How Isaac Asimov shaped robotics and space exploration and predicted the Internet
rossdawson.com
rossdawson.com
Someone, I think it may have been Asimov, but it might have been Heinlein or one of the other big names of that era, said that these are the least important things that science fiction writers predict.
What is important, he said, was not the gadgets of the future, but how they change us. Predicting ubiquitous robots or personal jetpacks would be like a writer in 1880 predicting cars replacing horses.
Sure, cars replacing horses is interesting...but what is important is predicting what the increased speed and range of cars over horses would do to everyday life. What do cars do to teen and young adult dating habits, for instance? With a car it is much easier to arrange a quick hook up with someone away from the prying eyes of your parents. That could have big ramifications.
The future is more than just the present with nicer gadgets.
Great science fiction keeps the technology in the background and simply uses it to further the story.
But excellent science fiction makes the plot so believable that the tech just seems natural. My go-to example of such sci-fi is Solaris. I think it's much harder to achieve this in a single novel because it's typically less annoying to the reader when exposition is spread over multiple novels.
Examples of the former (in my opinion): Ender series, The Forever War, Xenogenesis series, Contact, Nexus.
Examples of the latter: Red Rising, Foundation, The Expanse, Three Body series, Ghost in the Shell (Japanese manga).
- "Hello Summer, Goodbye" by Michael Coney
- "Oryx and Crake" by Margaret Atwood (the first book in the Maddaddam trilogy)
- "The Fifth Season" by N. K. Jemisin (the first book in the Broken Earth trilogy)
- "The Mechanical" by Ian Tregillis (the first book in the Alchemy Wars trilogy)
- "Nexus" by Ramez Naam (the first book in the Nexus trilogy)
- "Snow Crash" by Neal Stephenson
- "Pandora's Star" by Peter F. Hamilton (part of the Commonwealth Saga)
- "Hyperion" and "Fall of Hyperion" by Dan Simmons
- "Lock In" by John Scalzi
- "Blindsight" by Peter Watts
Hyperion was intriguing but Fall of Hyperion was too slow for my tastes.
Snowcrash was great. One of my favorite audiobook narrations too!
You might also like Malazan Book of the Fallen and Discworld. Malazan especially is a masterpiece of world and history building.
Oh, and the Ghost in the Shell series would definitely be a great fit for you. A good start would be the original animated film from the mid-90s. If you enjoy that, jump to the anime Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex.
Part of the reason is that several of the main characters are from the 20th century. I rolled my eyes when one of the characters, when starting up a plane, said something like "atomic batteries to power; turbines to speed. ... I've been waiting a long time to say that."
In this novel, people can be immortal and that's almost like saying the can buy bread or drive cars.
Of course it gives opportunities for a great plot.
But even better, the civilization that is being built on top of that is very interesting.
From 1964: "Complete lunches and dinners, with the food semiprepared, will be stored in the freezer until ready for processing. I suspect, though, that even in 2014 it will still be advisable to have a small corner in the kitchen unit where the more individual meals can be prepared by hand, especially when company is coming." Frozen TV dinners were a decade old when he wrote that. And they don't even vaguely dominate the food market today in the way he suggests they will. (If anything the big differences between 1964 and today are much greater availability of fresh foods and eating out being much more common.)
EVERYONE predicted video-phones back in the 60s -- hell, the Jetsons cartoon beat him to the punch there by a couple of years! Generally, people predicted they would be common much earlier than they actually were, and no one predicted you'd carry them around in your pocket -- or be more likely to just text a message than to use them.
For my money the most interesting predictions here are the ones where he predicts things will go more slowly than most people at the time thought -- for instance, predicting man will have not walked on Mars in 2014 was surprisingly conservative for an SF writer in 1964, but it was also dead right.
