I can’t remember when I last read Arthur C. Clarke’s mighty The City and the Stars, which just for the record I will unhesitatingly recommend to ANYONE. I can remember the first time. I was a teenager, aged all of 18 years old, poised and nervous on the brink of Exciting New Things in life. Or put another way, Things that I Guessed Correctly Would Either be Great Fun or Utterly Horrible but Either Way I’d Get Through Them. Which wasn’t far off the mark. Either way I felt I could easily put myself in the shoes of Alvin, the first entirely new person born in the city of Diaspar in seven thousand years, edgy and irritated in this society borne of millions of years of unyielding stability. Oh yes. And the elegiac, mournful yet optimistic tale of a future far beyond the fall of the Empire of Man very nicely helped me put my own problems in context. Ever since then I’ve always tried to take the long view that This Too Shall Pass.
And I started rereading it last night, out of curiosity. Yup, still got it.
Clarke is famous for predicting the communications satellite (he foresaw all of three of them in orbit, each one a manned installation ... but he got the concept and the maths right). But he also did much more than that. The City and the Stars, Chapter 1, and Alvin and a group of friends are having an adventure that turns out to be a fully immersive, all-senses virtual reality multi-user online saga. Bloody hell! This was 1956 and Clarke predicted World of Warcraft.
Why did no one listen?? You fools, you poor pitiful fools.
I've heard somewhere that he also predicted laptops and mobile phones, not that that would have been hard.
ReplyDeleteFor the record, I reckon that there will be a device that removes all traces of alcohol from your body and another gadget to allow you to edit and create documents and files by imagining them. I'll be right one day.
Ah yes, the viddy of Imperial Earth, published 1976, which is basically a modern day palmtop + phone. Doesn't have an inbuilt camera, as far as I recall, so he slipped up there. And I don't think he foresaw SMS.
ReplyDeleteI think the literature may be ahead of your other ideas ...