Entries tagged with science fiction

Occasionally, we all look at the science fiction of decades gone by and are amused by the technology they didn't predict. You know, stories set in the far future where computers occupy entire rooms, because no one in the 60s imagined anything different -- that sort of thing.

I sometimes look at today's SF and wonder what we're getting terribly wrong. Recent Star Trek still postulates separate data and voice devices a couple hundred years from now, but the combined PDA/cell phone/web browser is here now. (Earth: Final Conflict combined them. But it's a recent show, so you'd expect that.)

I realized another such glitch recently while watching Andromeda: data ports. How many stories are out there where characters have data ports directly wired into their brains, like (in this case) Seamus Harper does, so they can just plug themselves in and go? And Star Trek's Borg are seen plugging themselves into ships' computers all over the place (blithely ignoring authentication issues, but let's not spoil their fun too much...). But surely wireless networks will rule the future world and coaxial cables will be a fond memory of the 20th century, right? What's with these physical connections?

(If I recall correctly, Blake's 7 got the wireless thing right with Orac. I think it just had to be near another computer and it could (try to) hack it. On the other hand, the federation's main computer -- what, no distributed network? -- occupied a large room.)

Predicting the future is hard, of course, and sometimes the goal of SF is to create an interesting world, as distinct from a likely one. I'm not complaining.

This year's Hugo nominations are out.

I haven't stayed current in SF; there's just too much of it for the combination of my reading speed and available time. But I've heard good things about several items on the list, so it's probably not too wacky or anything.

But.

Let us talk about the "dramatic presentation (short)" category, and specifically the two nominated episodes of Enterprise. Now, Enterprise is a much better show than Voyaer was, but on the whole is not up to the levels set by Next Generation and Deep Space Nine. Each of those series scored one Hugo nomination in their entire seven-year runs. Granted, back then "dramatic presentation" hadn't been split into "short" and "long", so TV shows competed against movies directly.

But I still find it a little hard to believe that these two episodes were serious candidates for "best hour of SF TV last year". One of them, "A Night in Sickbay", was horrid in my opinon, and scored very low in the Usenet ratings. Was there really nothing better on, or were the better shows victims of insufficient visibility? (For those who don't feel like following the link, the other three nominees were one each from Angel, Buffy, and Farscape.)

Curious about how something that bad could make it onto the nomination list, I looked at the statistics. In that category, 284 people nominated a total of 176 items. You get, I think, 5 nominations per category, so that's a possible field of 1420 nominees if there were no overlaps. Distribution and other stats aren't available, but it's entirely possible that something could get onto the list in this category with about 10 nominations. This strikes me as peculiar somehow.

science fiction and future tech

Hugos