But to be fair, the idea/concept of the Multivac and of the "home" terminal" (at least for accredited scientists) was present in Asimov's stories long before 1988, this is 1959:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multivac
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anniversary_(short_story)
Now, to be a little conspirationist, it could be possible that he foresaw that the Internet (as we know it today) may become a very large government controlled computer ... ...accessible only by a selected minority ...
Available from http://www.baen.com/chapters/W200506/0743499107___2.htm . Also mentioned in one of the comments at the linked-to article.
And to be fair with Asimov, he saw some of that for example with "U.S.Robotics", a fictitious private company that invented the positronic brain and had a monopoly on that business. Also, his Encyclopedia Galactica is the creation of a large group of "encyclopedists" who are basically academic elites, something we could see as a Wikipedia-like except that it wasn't produced by millions of joe schmoes but rather by a kind of priesthood of professional intellectuals. (Foundation makes these people work in a centralized organization, but that happens in a late period of the galactic empire, it's my impression that the origins of the Encyclopedia are way more descentralized.)
Absent any existing examples, the effects brought about by the modern Internet, smartphones, collaborative open source software development, generally less rigid organizational hierarchies, etc. would have been very difficult to visualize. Indeed it would have seemed almost alien.
Too right. Hell, it's been nearly 50 years since the last Moon landing, and it's looking very unlikely we'll see that happen within the next few years.
Dragon Systems was founded in the early 1980's.
I agree with your comments but please avoid the ageism.
https://www.theverge.com/tldr/2018/2/6/16980538/spacex-falco...
I need to read them again...
The appliances of 2014 will have no electric cords, of course, for they will be powered by long- lived batteries running on radioisotopes. The isotopes will not be expensive for they will be by- products of the fission-power plants which, by 2014, will be supplying well over half the power needs of humanity. But once the isotype batteries are used up they will be disposed of only through authorized agents of the manufacturer.
> Jets of compressed air will also lift land vehicles off the highways, which, among other things, will minimize paving problems. Smooth earth or level lawns will do as well as pavements. Bridges will also be of less importance, since cars will be capable of crossing water on their jets, though local ordinances will discourage the practice.
> you will be able to reach someone at the moon colonies
> Most surprising and, in some ways, heartening, 2014 will see a good beginning made in the colonization of the continental shelves. Underwater housing will have its attractions to those who like water sports, and will undoubtedly encourage the more efficient exploitation of ocean resources, both food and mineral. General Motors shows, in its 1964 exhibit, the model of an underwater hotel of what might be called mouth-watering luxury. The 2014 World's Fair will have exhibits showing cities in the deep sea with bathyscaphe liners carrying men and supplies across and into the abyss.
Even more interesting, I would say (though who knows) this power mix he predicted (nuclear + solar) will be much closer to what we end up with on Mars, which he also made predictions about.
"Large solar-power stations will also be in operation in a number of desert and semi-desert areas -- Arizona, the Negev, Kazakhstan."
There's nothing in the prediction which implies that the solar power would be based on PV. I think there's a higher likelihood he was thinking of heliostats.
Solar One, a solar thermal power plant built in Mojave Desert, produced 10MW of electricity back in the 1980s.
You mean CSP? Why do you think that? Silicon PV was available in the 1960's and widely used in the space program. It's been around for longer than the first CSP plant that was built 4 years after Asimov made his predictions in 1964. [1]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concentrated_solar_power#cite_...
In 1941 Asimov wrote the short story "Reason", which took place in a solar power satellite which beamed power down to Earth. He at this time wasn't thinking about PV, because it didn't meaningfully exist, and the story only talks about a "converter". (The station is also a mile across, and in solar orbit.)
There's another SF book I read, probably written in the 1950s, about building such a power plant in Earth orbit. It used a mirror to heat up material in its focus to generate power. (One of the side plots of the story was that some TV show was being filmed on the construction site, and the lead actor, in a space suit, almost drifted through the invisible focus.) This is why I'm sure that SF at the time didn't say that solar power stations had to be PV.
