More 'prophetic'(?) extracts from Earth...

 I just finished re-editing (and hence re-reading) EARTH for the first time in 20 years. (Dang that young feller could write...)  I did tidy up errors in the not-so-great file sent to me by Penguin, when I got the rights back, under the 1976 Copyright Act.... but I resisted any temptation to alter my 50 year projections to the year 2038. 

Why? Because EARTH is almost always on every list of Top Ten Novels That Predicted the Future. (It had web pages before there was a Web, or browsers, that I had to mock up myself in 1988. Other themes included: generational conflict over privacy. Floods of climate refugees. Melting glaciers and rising seas. Plus heat waves... and a mother planet that (some characters believe) is finally getting fed up. Plus many other predictive 'hits.'

Anyway, I decided that inserting updates that conform closer to the world of 2023 would be cheating. Hence, my big predictive mistakes are also there! You'll find several.

Anyway, while Open Road prepares for the novel's re-release - with a gorgeous new cover! -- in December or January -- I'll be posting some of those 'predictive hits' here... or just passages that I think you might enjoy. So, let's get started!

The first excerpt from Earth is copied in below... one of the semi-poetical extracts or views into the world of 2038. Much as John Brunner did in his wonderful, still totally relevant classic Stand on Zanzibar. 

This passage also has a video reading I posted to Youtube. In fact, you could read along as I recite it!

====

A dust wafts through the hills and valleys of Iceland.

The people of the island nation sweep it from their porches. They wipe it from their windows. And they try not to scowl when tourists exclaim, pointing in delight at the red and orange twilight glow cast by suspended topsoil, scattering the setting sun. Stalwart Northmen originally settled the land, whose rough democracy lasted longer than any other. For most of twelve centuries their descendants disproved the lie that says liberty must always be lost to aristocrats or demagogues.

It was a noble and distinguished heritage. And yet, the founders’ principal legacy to their descendants was not that freedom, but the dust.

Whose fault was it? Would it be fair to blame ninth century settlers, who knew nothing of science or ecological management? In the press of daily life, with a family to feed, what man of such times could have foreseen that his beloved sheep were gradually destroying the very land he planned leaving to his children? Deterioration was so gradual that it went unnoticed, except in the inevitable tales of oldsters, who could be counted on to claim the hillsides had been much greener in their day.

Was there ever a time when grandparents didn’t speak so?

It took a breakthrough ... a new way of thinking ... for a much later generation to step back at last and see what had happened year after year, century after century, to the denuded land ... a slow but steady rape by degrees.

But by then it appeared already too late.

Dust over Iceland (SeaWiFS Project)

A dust drifts through the hills and valleys of Iceland. The people of the island nation do more than simply sweep it from their porches. They show it to their children and tell them it is life floating in ghost- like hazes down the mountain slopes. It is their land.

Families adopt an acre here, a hectare there. Some have been tending the same patch since early in the twentieth century, devoting weekends to watering and shoring up some stretch of heath or gorse or scrub pine.

Pilots on commuter flights routinely open their windows and toss grass seeds over the rocky landscape, in hopes a few will find purchase.

Towns and cities reclaim the produce of their toilets, collecting sewage as if it were a precious resource. As it is. For after treatment, the soil of the night goes straight to the barren slopes, to succor surviving trees against the bitter wind.

A dust colors the clouds above the seas of Iceland.

At the island’s southern fringe, a cluster of new volcanoes spills fresh lava into the sea, sending steam spirals curling upward. Tourists gawp at the spectacle and speak in envy of the Icelanders’ “growing” land. But when natives look to the sky, they see a haze of diminishment that could not be replaced by anything as simple or vulgar as mere magma.

A dusty wind blows away the hills of Iceland. At sea, a few plankton benefit, temporarily, from the unexpected nurturance. Then, as they are wont to do, they die and their carcasses rain as sediment upon the patient ocean bottom. In time the layers will creep underground, to melt and glow and eventually burst forth again, to bring another island to life.

Short-term calamities are nothing to the master recycling system. In the end, it reuses even dust.

====

Oh heck, here's another... a snippet extract by one of the characters - in New Zealand - when he learns that a micro black hole might swallow the planet in a couple of years...

