Word: fictions
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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That's an immense if. Drexler's idea was initially dismissed as science fiction, but even skeptics admit that, unlike time travel and warp drives, nothing about it actually violates the laws of physics. And when in 1989 an IBM team famously spelled the Big Blue logo in xenon atoms, nanotech spread from the basements of feverish acolytes poring over Drexler's seminal book, Engines of Creation (1986), to the research labs of NASA and Xerox PARC. Today nanotech researchers speak not of if but of when. Great leaps forward come from thinking outside the box. Drexler may be remembered...
That, however, was the very thing that caught the world's imagination. Human cloning! The stuff of science fiction seemed about to become reality. Even before other labs had confirmed Wilmut's discovery, a Harvard-trained physicist named Richard Seed proclaimed his intention to clone humans for commercial purposes. Cloning, he declared grandiosely, was "the first serious step toward becoming one with...
...Science fiction is a native 20th century art form that came of age at the same time as jazz. Like jazz, science fiction is very street-level, very American, rather sleazy, rather popular, with a long and somewhat recondite tradition. It's also impossible to avoid, no matter how hard...
...Science fiction boasts an impressive predictive track record--if you squint hard and ignore most of the evidence. Atom bombs, spacecraft, comsats, credit cards, jukeboxes, waterbeds, gene splicing--they all appeared in science fiction first, well before showing up at the mall or on the military base. But science fiction is visionary by design and prophetic only by accident. You'll have a hard time finding androids, aliens, time travelers or psychic powers at the K-mart, even though science-fiction writers have obsessed about them for 70 years...
...Congress's Office of Technology Assessment had all the virtues sometimes claimed for science fiction. The OTA was concerned with genuine hard-core technological prediction. It paid close scholarly attention to technical trends and their social implications with facts, figures and footnotes--and Congress abolished it in the mid-1990s. The OTA didn't work out; science fiction suits us better. American society prefers having supergizmos dropped on its head out of nowhere, with no time to prepare and no real thought of the consequences. We love it that way. It's livelier, funnier, freer and just more American. "Leap...