Black Gate

Well, just as everyone is remarking on how the new conversant iPhone is making science fiction true to life, one pretty big part of the science fiction imagination remains just that; while the 21st century has not only arrived, we’re a decade into it, but we won’t be taking any sight seeing trips to Mars in the near future.  Even a suborbital cruise will have to wait until 2013. The overly ambitiously and to-date technically impossibly named Virgin Galactic, a space tourism company founded by British billionaire and all-around let’s do something fun and make some money at it guy Sir Richard Branson, has announced that commercial flights have been delayed for another two years.  But don’t start buying any tickets, as this is something like the fourth time the schedule has been bumped forward since flights were supposed to begin back in 2008.

If you did want to get in on the ground floor, so to speak, tickets cost $200,000, with a deposit of$20,000 required.  Not sure if that includes complimentary drinks.

Back in 1977, science-fiction writer Isaac Asimov wrote a piece for Advertising Age predicting, among other things, that consumers would opt to receive ads personalized to their interests as well as the role of “persuasion techniques developed by advertology (sic)” to promote social change. While Asimov got the general idea right, he was wrong on the delivery channel for target marketing (he thought it would be television, having no notion of the Internet) and the evolution of political advertising (he thought it would be for the purpose of “battling ignorance and folly” as opposed to most political messages today that’d rather promote ignorance and folly).

Asimov was from a generation of SF writers who saw their avocation in part as to predict the future as a positive, better place to live. In the same article, Asimov conjectured that by 2000, “Energy will once more be relatively plentiful, and it will be used more wisely, we hope, by a world that has been taught by the events of these recent decades to cooperate for survival.” Good luck with that.

I was thinking about this after reading “Novelists Predict Future With Eerie Accuracy” by John Scwartz in The New York Times Sunday Review. He notes the range of predictions that have come to pass, ranging from Jules Verne staging moon launches from Florida to Arthur C. Clarke’s anticipation of satellite communications to Internet virtual realities envisioned by William Gibson and Bruce Sterling, two of the founding fathers of the cyberpunk movement in the 1980s. But he fails to distinguish between those like Asimov who hoped they were right in promoting a future enhanced by technological development and those whose extrapolations of global corporate and media trends led to more decidedly dystopic premonitions.

Alas, it seems as if the optimists who envisioned the twenty-first century as some sort of glittering technological utopia might have gotten some of the details right, but the award for getting right the overall picture of media and marketing malevolence goes to the more pessimistic cyberpunks. As the opening line of the archetypical cyberpunk novel — Gibson’s Neuromancer — describes it:

The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel.

Gibson delineates a world in which industry, technology, and mass media dominate human existence, but not in good ways that Asimov thought it might turn out. Certainly not one in which we’ve all decided to cooperate for our mutual survival.

In a galaxy, far, far away, Kepler 16b (aka Tatoonie) circles a binary star.

Next thing you know they’ll discover a race of Wookies.

Further news on the plight of the physical bookstore front.  Berkeley’s Serendipity Books is closing. Man, if a bookstore can’t survive in Berkeley, where can it?  Well, one place is Charlottesville, VA, which I chose to move to in part because of the plethora of bookstores.  But even here in this cultural mecca that shades blue in otherwise red  territory, bookstores may not survive the retirement or demise of their owners.

In related news, Criminal Records, one of Atlanta’s largest non-chain music retailers whose owner was involved in forming Record Store Day, a nationwide event to increase awareness of and traffic to independent record stores, is expected to close by November, barring some benefactor.  Eric Levin blames the economy, not digital downloads or box stores, but it would also seem he missed the class about paying your taxes.

Speaking of the demise of physical presence, Michael Hart, who is credited with creating the first e-book forty years ago by typing the Declaration of Independence into a computer on, you guessed it, July 4, has died.

If you can, go out today to your local bookseller/record store and buy something.  Do your bit to get the economy going. Exactly how someone is supposed to help you get your personal economy going, I’m not sure, but a good book or record can at least make you feel better about not being able to buy other stuff you can’t afford.