====

"You know,” George Hutton said slowly, still contemplating the peaceful view outside, “back when the American and Russian empires used to face each other at the brink of nuclear war, this was where people in the Northern Hemisphere dreamed about fleeing to. Were you aware of that, Lustig? Every time there was a crisis, airlines suddenly overbooked with “vacation” trips to New Zealand. People must have thought this the ideal spot to ride out a holocaust. 

“And that didn’t change with the Rio Treaties, did it? Big War went away, but then came the cancer plague, greenhouse heat, spreading deserts ... and lots of little wars of course, over an oasis here, a river there. 

“All the time though, we Kiwis still felt lucky. Our rains didn’t abandon us. Our fisheries didn’t die. 

"Only now..."

 ====

I set aside a bunch of these to share with you all, across the next few weeks.

Here's hoping the best of the predictions will still come true... and not the worst ones.

Science Fiction & Prediction

Let's take a breath and look longer term.  I am inspired after we watched the (mostly) very good "Bladerunner 2049" flick, last night.  More on that, below.

== Probing the territory in front of us ==

How does Science Fiction do at prediction? From Star Trek to 2001 and The Matrix, this article from The Guardian takes a look at how well -- or poorly -- science fiction films predicted and portrayed the next generation of computers, robots and technological innovation. 

In this essay - Why Science-Fiction Writers Couldn’t Imagine the Internet, Lawrence Krauss (author of the recently released The Greatest Story Ever Told -- So Far: Why Are We Here?) presents game-changing real world technologies that defied prediction -- and contemplates what science fiction is good at, and how it seldom actually forecasts the truly unexpected. Well, sure. Though it’s also important to be aware of anomalies...

Like E. E. Hale's The Brick Moon, published in 1866 which foretold navigation and communication satellites as well as humans living in orbit, or Bernal’s “The World, The Flesh and the Devil” in the 1920s scanning ahead at rotating cylinder space colonies, or Aldous Huxley’s genetic augmentation of humans, or H.G. Wells predicting nuclear weapons and war. 

American short story writer Edward Page Mitchell in the 1880s foresaw instant news transmission, pneumatic tube transport and equal rights for women, along with a steady decline of racism, till a Chinese-American is a major presidential candidate in the 1960s. 

San Francisco author Robert Duncan Milne had a run of fantastic tales from 1877-1899 about radio communications, image-based surveillance, photographic forensics, and surviving solar flares.  (More Brin news about Milne, in the course of time, I promise.)

Krauss kindly credits me with predicting some aspects of the World Wide Web, in my 1989 novel EARTH, along with William Gibson’s cyberpunk versions of the Internet, earlier. But he stops there, claiming that SF missed the super-linked world, for the most part. And, for the most part, he’s right! Still, other exceptions stand out. Take Frederik  Pohl's The Age of the Pussyfoot, which in 1967 or so portrayed not only a vast world-array of linked computers, but citizens carrying personal assistants in their pockets (“Joymakers”) that advised, got information, took pictures and – oh yes – made calls. 

John Brunner’s 1960s novels Stand on Zanzibar and The Shockwave Rider anticipated not just the internet but computer worms and viruses, as did Gregory Benford’s even-earlier story "The Scarred Man."  Even before that, Murray Leinster’s “A Logic Named Joe” had fun with what could go wrong, if we all got semi-intelligent personal AI helpers.

While we are on brilliant prescience, have another look at a Fred Pohl book that I have touted for 20 years, urging members of our intelligence, law and military communities to read, and be scared! Pohl’s The Cool War is mentioned in this article that openly adopts his terminology for a struggle between powers that has warmed up to a desperately dangerous kind of bitter peace. In that novel, nations wage a cryptic campaign of tit-for-tat sabotage, undermining each others’ infrastructure, banking systems and power, a ‘war’ that is never declared and never goes nuclear, but leaves us all spiraling ever downward into failure and poverty.

Cool War... The term has been updated and promulgated by David Rothkopf, editor at large at Foreign Affairs and a visiting scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, and I am glad it is getting wider play, since a Cool War is clearly what we’re in. (A little credit then, for my having pushed Pohl’s book -especially to the Protector Caste- for two decades? ;-)

The new anti-democratic axis that has been forged by Vladimir Putin -- now stretching from Ankara all the way to Manila and supported by another rising power – discusses openly its motive and intent to bring down the “decadent west” with its “fictitious” notions of freedom of citizen-rule.  The sabotage of our political processes has come far and probing feints have measured vulnerabilities in every area that Fred predicted, from the power grid to transport. 

