Gibson's prose has a short shelf life. That's why he doesn't write future-set stories anymore.
In the film of Johnny Mnemonic, the screenplay of which was penned by Gibson himself, Johnny must act as a courier for 320 GB by using a brain implant -- in 2025. It's 2018 in the real world, and data smugglers today would probably get farther by swallowing toy balloons with two or three microSD cards in them than by going the whole invasive wipe-your-childhood-memories brain implant route (if such a route were available).
Not true that Gibson's prose has a short shelf life. Neuromancer is in my view a timeless masterpiece, and Gibson's most recent book is set in the future.
I think the technology descriptions have really dated. Exhibit A: Neuromancer. the Dornier-Fujitsu space yacht Haniwa, assembled in Orbit. "Case made out the familiar chatter of a printer turning out hard copy...Case snatched a length of twisted paper and glanced at it."
Star Trek: The Next Generation referred to data sizes as "quads", which has the advantage that it has actually future-proofed the series a bit. It's fairly clear that whatever a "quad" is, it isn't just two bits smashed together, but what it is? Who knows.
It's true that most of Star Trek uses vague or made-up terms for computing measures, but Data formally refers to his own storage in units of "quadrillion bits", and apparently using that as a definition of "quad" makes for a reasonable order-of-magnitude estimate for other uses, even today.
The authors of the Star Trek TNG Technical Manual in the early 1990s sidestepped unforseeable computing progress by referring to 'kiloquads' of storage and never relating it to contemporary measurements.
Since part of its purpose was as a writer's guide that terminlogy slipped into the shows and was quite believable when some character expressed surprise that a tiny chip could carry '15 kiloquads' of data. It worked very well.
Gibson's prose has a short shelf life. That's why he doesn't write future-set stories anymore.
In the film of Johnny Mnemonic, the screenplay of which was penned by Gibson himself, Johnny must act as a courier for 320 GB by using a brain implant -- in 2025. It's 2018 in the real world, and data smugglers today would probably get farther by swallowing toy balloons with two or three microSD cards in them than by going the whole invasive wipe-your-childhood-memories brain implant route (if such a route were available).
Not true that Gibson's prose has a short shelf life. Neuromancer is in my view a timeless masterpiece, and Gibson's most recent book is set in the future.
Well, Neuromancer's first line doesn't make sense any more :-P
That said, it's one of my favourite books.
14 replies →
I think the technology descriptions have really dated. Exhibit A: Neuromancer. the Dornier-Fujitsu space yacht Haniwa, assembled in Orbit. "Case made out the familiar chatter of a printer turning out hard copy...Case snatched a length of twisted paper and glanced at it."
When I read it at the time, I thought the techno-babble might as well have been called magic. It was OK, but masterpiece?
1 reply →
Star Trek: The Next Generation referred to data sizes as "quads", which has the advantage that it has actually future-proofed the series a bit. It's fairly clear that whatever a "quad" is, it isn't just two bits smashed together, but what it is? Who knows.
It's true that most of Star Trek uses vague or made-up terms for computing measures, but Data formally refers to his own storage in units of "quadrillion bits", and apparently using that as a definition of "quad" makes for a reasonable order-of-magnitude estimate for other uses, even today.
If you try to make your stories too future-proof you end up making it look like just magic. It may also become harder to relate to.
See Numenera [0] though, set a billion years in the future, while still keeping a sense of familiarity.
[0] https://numenera.com
The authors of the Star Trek TNG Technical Manual in the early 1990s sidestepped unforseeable computing progress by referring to 'kiloquads' of storage and never relating it to contemporary measurements.
Since part of its purpose was as a writer's guide that terminlogy slipped into the shows and was quite believable when some character expressed surprise that a tiny chip could carry '15 kiloquads' of data. It worked very well.
1 reply →
Numanera makes me go "meh", because it seems to mostly be an attempt to put a gloss of exoticity over tremendously unexciting game mechanics.
4 replies →
3MB of hot, hot ram