From the past Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash (1992)

[Larry Greenwood]

Has anyone in this group by chance ever read Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash? Right that was 15 years ago, even before the web. Neal was in that group of writers who were labeled "cyberpunk" or "cyberpunk literature". Anyway, as I am getting better at getting around in this group and looking at the "Second life" site, I am amazed at the similarities between the "cyber" world that Neal described and what is emerging now. What is also amazing is how he describes the future library---I won't get into it here, you'll have to read the book! But clearly he had a vision of library services that I am seening unfolding in this group and others. When I was library directing I would always refer to Neal's book to see what was ahead.

Larry Greenwood

[Ken Fujiuchi]

Sadly I haven't gotten around to reading Neal Stephenson's book. Many of my friends recommend Snow Crash, but I just haven't gotten around to it. You post did remind me of this flickr set here http://www.flickr.com/photos/notlikecalvin/sets/72057594068198516/ which are photos of places in London that were also in Neal Stephenson's "System of the World" at the Tower of London. He has photos of various locations from the book, complete with notes. I thought it was a neat example of how Flickr can be used for literary subjects.

[Larry Greenwood]

Thanks Ken for the link and the photos. I was not familiar with the book you mention. But I'll check it out.

On a different note, you have got to wonder how folks like Neal and Gibson were able to look this far ahead? And that question leads to another, which is "who are the prophets today looking ahead?"


Larry Greenwood

[joshua m. neff]

The funny thing about William Gibson and "cyberspace" is that when he first wrote about it, he'd never even touched a computer. He wrote his first short stories and novel on a typewriter, and based cyberspace on kids playing video games at an arcade he would walk by (noticing how intently they stared at the screens).

[Larry Greenwood]

Joshua,

So how do you figure these guys could look this far ahead? That's what intrigues me. Or was it a lucky guess....

(Actually I don't think we have caught up to Neal's "cyber world view yet.")

Larry Greenwood

[Larry Greenwood]

And I wonder why these delete buttons keep following us around?

Larry

[joshua m. neff]

I think a lot of it is lucky guessing. Years ago, I read an interview with some SF author (I can't recall which one) who said something along the lines of, "If you went back in time to the '60s and talked about a disease that mostly struck homosexuals, minorities, and was rampant in Third World countries, and had no cure, you'd be branded as some kind of wacko bigoted right-winger. There's *no way* you can really predict the future."

To a certain extent, I think "Snow Crash" is also lucky guessing. (Although I've never read an interview with Stephenson, so maybe he really was onto something then.) I read the book right after it came out. I was an English major undergrad, and my advisor was this SF-loving, pop culture nut who was playing with Hypercard and predicting that the linear novel would soon be dead. And nobody was talking with any certainty that in the not-too-distant future there'd be anything like Second Life. Hell, the World Wide Web was fresh and new at that point.

[Larry Greenwood]

So who is the current Neal Stephenson? I wonder who we should be reading today? I am not aware of anyone who is writing that far ahead about the virtual world. Who is looking down the road 10 or 15 years ahead today? I wonder...

Because as I found out from Neal's book, once you can see ahead that far, you can begin to make some sense about what is happening right now and begin to see somewhat into the immediate future say five years ahead. I remember that back in the early 90s when I was library director I always felt I sort of knew what was going to happen within about five years ahead and where we should be in the library with the technology. But about five years ago, I could no longer do that. I sensed that things were moving way too fast in too different many directions.

I wonder if anyone else today, in this group, can look ahead five years, or is it just me?

Larry Greenwood

[Matthew Hamilton]

I always felt that part of the reason that Gibson and others were able to "predict" the future was that a lot of computer scientists would mimic the books they'd read, movies they'd seen, and TV shows they liked.

However, I think this is much less true today than when the Net and Web were newer... I just remember that in the early days of the Net, frequently the things people would develop would be direct inspirations from Star Trek, Gibson, etc. If a Sci Fi author wrote a vision that was appealing, it seemed like a swarm of programmers would jump on it and try to make it reality.

While that's kind of cool, I like that Web 2.0 is putting creativity back in the hands of non programmer types, and now the results are much more diverse and surprising (and frequently, even more interesting).

[Aaron Dobbs]

Five years ahead? I'll take a stab at it (though I think these have mostly been said elsewhere)... Video- and Screen-casts will be the way Library Instruction is done -- though it will be dying out and Second Life (or it's successors) will be where "classroom instruction" will take place for many online classes. (SL, or successors, will incorporate voice and other sounds somewhen before that).

Regarding where libraries will be? That's a bit harder for me to see; we'll have our fingers in the pies above, and we'll have our "legacy users" for sure *but* will we have "lost" a generation of potential supporters to the gee-whiz-bang online services sprouting up everywhere?

[Ken Fujiuchi]

I don't think that these science fiction writers see into the future, nor do they just guess. One of my favorite Robert A. Heinlein novels was "Have Space Suit - Will Travel" about a young boy who builds himself a spacesuit and goes out on adventures in outer space. This was before an space suits actually existed. The author, as an engineer, just happened to see the current technology in pressure suits and applied the same design principles, but for a vacuum environment. He also goes on to include details about how a person in a space suit would take meals and water, or how the person would navigate on the moon. I always found it interesting that Heinlein's description of his fictional space suit helped NASA design a real spacesuit a few years later.

In the end, Sci-Fi is about an educated guess of the potential of current technologies available to the author at the time. Oh and it may depend on the author sees a dystopian or utopian future.

[Marcus Elmore]

Funny, I just pulled Snowcrash off the shelf the other night for the first time in years, to look at his description of avatars after my first jaunt into Second Life. I was struck by what he got right-in-advance, especially the notion of virtual celebrity (the novel's protagonist lives in a shipping container and delivers pizzas for a living in the "real world", but in the virtual world, he's famous).

However, I also noticed how much of the experience of virtuality, at least as Gibson and Stephenson imagined it in the 1980s, has not (yet) emerged. I'm thinking specifically of embodiedness; for both writers, VR was something in which you participated fully via some technological interface. What we get instead is the ubiquitous workstation, and the guilty (?) experience of a virtual life lived around the margins of our work- and school-days, not really that much different than shopping on eBay when we should be writing reports.

Ken F. suggests that SF is "an educated guess of the potential of current technologies available to the author at the time." While this is certainly true, I think a more important feature of SF (and especially the work of Gibson and Stephenson) is as a metaphor for our current social, political, and economic reality: it's a way of talking about what is, at least as much as it is a way of speculating on what will be. (The future of Have Spacesuit, Will Travel, for instance, leaving out the rocketships and aliens, is instantly recongizable as the social world of the 1950s.) Virtuality is important in Snowcrash and Neuromancer NOT because the technology is going to revolutionize our lives (and it may well, as the Web has) but because it's a second-hand way of getting at what its like to live in a fully commodified, corporate, media- and advertising-saturated global economy. That's the terrain libraries are struggling to navigate now, and the technology, while it may help or hinder, is just a means to the same end we've been pursuing all along.

[Larry Greenwood]

We just move so I can't find my copy of Snow Crash where I have underline all the references to librarians and libraries.

But speaking of avatars, I thought Stephenson's description of the avatar librarian was thoughtful. If I remember right, if you didn't like some aspect of the librarian you could change it.

I imagine that feature would be a novelty for students using the library.

Larry Greenwood