be in the near future.

The second time I read it, several years later, what struck me as odd was the silly idea that an adolescent kid would own one - something like that would be a luxury that maybe a successful businessman would buy for himself, not a kid's toy.

The third time I read it, again after a gap of several years, it seemed astonishingly accurate to the then-current state of mobile phone usage, amazingly so given the novel's vintage. That stuff about the kid leaving his phone at home when he ran away because it could be used to trace his exact location seemed a bit paranoid, though - it wasn't like the phone companies were going to start fitting GPS modules to all their phones. That would be silly.

I'm 27 years old. When I was in middle school no one I knew had a cell phone. By the time I finished high school everyone was getting them. I also remember my family getting our first computer and connecting to it via dial-up. It was so exciting. Now, 15 years later, I walk around everyday with the internet in my pocket; accessible with the touch of a finger on a device that can also make calls, send emails, and play games more advanced than what most console games were capable of then. And it's boring.

It's amazing how quickly technology can develop and become ordinary.

I wrote a master's thesis on a Kaypro 4. I still think it was pretty amazing not to be connected to a mainframe!

Matthew wrote: "I'm 27 years old. When I was in middle school no one I knew had a cell phone. By the time I finished high school everyone was getting them. I also remember my family getting our first computer and ..."


Heh, I'm 27 years old too, and I have had the exact same experiences.

We still don't really have hover cars, but our information technology has widely surpassed most any of the predictions I have come across in the classic sci-fi stories.
That little phone in your pocket has more computing power than what NASA used to send people to the moon.

I'm kind of surprised it took so long for cellphone-like devices to show up in most science fiction. The Dick Tracy comic strip had wrist-radios since the mid-1940s; why was the notion of a miniature long-distance communications device so far-fetched to Golden Age SF authors?

Jacob wrote: "In H. G. Wells 'War of the Worlds' the aliens arrive via giant cannons. Today that seems too simple for such an old and advanced race. Where are the rockets?"

Not necessarily. Project HARP achieved limited spacelaunch by cannon about 50 years ago; at least one company is still attempting to regularize the practice. It might be even more practical on Mars, where the escape velocity is less than half of Earth's.

http://xkcd.com/864/

Would imbed the image but on phone...

You have to work for SHIELD to get a flying car.

Heinlein has a well-earned rep for anticipating technology. For instance, he predicted "breeder" fission reactors in 1940 in the short story "Blowups Happen," the Roomba automated floor cleaner in his novel "The Door Into Summer" in 1957, and railgun launchers in "The Man Who Sold the Moon" in 1949.

Some of the tech he anticipated that hasn't materialized: people-moving strips that extend between cities; nuclear thermal rockets (NERVA notwithstanding); mathematically rigorous psychology and linguistics.