I looked around for something more definitive. In 1981 Asimov wrote "How Did We Find About Solar Power", available at https://archive.org/stream/HowDidWeFindAboutSolarPower-Engli... .
That booklet predicts PV use for the future. (It's also where I learned specifically about Mouchot's work.) In the 1980s he know the cost of PV power was growing ever cheaper.
What it doesn't answer is what Asimov thought in the 1960s.
He might simply have left it open, as he did in "Reason".
So, I could be wrong about my belief. But it's surely not obvious that Asimov is specifically predicting PV over other possibilities that he reasonably know about.
The closest is 238Pu, which is most commonly used in RTGs, but also in a few pacemakers.
A fridge pulls about 60W, so let's say the battery needs to supply 80W on average (assume some heavy-duty capacitors to smooth things out). Wikipedia says that the power density of 238Pu is 0.54 watts per gram.
That's about 150 grams of 238Pu per household. http://ne.oregonstate.edu/rebuilding-supply-pu-238 says 238Pu costs roughly $8 million per kilogram. If we can reduce that by 100x then that's still $12,000.
It seems like it's cheaper to have things hooked up to a power grid, with batteries for those short times that grid power doesn't work, than to use radioisotopes.
My response was that there are two options: 1) discover a radioisotope we don't know about, or 2) find some way to reduce the price by a factor of 1,000.
The thing is, we know all of the radioisotopes now, at least, all with a lifespan measured in years and which can be made on macroscopic scales.
Thus, it can't be #1. (Or, which alternative do you think is better?)
Are you proposing that it's #2? If so, why do you think a factor of 1,000 in cost savings is possible?
One way to make 238Pu is to start with spent nuclear fuel. If we had enough spent nuclear fuel to make batteries for every household, we would have had far more nuclear power in the first place.
Yes, certainly it's possible that we would have had something like a Mr. Fusion by now if there hadn't been the public resistance towards nuclear power. But it's much more likely that it's only a fantasy.
And if it is a fantasy then your argument falsely maligns anti-nuclear advocates by making them responsible for something which was never going to happen.
The best that you can argue is that it's been slowed down. However, there is a strong need for 238Pu in RTGs, and the US, Russia (and the Soviet Union before it) and other countries produce 238Pu. Hundreds of millions of dollars are available for RTG development.
(Why? Because the Navy, CIA, NSA, and no doubt others need dense power sources, have used RTGs, including in top-secret surveillance like tapping undersea cables.)
We know that there are no other possibilities than the handful of radioisotopes that might be an RTG. We also know that the production levels needed to put RTGs in every household would be much more expensive than using the same production methods (mostly nuclear reactors) to generate electricity and deliver it directly to the home.
If you continue to blame anti-nuclear activists for something which is not their fault, then people are going to disregard your viewpoints.
Whether we would get a 1000 cost saving we don't know who know how other things would have developed if we had abundant and clean nuclear.
I will let people decide if they want to do disregard my view or not, don't need you to be the judge of that.
Basically, it posits a fantastic alternative to reality then places the blame for not achieving them on the anti-nuclear protestors, even though in reality there are many better arguments for why those would not have been achieved by now even had there been no reduction in nuclear research.
Moreover, it ignores the problems that might have arisen had, say, Project Orion been green-lighted to launch Mars Probe One.
That being said, long live Isaac Asimov work, your books are amazing!
Almost finished reading the entire Robot/Empire/Foundation series. That “I, Robot” movie was garbage; absolutely nothing to do with the Robot series.
Just finished The Currents of Space. Pretty depressing, that (probably) 10k years in the future, humans are still exploiting each other. Asimov probably has it spot on.
Indeed. Wasn't the rumor that "I, Robot" was originally a script called "Hardwired" (or something like that), and that the Asimov-specific elements were pasted on top of it at the last minute? Regardless, the movie is trash and goes pretty much against the spirit of all Asimov ever wrote :/
I see the beginnings of something similar with The Flow in The Collapsing Empire.
