Vremeplov

[PTY]

evo kako je davne 1964 čika Asimov zamišljao naše vreme:




Visit to the World's Fair of 2014By ISAAC ASIMOV

The New York World's Fair of 1964 is dedicated to "Peace Through Understanding." Its glimpses of the world of tomorrow rule out thermonuclear warfare. And why not? If a thermonuclear war takes place, the future will not be worth discussing. So let the missiles slumber eternally on their pads and let us observe what may come in the nonatomized world of the future.What is to come, through the fair's eyes at least, is wonderful. The direction in which man is traveling is viewed with buoyant hope, nowhere more so than at the General Electric pavilion. There the audience whirls through four scenes, each populated by cheerful, lifelike dummies that move and talk with a facility that, inside of a minute and a half, convinces you they are alive.

The scenes, set in or about 1900, 1920, 1940 and 1960, show the advances of electrical appliances and the changes they are bringing to living. I enjoyed it hugely and only regretted that they had not carried the scenes into the future. What will life be like, say, in 2014 A.D., 50 years from now? What will the World's Fair of 2014 be like?

I don't know, but I can guess.


One thought that occurs to me is that men will continue to withdraw from nature in order to create an environment that will suit them better. By 2014, electroluminescent panels will be in common use. Ceilings and walls will glow softly, and in a variety of colors that will change at the touch of a push button.
Windows need be no more than an archaic touch, and even when present will be polarized to block out the harsh sunlight. The degree of opacity of the glass may even be made to alter automatically in accordance with the intensity of the light falling upon it.


There is an underground house at the fair which is a sign of the future. if its windows are not polarized, they can nevertheless alter the "scenery" by changes in lighting. Suburban houses underground, with easily controlled temperature, free from the vicissitudes of weather, with air cleaned and light controlled, should be fairly common. At the New York World's Fair of 2014, General Motors' "Futurama" may well display vistas of underground cities complete with light- forced vegetable gardens. The surface, G.M. will argue, will be given over to large-scale agriculture, grazing and parklands, with less space wasted on actual human occupancy.


Gadgetry will continue to relieve mankind of tedious jobs. Kitchen units will be devised that will prepare "automeals," heating water and converting it to coffee; toasting bread; frying, poaching or scrambling eggs, grilling bacon, and so on. Breakfasts will be "ordered" the night before to be ready by a specified hour the next morning. 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.


Robots will neither be common nor very good in 2014, but they will be in existence. The I.B.M. exhibit at the present fair has no robots but it is dedicated to computers, which are shown in all their amazing complexity, notably in the task of translating Russian into English. If machines are that smart today, what may not be in the works 50 years hence? It will be such computers, much miniaturized, that will serve as the "brains" of robots. In fact, the I.B.M. building at the 2014 World's Fair may have, as one of its prime exhibits, a robot housemaid*large, clumsy, slow- moving but capable of general picking-up, arranging, cleaning and manipulation of various appliances. It will undoubtedly amuse the fairgoers to scatter debris over the floor in order to see the robot lumberingly remove it and classify it into "throw away" and "set aside." (Robots for gardening work will also have made their appearance.)
General Electric at the 2014 World's Fair will be showing 3-D movies of its "Robot of the Future," neat and streamlined, its cleaning appliances built in and performing all tasks briskly. (There will be a three-hour wait in line to see the film, for some things never change.)


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.


And experimental fusion-power plant or two will already exist in 2014. (Even today, a small but genuine fusion explosion is demonstrated at frequent intervals in the G.E. exhibit at the 1964 fair.) Large solar-power stations will also be in operation in a number of desert and semi-desert areas -- Arizona, the Negev, Kazakhstan. In the more crowded, but cloudy and smoggy areas, solar power will be less practical. An exhibit at the 2014 fair will show models of power stations in space, collecting sunlight by means of huge parabolic focusing devices and radiating the energy thus collected down to earth.


The world of 50 years hence will have shrunk further. At the 1964 fair, the G.M. exhibit depicts, among other things, "road-building factories" in the tropics and, closer to home, crowded highways along which long buses move on special central lanes. There is every likelihood that highways at least in the more advanced sections of the world*will have passed their peak in 2014; there will be increasing emphasis on transportation that makes the least possible contact with the surface. There will be aircraft, of course, but even ground travel will increasingly take to the air*a foot or two off the ground. Visitors to the 1964 fair can travel there in an "aquafoil," which lifts itself on four stilts and skims over the water with a minimum of friction.