And did you really think that North Korea’s nukes have no part in the overall plan? They allow for a possible EMP strike on North America aimed at knocking us down a bunch, while the larger powers retain “It wasn’t us!” plausible deniability. Read that again. And again while actually thinking about who really controls things, in North Korea.)

I’ve railed about this in both fiction and nonfiction (e.g. The Transparent Society) as well as many talks and consultations. 

Though it can be important to grasp the justifications of the other side! Let’s remember that Putin feels vexed that Obama and Hillary Clinton oversaw (he claims instigated) the revolution that removed the Ukraine from Russia’s orbit, sending that people racing toward union with the West. Putin did not want the masterminds of this setback to remain in power, and he brought out every gun to ensure they’d be replaced by his own favored man.

Yes, we live in a world that seems almost written as a science fiction tale!  Who on Earth would have imagined that Americans might be prodded and propagandized into turning away from our genius at pragmatic negotiation? That we’d let ourselves be talked into abandoning the high art of politics? That a third of our citizens could be distracted into waging all-out war on … science? On every single profession of fact-users who know stuff? And now the “deep state” officers of the FBI and intel agencies and military?

No, no. Let this be a cheap novel.

== The future is better than the past ==

Few of my postings have elicited as much fervent argument – and even hate-mail – as my recent blog about Robert A. Heinlein, an author log categorized as a right-winger by oversimplifying fools. That post reprinted directly from Heinlein’s afterword to Revolt in 2100, in which he expressed desperate worry about a merging of the American right with racism and the nastier tendencies in fundamentalism.

Yes, RAH was definitely a “libertarian” in the older sense that hearkens to Adam Smith and self-reliant individualism, though I doubt he’d find much in common with the version that has hijacked that movement, nowadays. On the other hand, he was vigorously pro-science and intellect and diversity/tolerance, and… well, read his own words, and see how chillingly close they came to predicting our awful, pre-theocracy politics, today. 

Here’s another passage, this time from the penultimate page of his finest time travel novel, The Door Into Summer:

"…the future is better than the past. Despite the crepehangers, romanticists, and anti-intellectuals, the world steadily grows better because the human mind, applying itself to environment, makes it better. With hands...with tools...with horse sense and science and engineering.

     

“Most of these long-haired belittlers can't drive a nail nor use a slide rule, I'd like to invite them into Dr. Twitchell's cage and ship them back to the twelfth century--then let them enjoy it.”

Yeah, sure. There are lefty flakes who qualify as “romantics” and “long hairs!” But look around at who is screaming hatred of science and every other fact profession. (Name one exception.) Look at the revival of fascism and confederatism, two of the most romantic movements ever seen. And… aw, heck.  Let me paste back in here the pivotal paragraphs of Heinlein’s afterword to Revolt in 2100:

“Could it be otherwise here? Could any one sect obtain a working majority at the polls and take over the country? Perhaps not – but a combination of a dynamic evangelist, television, enough money, and modern techniques of advertising and propaganda might make Billy Sunday’s efforts look like a corner store compared to Sears Roebuck. 

"Throw in a Depression for good measure, promise a material heaven here on earth, add a dash of anti-Semitism, anti-Catholicism, anti-Negrosim, and a good large dose of anti-“furriners” in general and anti-intellectuals here at home, and the result might be something quite frightening – particularly when one recalls that our voting system is such that a minority distributed as pluralities in enough states can constitute a working majority in Washington."

Oh, yes. Science fiction authors can be off target.  But there can also be prescient.

== Bladrunner 2049 ==

Forgot to do this so I'll be brief.  It's a great flick. Very enjoyable. Grade A for Ambiance, music and acting. A bit lower for plot logic, but I'll get to that another time. Seriously, the fact that I'm not used as a plot consultant more often than I am is ... well... a tragedy for you film lovers!  ;-)

Peering at the Future...

This weekend's posting is mostly a potpourri of interesting miscellany. But we'll start and end with some items about... prophecy!

No, not reading tea leaves or goat entrails, but the kind that obsesses everyone from bureaucrats to corporate heads to school teachers to stock brokers to moms n' dads. Using those "lamps on our brows" -- our imaginative prefrontal lobes -- to poke a stick into the future we are running across, discovering opportunities and errors just in time.

