Date: Thu, 29 Sep 94 11:34:42 -0700
From: gysin@mugwump.UCSD.EDU (Brian Keeley)
To: ronc@cogs.susx.ac.uk (Ron Chrisley)
Subject: Re: [ronc: Answer to N&Q of 9/9/94]
Reply-To: bkeeley@UCSD.EDU


William Gibson's "Gernsback Continuum" is the first story in his
"Burning Chrome" short-story collection.  The story revolves around a
character who keeps intersecting with the "futures of the past," that
is, the vision of the how the future would be, as held by the people
of the past.  Imagine Orwell's 1948 vision of the mid-1980s.  In the
futures of the past, people in the 90s should be flying around in
personal jet-cars, and everybody has a small, safe nuclear power plant
in their house.  We have relatives that live on the moon and mars, and
we travel the world in huge dirigibles.

Reading _Imagologies_ reminded me of this story, in that Taylor &
Saarinen are expousing a vision of the future in which teledildonics
exists and where everybody has a high-bandwidth multimedia connection
to their personal videophone (provided by AT&T).  To their credit, at
least AT&T makes it clear that such technology lies firmly in the
future, T&S seem to be making a living at blurring the distinction
between current and (however inevitable) future technology.

	[Along with AI researchers.  Sometimes I'm scared by the fact that a
	lot of AI people seem to be trying to bring about the future as
	envisaged by dubious SF writers of the past.  -- Ron]

Brian