This is surely a stop-gap. By 2014 the four stilts will have been replaced by four jets of compressed air so that the vehicle will make no contact with either liquid or solid surfaces.


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.


Much effort will be put into the designing of vehicles with "Robot-brains"*vehicles that can be set for particular destinations and that will then proceed there without interference by the slow reflexes of a human driver. I suspect one of the major attractions of the 2014 fair will be rides on small roboticized cars which will maneuver in crowds at the two-foot level, neatly and automatically avoiding each other.


For short-range travel, moving sidewalks (with benches on either side, standing room in the center) will be making their appearance in downtown sections. They will be raised above the traffic. Traffic will continue (on several levels in some places) only because all parking will be off-street and because at least 80 per cent of truck deliveries will be to certain fixed centers at the city's rim. Compressed air tubes will carry goods and materials over local stretches, and the switching devices that will place specific shipments in specific destinations will be one of the city's marvels.


Communications will become sight-sound and you will see as well as hear the person you telephone. The screen can be used not only to see the people you call but also for studying documents and photographs and reading passages from books. Synchronous satellites, hovering in space will make it possible for you to direct-dial any spot on earth, including the weather stations in Antarctica (shown in chill splendor as part of the '64 General Motors exhibit).


For that matter, you will be able to reach someone at the moon colonies, concerning which General Motors puts on a display of impressive vehicles (in model form) with large soft tires*intended to negotiate the uneven terrain that may exist on our natural satellite.


Any number of simultaneous conversations between earth and moon can be handled by modulated laser beams, which are easy to manipulate in space. On earth, however, laser beams will have to be led through plastic pipes, to avoid material and atmospheric interference. Engineers will still be playing with that problem in 2014.
Conversations with the moon will be a trifle uncomfortable, but the way, in that 2.5 seconds must elapse between statement and answer (it takes light that long to make the round trip). Similar conversations with Mars will experience a 3.5-minute delay even when Mars is at its closest. However, by 2014, only unmanned ships will have landed on Mars, though a manned expedition will be in the works and in the 2014 Futurama will show a model of an elaborate Martian colony.


As for television, wall screens will have replaced the ordinary set; but transparent cubes will be making their appearance in which three-dimensional viewing will be possible. In fact, one popular exhibit at the 2014 World's Fair will be such a 3-D TV, built life-size, in which ballet performances will be seen. The cube will slowly revolve for viewing from all angles.


One can go on indefinitely in this happy extrapolation, but all is not rosy.


As I stood in line waiting to get into the General Electric exhibit at the 1964 fair, I found myself staring at Equitable Life's grim sign blinking out the population of the United States, with the number (over 191,000,000) increasing by 1 every 11 seconds. During the interval which I spent inside the G.E. pavilion, the American population had increased by nearly 300 and the world's population by 6,000.


In 2014, there is every likelihood that the world population will be 6,500,000,000 and the population of the United States will be 350,000,000. Boston-to-Washington, the most crowded area of its size on the earth, will have become a single city with a population of over 40,000,000.


Population pressure will force increasing penetration of desert and polar areas. 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.


Ordinary agriculture will keep up with great difficulty and there will be "farms" turning to the more efficient micro-organisms. Processed yeast and algae products will be available in a variety of flavors. The 2014 fair will feature an Algae Bar at which "mock-turkey" and "pseudosteak" will be served. It won't be bad at all (if you can dig up those premium prices), but there will be considerable psychological resistance to such an innovation.


Although technology will still keep up with population through 2014, it will be only through a supreme effort and with but partial success. Not all the world's population will enjoy the gadgety world of the future to the full. A larger portion than today will be deprived and although they may be better off, materially, than today, they will be further behind when compared with the advanced portions of the world. They will have moved backward, relatively.


Nor can technology continue to match population growth if that remains unchecked. Consider Manhattan of 1964, which has a population density of 80,000 per square mile at night and of over 100,000 per square mile during the working day. If the whole earth, including the Sahara, the Himalayan Mountain peaks, Greenland, Antarctica and every square mile of the ocean bottom, to the deepest abyss, were as packed as Manhattan at noon, surely you would agree that no way to support such a population (let alone make it comfortable) was conceivable. In fact, support would fail long before the World-Manhattan was reached.