I'll start with an item in the news.  Today -- very, very quietly -- the U.S. House of Representatives Intelligence Committee finally issued its report on the tragic deaths of four American diplomats at the hands of terrorists in Benghazi, Libya.  The predictions about this report, touted for upwards of three years by Fox News and almost every Republican pundit and office-holder... (and many of you out there)... had been that the Obama Administration would be at-minimum revealed as incompetent and deceitful and more-likely criminally negligent cowards engaged in a Nixon-level illegal cover-up, possibly leading to impeachment.

Those of you who made -- or religiously repeated -- this forecast, do have the honesty to raise your hands?  

We'll have a look at the actual outcome from that committee -- chaired by my own republican representative Darrell Issa, lower down in this blog -- and see how you scored.

== Can we forecast the future? ==

Elsewhere, I explore this idea more formally, starting with the obsessively delusional methods of our astrologer ancestors and moving on to today's favorite delusions. For example, I have long called for a predictions registry that could track the simplest but most important metric of a public figure’s credibility… whether they turn out to be right a lot… or seldom! Go have a look at how I lay it out. There is probably no more-useful endeavor that some philanthropist might fund (cheap) than a service to score -- in a non-partisan way -- who in our civilization tends to be right a lot. 

It's a criterion we should use a lot more than the current standard for allocating power... those who are persuasive.

Is this a start?  Now Nate Silver’s FiveThirtyEight.com gives an A through F score for pollsters over the last decade... rating which ones have some credibility and which seem relentlessly biased or do poorly.

Can we use these scores to refine how to more accurately predict the future?

== Some people do want to achieve this? ==

In an article for Salon, Predicting the Future for the U.S. Government: Matthew Burrows -- author of the new book The Future Declassified: Megatrends That Will Undo the World Unless We Take Action (for which I provided a cover blurb) -- describes the work he has done in the past for National Intelligence Council’s Global Trends report. These reports explore changes that may take place in the near future -- over the next 15 to 20 years.  

I have read many of these reports and found them very useful cogently laying down a range of possible futures that policy-makers and implementers may have to face as we weave the minefield of the near future.

They are, of course, most useful when they offer choice points and potential branchings that might still be under human control

== College and Success: The miscellany begins! ==

My Ice Bucket ALS challenge video is up!  It's all YOUR fault!!!  (Those of you who ponied up for a good cause.  Clearly I suffered terribly, at the hands of my new-freshman son, who delivered the icy deluge! The important thing is -- not to view this as a prank -- but as an opportunity to give to worthy causes -- exercise your power of Proxy Activism.

Speaking about freshmen, heading off to college. Want them top get the most out of these university years? Every autumn I pull out my ten minute video of “Advice for College Students” and offer it to you all to pass along to that bright young person you know.  There are several tricks for making the most of his or her time at university, but the best and coolest one I save for last.  Any student who does this one trick is guaranteed — yes, guaranteed — to have a far more positive and enriched four+ years.

Ahem, while we're speaking of colleges, there’s news about college rankings....can I be forgiven for preening a bit about my alma maters? Okay I lucked out.  My bachelor’s degree is from the 12th best university in the world (10th in the U.S.) — according to the CWUR system.  My doctorate is from the planet’s 20th best campus (15th U.S.)  Oh, they’re #5 and #6 in the world, in the category of “influence.”  Gotta work on that.  Caltech would rank even higher if it weren’t too small to have a heap of majors.  

UCSD is still quite young (established in the 1960s) -- by far the newest in the top 20 --and we just set up the Arthur C. Clarke Center for Human Imagination, which ought to boost the campus a few more slots!  

Bragging? Well, in fact, I kind of stumbled into attending both places.  And stumbled a bit, while there! But the key point is that I came away having squeeeeeeezed them both, using the methods I recommend in that advice video above... methods that any college student can use, to double value that they get out of their years at university. 

Again, my advice to college students.

== On Aliens and Religon ==

An interesting question: Which religions would have the hardest time accepting aliens? io9 starts off the discussion…

…referring to book: Religions and Extraterrestrial Life: How Will We Deal With it? by David A. Weintraub.