The actual outcome, without laws and with corporations standing in for the robots, is that we are livestock and vermin, according to individual usefulness and accidents of birth.
That wasn't Asimov's answer, outside a few atypical robots-as-a-menace stories. Even the Zeroth Law cannot be misconstrued as "keeping humans as pets" :)
I read him growing up, too, even his David Starr and Norby books, and he never really caught my attention. Gordon R. Dickson's Dorsai Saga is a much better version of the Foundation books, and for all of the love of the Three Laws of Robotics, they really just were devices for science fiction versions of locked room mysteries.
It takes all kinds.
Most of his science output was in a bunch of nonfiction books that I'm not even sure are still in print, and he had a rep for churning out books on every subject at lightning speed, rather than for great insight.
Dorsai and Dickson's stuff had issues too, but he was much better at writing people as well as ideas, and he's had a longer, better overall career at writing science fiction and fantasy. Asimov was probably the first household name writer, but really needs to be viewed a lot more critically then the fandom does.
Heinlein, writing about ESP, and FTL? Niven too, for that matter.
FWIW, Asimov's "Evidence" is listed as a representative example of hard science fiction at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_science_fiction .
The Intelligent Man's Guide to Science (now called Asimov's New Guide To Science) was and is still very highly regarded.
I think you have to consider it in context, and compare it to other SF at the time.
There's a reason why he was one of the "Big Three" of that time, and why Foundation series and his Nightfall novelette were acclaimed so highly.
I can't stand reading Edgar Rice Burroughs, but I can tell that SF fans in the early to mid-20th century thought he was great. I think Dune is simplistic in how it portrays ecosystems and economies, but I recognize that it was the book which really got people to start taking those ideas serious when writing SF.
You'll note that both have been turned into movies, as have several of Asimov's works, so it's not like he's mediocre.
But yes, Asimov wrote with a mid-20th century viewpoint, which dates the material. (Just like early Niven has such a 1970s/Los Angeles viewpoint.[0]) And here we are, post-New Wave, post-cyperpunk, even post-space-opera-revival. Our views have changed, and we now have different expectations and higher standards.
In his non-fiction works, I quite enjoyed the broad coverage in "Asimov's Guide to Science".
[0] Consider that "Puppeteers" comes because on the human ship which met them there was "a camp revival of the ancient Time for Beany TV show featuring Cecil the Sea-Sick Sea Serpent." Compare to Cordwainer Smith, whose works, I think, are not so easily dated.
The Expanse series by James S. A. Corey
The Culture series by Iain M. Banks
(As a Heinlein fan, I really enjoyed Varley's "Red Thunder", written as an homage to Heinlein's juvenile series. There's a scene where the disgraced former astronaut is talking with the family of one of the teens, to convince them that it's okay for him to be on the experimental rocket. The teen's mother is a single parent, and the grandmother is was a Cuban refugee who crossed the Florida Straight in a makeshift boat. It's the grandmother who used her history to convince the mother that it was okay.
This scene mirrors one from Heinlein's "Rocketship Galileo", where the esteemed nuclear physicist visits the mother and father of one of the teens, and the mother draws on the family history where her great-grandparents as teenagers crossed the country on a Conestoga wagon.
The Heinlein one draws on standard American patriotism. I read the Varley version as a commentary that that courage isn't limited to the (primarily white European) people who colonized the American west.)
Okay, that long parenthetical note aside, perhaps you would like David Brin's Uplift Saga series. I didn't like Sundiver that much, but "Startide Rising" and "The Uplift War" have elements which feel like Dune and the Foundation series.
For more modern SF, you may be interested in Ian M. Banks' Culture series. That isn't much like Dune or Foundation, but it is well-written, complex, thoughtful, and full of interesting ideas. (Edit: I see cde-v mentioned Banks an hour ago.)