Well, the earth's population is now about 3,000,000,000 and is doubling every 40 years. If this rate of doubling goes unchecked, then a World-Manhattan is coming in just 500 years. All earth will be a single choked Manhattan by A.D. 2450 and society will collapselong before that!


There are only two general ways of preventing this: (1) raise the death rate; (2) lower the birth rate. Undoubtedly, the world of A>D. 2014 will have agreed on the latter method. Indeed, the increasing use of mechanical devices to replace failing hearts and kidneys, and repair stiffening arteries and breaking nerves will have cut the death rate still further and have lifted the life expectancy in some parts of the world to age 85.


There will, therefore, be a worldwide propaganda drive in favor of birth control by rational and humane methods and, by 2014, it will undoubtedly have taken serious effect. The rate of increase of population will have slackened*but, I suspect, not sufficiently.


One of the more serious exhibits at the 2014 World's Fair, accordingly, will be a series of lectures, movies and documentary material at the World Population Control Center (adults only; special showings for teen-agers).


The situation will have been made the more serious by the advances of automation. The world of A.D. 2014 will have few routine jobs that cannot be done better by some machine than by any human being. Mankind will therefore have become largely a race of machine tenders. Schools will have to be oriented in this direction. Part of the General Electric exhibit today consists of a school of the future in which such present realities as closed-circuit TV and programmed tapes aid the teaching process. It is not only the techniques of teaching that will advance, however, but also the subject matter that will change. All the high-school students will be taught the fundamentals of computer technology will become proficient in binary arithmetic and will be trained to perfection in the use of the computer languages that will have developed out of those like the contemporary "Fortran" (from "formula translation").


Even so, mankind will suffer badly from the disease of boredom, a disease spreading more widely each year and growing in intensity. This will have serious mental, emotional and sociological consequences, and I dare say that psychiatry will be far and away the most important medical specialty in 2014. The lucky few who can be involved in creative work of any sort will be the true elite of mankind, for they alone will do more than serve a machine.


Indeed, the most somber speculation I can make about A.D. 2014 is that in a society of enforced leisure, the most glorious single word in the vocabulary will have become work!



http://www.nytimes.com/books/97/03/23/lifetimes/asi-v-fair.html

[PTY]

Speculative fiction scholar and Fantastic Books editor Darrell Schweitzer has spearheaded our efforts to bring The Heads of Cerberus back into print. First published in the rare pulp magazine The Thrill Book in 1919, Francis Stevens' masterpiece blends time-travel fantasy, alternate realities, and social satire as it propels early 20th century characters into the Philadelphia of the year 2118. The city is an isolated dystopia run by a corrupt oligarchy, the Liberty Bell has been transformed into a disintegration machine, and William Penn is worshiped as a god. This exciting melodrama is filled with striking images and vivid characters, and for readers actually familiar with the Quaker City, there is the added pleasure of seeing an eerily recognizable rendition of the past projected into a strange future.

Francis Stevens was a pseudonym of Gertrude Barrows Bennett (1883-1948), the first woman to be a major contributor of fantastic fiction to the pulp magazines. She published one story under her own name in The Argosy in 1904. In the middle of the next decade, she turned to writing full-time to support her family, and her fiction writing career began as Stevens with "The Nightmare," which was published in All-Story Weekly in April 1917. Her fiction appeared in the major pulp magazines of the day, and she also wrote several novels.

Following her invalid mother's death around 1920, she stopped writing. Her last novella, "Sunfire," was serialized in Weird Tales in 1923. Her fans assumed she had "mysteriously disappeared," but her disappearance was easily explained: she was a writer who produced fiction only out of economic necessity, and when that necessity was removed, she stopped. She was a popular writer, but producing work at a time when fiction had no longevity: the pulp magazines in which it was published didn't survive long.

Other than its first publication, The Heads of Cerberus saw one very limited book edition published in 1952, but aside from those curtailed appearances, the book has been more legend than memory. Fantastic Books is thrilled to finally bring the book into publication for the wide audience it deserves.

Editor Darrell Schweitzer's introduction puts the book in context for the modern reader.