Alas, in this Scientific American interview, Weintraub displays some worrisome shallowness.  For example when he says: “In Judaism it doesn’t matter—there’s very little in Hebrew scripture that relates to the question.” But this is false when it comes to Talmudic and rabbinical commentaries.  Likewise, when I get the book I hope I will find the catholic discussions of C.S. Lewis and James Blish and other eminent science fiction authors who dealt with the theological implications of alien life with extensive thoughtfulness.

I do intend to buy this tome, which overlaps two areas of special interest to me.

== Miscellaneous Items ==

Giant Manta Ray Tangled in Fishing Line appears to 'Ask for Help' from Divers.  Actually, I mulled on events like this one long ago, in STARTIDE RISING... in that I sense that animals have a powerful sense of hierarchy in Nature.  Dolphins will play with orcas, till they sense they are hungry. Creatures who come to humans for help know that the humans are both powerful and not in a hunting mode.... All of this comes into whether it would be right to "uplift" animals.

Miscellany?  You want miscellany? Okay then let's veer to... scan through the photographs: all the stuff soldiers carried in battle from the 11th century to today.

What was that? A guide to the military gear adopted by police departments since 9/11 and used in Ferguson.

The Moscow Times is reporting that Bulgarian pranksters are repainting Soviet-era monuments so that the Soviet army types depicted are recast as American Superheroes.
  

A stunning video shows just how much skill and hard work goes into some of the fantastic “photo-shopped” images we are seeing nowadays.  Anyone who says we aren’t in an era of truly high art is crazy.  There’s never been a “renaissance” like this one, and we should shout it!  

Sci fi - historical-ish humor?  How to explain the Internet to an 1835 London street urchin.  

The more someone smoked pot as a teenager, the more likely that person would struggle as a young adult.

How prosthetic limbs are becoming more bionic. Amazing TED talk by Hugh Herr, with a very moving final ending.  

Okay, now I am just proud to be human. 3D gun makes - and shoots(!) paper planes.

Okay… here’s yet another reason to be proud to be human. ‘ The Airgonay drone club, based in the French Alps, organized a race in the forest for lightweight drones that bob, weave, and generally fly at up to 40 miles per hour. These are remote controlled drones, not autonomous, so operators have on-board cameras to see where their devices are going and take snazzy in-race footage.’  Reminiscent of the best scene in “Return of the Jedi.”  The report is in French, but you'll understand what's happening within a minute.

== Back to Benghazi ==

Okay, so, how did you fellows do?  You who predicted impeachment, prison terms and roiling scandals, when the GOP-run U.S. House of Representatives Intelligence Committee finally issued its report on the tragic deaths of four American diplomats at the hands of terrorists in Benghazi, Libya.  How did you score?

Ah, let's see. "An investigation by the Republican-led House Intelligence Committee has concluded that the CIA and U.S. military responded appropriately to the attacks on U.S. facilities in Benghazi, Libya, in 2012, dismissing allegations that the Obama administration blocked rescue attempts during the assault or sought to mislead the public afterward."

Further: "After a two-year probe that involved the review of thousands of pages of classified documents, the panel determined that the attack could not be blamed on an intelligence failure, and that CIA security operatives “ably and bravely assisted” State Department officials who were overwhelmed at a nearby but separate diplomatic compound."

And: "The committee also found “no evidence that there was either a stand down order or a denial of available air support,” rejecting claims that have fed persistent conspiracy theories that the U.S. military was prevented from rescuing U.S. personnel from a night-time assault that killed U.S. Ambassador Christopher Stevens and three other Americans."

Earlier this year, the United States captured one of the militants accused of orchestrating the attacks in a raid in Libya. Ahmed Abu Khatalla now faces trial in the United States.

So... how did you score?  Note that this was issued by the most partisan U.S. House in 50 years, under a republican leadership that routinely and regularly threatens the president with impeachment for everything under the sun. Indeed, this house -- the laziest in 200 years -- held almost half of its total hours of hearings on just this one "heinous" matter. (They never showed the slightest interest in investigations the eleven "benghazis" that occurred under George W Bush, see accompanying image.)

No, there is only one "conspiracy" here. Delaying this stupendously exonerating report till after the election. Fox News covered this report in less than 30 seconds. Oh and Darrell Issa, chairman of the committee? After two years of grandstanding and tirades promising to "hold the criminals and traitors accountable?"

Mr. Issa's office ignored calls requesting a statement. He has been avoiding the press.  It seems... for once... he has nothing to say.