Just an aside I thought I would throw in on Sci Fi
Tom Swift! my fourth grade Hero!
Andre Norton, good when she wrote the stuff before dragons and other weird
animals dominated the story
( give me time travel ray guns space ships etc etc.)
"When Arthur
C. Clarke is mentioned, it is for his contributions to communications
satellites, not for his science fiction."
A rather interesting book is " Assent to Orbit" it is a compilation of
Clarke's papers"
Another person that wrote Sci-Fi was John R. Pierce of Bell labs fame
( traveling wave tubes, klystrons, and the ECHO and TELSTAR Project) He
wrote under the names of J.J. Coupling and John Roberts.
We are working on compiling a compete list of all of Pierce's writing,
both fiction and non-fiction
( to read some of John's articles on ECHO, TELSTAR and his work on microwave
device development at Bell Labs please check out
www.smecc.org
A further note on Clarke and Pierce. Clark regards Pierce as one of the
fathers of communications satellites
we can assume that since it is the plural ,the other person he is referring
to is Harold Rosen Of Hughes fame ( syncom, earlybird et al.)
In an inscribed copy of assent to orbit that is in the museum's archives
here that was presented to Pierce by Clarke. The inscription is signed by
Clarke however denoting he is the "Godfather" !
enough rambling on my part back to work sorting papers on spiral fusion
ed sharpe archivist for smecc
--
Please check our web site at
http://www.smecc.org
to see other engineering fields, communications and computation stuff we
buy, and by all means when in Arizona drop in and see us.
address:
coury house / smecc
5802 w palmaire ave
glendale az 85301
623-435-1522
thanks Ed Sharpe archivist for SMECC
"Wirt Atmar" <[log in to unmask]> wrote in message
news:3dd16c34$1@skycache-news.fidnet.com...
> Roy writes:
>
> > But you don't think science fiction can tell us anything about the human
> > condition? Perhaps these are lesser authors, because of the realm they
> > have chosen to play their ideas out in?
> >
> > And if thought 'lesser', who judges them so? You?
>
> One easy way to judge the value of any attribute on society -- in a
> completely unbiased manner -- is to somehow measure the rate at which the
> attribute is regarded, not in a manner where people tell you what they're
> doing or what they believe, but in how they act.
>
> After attending now 40 years worth now of scientific conferences, military
> and NASA planning sessions, at a rate of anywhere from two to five a year,
I
> cannot ever remember a single line being quoted on any slide from a
science
> fiction author.
>
> There are authors of course who are widely quoted: William Blake, T.S.
Eliot,
> Shakespeare, Thomas Jefferson, etc. (indeed, Eliot's quatrain, "We shall
not
> cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive
> where we started and know the place for the first time" and Jefferson's
> instructions to the Corps of Discovery are among NASA's favorite current
> authors), but no one, to the best of my recollection, has ever gotten up
in
> front of his peers, when discussing a subject of some real importance, and
> ever quoted Asimov, Clarke, Dick, or even Kim Stanley Robinson. When
Arthur
> C. Clarke is mentioned, it is for his contributions to communications
> satellites, not for his science fiction.
>
> The only exceptions to that statement that I can remember are HAL of
"2001"
> and, to a lesser degree, Ellie Arroway of Carl Sagan's "Contact". Those
> subjects and visions struck a deep resonant chord with a great many
people,
> primarily because they posed deep technical challenges and fundamental
> philosophical questions regarding the evolution of machine intelligence
and
> our approaches towards the discovery of extraterrestrial intelligence.
>
> Science fiction books aren't spat upon by "real" scientists, as some of
you
> seem to believe. Virtually every scientist and engineer that I know read
them
> extensively when they were young, and most credit the books as being *the*
> primary influence on them in their becoming a scientist. Carl Sagan used
to
> like to talk about the influence that the Edgar Rice Burroughs series of
> Barsoom (Mars) had on him when he was a child right up to the point of his
> death. But as you become older and begin the understand the significance
of
> the problems and what you can and can't do, you grow out of them.
>
>
> In addition, Stan wrote:
>
> > > There are legitimate approaches to the analyses of complex problems.
> > > Quoting science fiction authors is not one of them.
> >
> > To the contrary...it's the best kind of literature to find possible
> > solutions to problems, by *definition*.
>
> I'm tempted to ask what planet you're living on, but I won't. It seems too
> cheap a shot :-).
>
> Wirt Atmar
>
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