[PTY]

Heinlein was purely motivated by his sense of patriotism, which at points led to the irritation of his fellow authors. The wartime years proved to be influential to Heinlein years later: In 1944, he was moved by the release of a song, "The Ballad of Rodger Young," about Army Private Rodger Young, who was killed in action on the Solomon Islands in July 1943. Another pivotal moment for Heinlein was President Truman's announcement on August 6, 1945, of the first of two new weapon deployments over Japan: Little Boy, an atomic bomb that had just devastated Hiroshima. A second, Fat Man, a plutonium bomb, was dropped three days later. Upon the news, Heinlein noted: "That's the end," and resigned from his position at the NAES. Before he did so, however, he submitted a five page paper to his supervisor at the station, outlining potential future projects that the installation could likely follow up on, advocating that they reorient their focus towards the new style of warfare that had just opened up.

With the conclusion of WWII, Heinlein turned back to writing science fiction. He had been able to make a name for himself in John W. Campbell Jr.'s Astounding Magazine in 1939, and throughout the war had kept in touch with the editor. Following the 1940s, however, he began to look to other publishing markets. Working with Charles Scribner's & Sons, he started a line of juvenile novels in 1947, beginning with Rocketship Galileo. Almost yearly, he published a book in a series marketed toward young boys. Heinlein often challenged his editors for what was appropriate for the demographic, bolstered by an ever-increasing popularity for the novels.

In April, 1958, Heinlein was presented with a newspaper from his wife, featuring a full-page ad urging for an end to nuclear weapons testing. Heinlein was angry: He felt that the nuclear arsenal that the United States had built up was the only thing keeping the Soviet Union and Communism in check. He promptly wrote up a full-page ad of his own, and paid for placement in the local papers. He sent a copy to President Dwight Eisenhower, and was dismayed when the president's administration began to explore the first steps toward a limited nuclear test ban treaty shortly thereafter. His worry wasn't an idle one. By this time, he lived mere miles from the North American Aerospace Defense Command headquarters in Colorado, a likely strategic target in the event that the U.S .and USSR ever went to war.

In response, Heinlein set aside the book he was working on, Stranger in a Strange Land, to write a new, politically motivated story.  In an April letter to his agent, Lurton Blassingame, he was pessimistic about the future of the United States: "I am convinced in my own mind that the United States is washed up and we will cease to exist inside of five to fifteen years - unless we quickly and drastically pull up our socks, both at home and in foreign policy. This opinion has been growing in my mind for years: I was simply triggered into doing something about it by this pacifistic-internationalist-cum-clandestine Communist drive to have us treat atomics and disarmament in exactly the fashion the Kremlin has tried to get us to do for the past twelve years."

On November 22, 1958, Heinlein wrote to Blassingame, telling him that he completed the new novel, tentatively titled Sky Soldier. It was a short work, coming in at 60,000 words, and after he spent a month revising it, he mailed it off, with the caveat that it wasn't one of his juvenile novels: "it is an adult novel about an eighteen year old boy...I have followed my own theory that intelligent youngsters are in fact more interested in weighty matters than their parents usually are."

Following the exploits of a young space marine, Johnny Rico, Heinlein weaves a story that follows the soldier as he volunteers for military service as humanity finds itself at war against an implacable alien foe. Heinlein used the novel as a sounding board for a Platonic philosophic style that rigorously encouraged service to the state— in this case, through Federal (read: Military) service—while at the same time throwing his own fear of Communism and the need for a strong military force to confront its expansion. Influenced by his work in the Military Industrial Complex during WWII, Heinlein understood the increased mechanization of warfare, and extrapolated accordingly. Heinlein never quite uses the novel for his soldiers to question the necessity of the war that they fight, but as a hawkish examination on the responsibilities of a citizen towards one's country.

Lurton turned the book over to Scribner's for consideration for in the Juveniles line, only to have it promptly rejected, effectively ending Heinlein's ties with the company. He was irritated at the publisher and its editors and feeling wronged by the rejection, reasoning that his stories had been incredibly popular for the publisher and that this story would do just as well. Heinlein's editor at Scribner's, Alice Dalgliesh, noted that the story would likely work as a serial, and shortly thereafter, Heinlein sold the serial rights to The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction and the hardcover rights to Ace by March of 1958.

