(Insert Star Trek cliché here.)

 

I was having a beer with a friend when his cell phone rang. After reassuring his wife that he was certain to forget to buy milk on the way home, he hung up, looked at his phone contemplatively and said, "Do you think that cell phones would look like this if it wasn't for Star Trek?" 

 

Well, actually, no, they wouldn't. Apparently Martin Cooper, the chief engineer at Motorola who developed the cell phone in 1973, is on record as stating that Star Trek was his inspiration.

- Sid

 

"Many are cold, few are frozen." - Bob Ettinger

When reading science fiction, it's difficult to avoid playing the "well, they got that wrong" game. 1984 was a popular year for the game, as was 2001. (Presumably there will be a resurgence in 2010.) 

However, most science fiction writers deny that they are attempting to predict the future, even if there have been a few cases where people have managed to hit the nail on the head with surprising accuracy. Prediction aside, there has been at least one case where science fiction was the direct causal element of a technological development.

In 1931, Amazing Stories featured a story entitled The Jameson Satellite, by Neil R. Jones. The titular character decides that he wants his body preserved until the end of time, and in order to achieve this odd desire (sadly, the story never looks at the underlying psychology behind this decision) he has his body sent into orbit so that the cold and vacuum of space will prevent decay. 

40,000,000 years later cyborg aliens from Zor find Dr. Jameson's body, extract his brain, put it into a spare robot body, and toss away the corpse, but that's another story - or another thirty-some stories, actually. 

Jump forward a comparatively brief 31 years to 1962, when a scientist named Bob Ettinger publishes the first version of The Prospect of Immortality. In his book, Ettinger advocates a system whereby people would be frozen immediately after death in hopes that they could be thawed out and cured when medical science had found a remedy for the cause of their death. In 1976 he starts the Cryonics Institute and begins offering cryopreservation as a service. 

Ettinger's admitted inspiration? A youthful reading of Neil R. Jones and Dr. Jameson. And no, Walt Disney was not a client.

- Sid

P.S. The cover illustration shown at the start of the post is for a later story in Jameson's saga - I decided that it made more sense to show a cover that featured one of the stories - and a reasonably accurate painting of one of the robots - rather than the 1931 issue where the first story appeared. In the interests of accuracy and thoroughness, on the left is the cover for that July 1931 issue. For anyone interested in reading the Professor Jameson stories without having to invest a small fortune in pre-war pulp magazines, Ace Books editor Donald A. Wollheim published the collected stories in book form in the late 60's. I own two of the five collections and they cost me a grand total of $2.75 used.

And it's not like I didn't tell them.

We're millions of miles from Earth inside a giant white face. What's impossible?

Gary Sinise, Mission to Mars

Showing science fiction movies on the Space channel, that's what. Yes, they did it again - another Sunday night of non-genre films! This time it was FX and FX II, which at best are action films and at worst are the inverse of fantasy in that they're about the false physical creation of an illusion. And the other, non-science fiction channels? Mission to Mars, An American Werewolf in London and Armageddon. Now I grant you that neither Mission to Mars nor Armageddon are GREAT science fiction films, although I seem to recall that American Werewolf was well received when it premiered, but, as with the joke about the dancing bear, it's not a question of quality. Sigh...they're just not getting it.

- Sid