[extropy-chat] Writing for the Future

[Damien Broderick]

At 11:16 AM 11/19/2004 -0800, Hal wrote:

>To my future readers, then, I will offer greetings, and note that my
>life, combined with that of the books which influenced me, spans most
>of the 20th century.  I don't write about personal matters very often,
>but when I do, as I have done in this message, hopefully it will offer
>most of my readers a better picture of life not only today but over the
>past century as well.

With any luck, many of those future readers will either be people who are 
alive now, or new people who can recover/experience our memories in 
enormous if filtered detail.

I often groan at an associated problem: communal loss of memory and the 
endlessly reinvented wheel. In science fiction, the majority of new readers 
and viewers seem utterly innocent of all the rich, elaborate work of the 
past half century. Teleportation is a Star Trek idea, cloning is something 
invented by George Lucas, etc; what Hara Ra said earlier about the universe 
as a computation, and the tedious way certain scientists (or at any rate 
the journalists reporting them) apparently believe they have only just 
dreamed up this amazing gosh-wow idea. No memory of Fredkin or his 
predecessors, let alone sf versions. Confusion is rife even when an attempt 
is made to allocate prior fictional credit: I've seen an article in which 
the computational model of reality is equated with HITCHHIKER'S GUIDE where 
the Earth and all its species comprise a computer built by mice. *Not* the 
point; the *opposite* of the point. Oh well.

Damien Broderick