The story, now titled Starship Soldier, was serialized in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction from October 1959 to November 1959. The novel was repackaged by Ace as Starship Troopers and published in December 1959. It was met with both great success and with great controversy. Numerous reviewers (including the founding editor of MOFSF, Anthony Boucher) felt that it was an attempt from Heinlein to rationalize and condone a fascist state, while others felt that he was glorifying the brutal nature of war, all the while promoting his particular brand of right-wing, libertarian politics. While certainly true to a point on all accounts, historian Brian Aldiss notes that Heinlein should never be considered an author steeped in realism; in particular, his experience with the juvenile novels likely played a part in the amount of violence and action that he portrays in the novel.

Ultimately, it was Heinlein's patriotic love letter to a country that he loved intensely, and it remains deeply divisive to this day. Despite the condemnation of the book from circles within the fan community, Heinlein was surprised when the novel was awarded the 1960 Hugo Award for Best Novel. Interestingly, it was not the only military science-fiction work on the ballot: Dorsai! by Gordon R. Dickson was also nominated, which has also proven to be an influential work within military science fiction.

Starship Troopers would prove to be the spark to an entire subgenre of militant science fiction stories. A number of other works were directly influenced by Starship Troopers: Joe Haldeman's famous 1974 novel The Forever War carries a number of similarities, but drew more from Haldeman's own experiences in Vietnam. John Steakley's 1984 novel Armor draws on his reading of the book. Bill The Galactic Hero was a satirical take from Harry Harrison, while John Scalzi's Old Man's War borrows from Starship Trooper's structure. Beyond the individual books, Heinlein paved the way with the creation of a modern war story within the science-fiction genre, continuing, in effect, the style of "future war" stories that had come decades before, such as The Battle of Dorking by George Tomkyns Chesney, a reactionary story that warned of a foreign menace; and The War of the Worlds by H.G. Wells, which instilled a political warning, all set among a backdrop of violence. Hawkish, conservative and divisive, Troopers remains popular for its political message in some circles, and for its unadulterated military hardware fixation in others. Its influence will undoubtedly remain as long as there's armed conflict between nations.

https://www.kirkusreviews.com/features/robert-heinleins-starship-troopers-cold-war/

[PTY]

deNardo nam se malko raznezio...





Courtesy of Michael May's (awesome) Adventureblog, I am reminded that how much comics were part of my early reading experiences. Not only did I have the super-size version of the Superman vs. Muhammad Ali boxing match, but I also had a read-a-long recording of Amazing Spider-Man #124, which featured J. Jonah Jameson's astronaut son, John, and the creature he became: the Man-Wolf!
Now, through the magic of the Internets, I can re-live this magic moment from my childhood. And you can, too! Go, go, gadget YouTube!





http://youtu.be/f6Wy5GxnDSw

[PTY]

A kako su svojedobno palpična sf-sabraća Rusi zamišljali život u svemiru?








http://io9.com/how-soviet-artists-imagined-communist-life-in-space-1558140402

[PTY]

Century-old time capsules opened in New York City, Boston




A fun coincidence of history: In Boston and New York this week, two unrelated openings of time capsules left by people 113 and 100 years ago, respectively. They are two of the country's oldest time capsules.

In NYC on Wednesday, The New York Historical Society opened a time capsule created in 1914 by Wall Street businessmen celebrating New York as a center of commerce. Spectators gathered around the bronze box as 26 screws holding the lid down were carefully unscrewed by people wearing surgical gloves. Mashable has a nice photo gallery with images from the opening ceremony.



http://boingboing.net/2014/10/09/century-old-time-capsules-open.html

[PTY]

  Guilty Pleasure: Reading Competent, Spectacular Science Fiction in Hard-to-Find Pulps


Exceptional quality of adventure and sense-of-wonder 1930s-1940s science fiction from brothers Earl Binder and Otto Binder writing as Eando Binder. They also used pen-names: John Coleridge, Gordon Giles, Will Garth





The Rare & the Beautiful... obscure issues of pulp magazines, full of fantastic, engrossing fiction... enter the world of collectible pulps: read our previous issues on DRB SF site: Rare Pulps, Issue 1 and Issue 2.


http://www.scifi.darkroastedblend.com/2014/03/pulp-pleasures-eando-binder.html