Favorite Sci-Fi Prediction

Science-fiction writers make lots of predictions when they set their stories in the future. I love that we live in a time that is "the future" for a lot of great science-fiction, because we can see whether their predictions came true. The really mind-blowing part is that some of them DID!

I chose Ray Bradbury's imagery of "seashells" in Guy Montag's wife's ears because it took me forever to realize that they were something that existed when I was reading the book. My GameBoy came with the best pair of earbuds I've ever owned (hey Apple, take a page out of Nintendo's book on that one, they were seriously amazing... oh wait, I mean ARE because they still work great two decades later) and I didn't notice at first that that was exactly what Ray Bradbury was talking about when he wrote, "And in her ears the little Seashells, the thimble radios tamped tight, and an electronic ocean of sound." More importantly, he nailed the fact that having earbuds delivering your electronic audio media of choice whenever you want would make people... distant. Montag's wife is so absorbed by digital media (her Seashells or the wall screens she nags him about) that she's hardly even aware of her own husband's existence. Today, some people are so absorbed by whatever's on their phones or iPods or what-have-you, they don't notice the world around them. This was actually a pretty big theme of Bradbury's (he wasn't a huge fan of technology).

Mine actually came from our book this week, 2001: A Space Odyssey.  Clark talks about a electronic pad that has all the world news at just a drop of a hat, any newspaper you could possible want in an instant, eliminating the need for paper any longer.  Sound familiar?

I would wager that just about all you readers own one of these.  And what do you do with it?  Oh yea, you browse the internet where you have all the world's news articles at the touch of a button without wasting paper.  It's amazing how accurately Clark predicted we would be getting our information, considering he wrote the book in the 1960s.

"One by one he would conjure up the world's major electronic papers... Switching to the display unit's short-term memory, he would hold the front page while he quickly searched the headlines and noted the items that interested him."

Author Bio: Arthur C Clarke

The author of this week's review book, 2001: A Space Odyssey, is Arthur C. Clarke.

Yeah, that's the guy.

He lived from 1917 to 2008, and wrote science fiction. His most famous work was 2001, which was actually the first of a series (the others were 2010: Odyssey Two, 2061: Odyssey Three, and 3001: The Final Odyssey).

His writing helped popularize the ideas of space travel and futurism (he made lots of technology and science based predictions in his writing, as tends to happen in science fiction works set in the future).

Review Me Twice - Dune by Frank Herbert

I just wanted everyone to share in the awesome

1970s cover that I was experiencing.

I'm not sure if you know this, but Dune is a freakin' long novel.  Seriously guys.  I've been hardcore reading it for two weeks now and I'm still only about a little over halfway through it, which is INSANE.

But you know what?  I'm probably going to continue to diligently read it and finish it up as soon as I can.  I want to know what happens.  I am really invested in these characters and their lives and what's going to happen to them.

Not to mention the world building in this novel is insane!  This is Tolkien level of world building, complete with its own religions and legends and languages and solar systems.  HERBERT CREATED A WHOLE NEW SOLAR SYSTEM FOR THIS FREAKIN' BOOK!  It's really impressive.

So far, it's the book I've been most impressed with during our month of sci-fi, which I wasn't so sure was going to be the case.  Dune is a classic that gets a lot of hype and, often, the books don't live up to that hype.  So far, Dune completely does.

Fiction is Leaking into the Real World

I could write on this topic for at least two dozen famous books and series (off the top of my head, I'm thinking of Harry Potter, Lord of the Rings, Star Trek, Star Wars, and many DC and Marvel comics), but I think this one is particularly fun because it extends beyond Earth.

Dune is a huge series. Sure, this week, we're only reading the first novel. (Which is huge enough as it is.) But there are many other books, short stories, and don't forget the movies. Since it's set on a fictional planet, and lots of other fictional planets, you can imagine that the world gets pretty big.

Here's a list of the planets in the Dune universe (the Duniverse, if you will).

Go on, go read it. It's from Wikipedia. Check out the fact that a lot of those planets have information about real-life things in space that are named after them! Like Arrakis (the primary planet in the story) being the name given to a plain on Saturn's moon, Titan.

I'd like to think that if Frank Herbert were still alive, he would think that's pretty darn cool.

Favorite Mythical character

Have we done this before?  Maybe, but I figure you'll forgive us if we have because, with our book this week, it's immensely relevant.  In Dune, there are these huge sandworms that are attracted to the spice (basically the biggest major investment in this book) and then they come and eat you.  So I figured this would be a good week to know about some mythical beings.

Hyrda is one of the coolest, most bad-ass mythical beings ever.  I mean, not only does the thing have 100 heads, but it JUST KEEPS GROWING THEM.  You just can't seem to kill the stupid thing hno matter how hard you try.  A blow tot he heart is the only way that you're going to get rid of it.

Hyra has also had some cool pop culture references, most recently on the Captain America movie.  Hydra was a specialty branch of the Nazis, a secret society meant to bred the best of the best, to take over the world.  It's a potent symbol, the idea that you can kill as many agents as you like, but Hydra will still always be there, persuing their mission.

Phoenix, hands-down. It has been over-used a bit in pop culture, but it's still pretty amazing. Plus, it was my school's mascot when I was in sixth grade. And Fawkes is awesome. A phoenix bursts into flames periodically and is reborn from its own ashes. If that isn't one bad-ass mythological creature, I don't know what is.

My favorite thing about the phoenix is that it's immortal, but not in the way most immortal creatures are. It gets to keep living a full life over and over, instead of being stuck as an adult forever. That's the way I would want to be immortal, I think. Fresh start every century or so. Phoenixes have got it figured out.

Author Bio: Frank Herbert

Frank Herbert (1920-1986) was best known for the Dune series, and we're reading the first book of that series (appropriately titled Dune) this week. That book is the best-selling sci-fi book in history, and is unquestionably one of the classics of sci-fi, so Herbert is kind of a big deal.

He's from Washington, but had a bad home life and ran away to live with family in Salem, Oregon. His first job was at a newspaper. He served in the Navy as a photographer during WWII, then went to University of Washington and did all sorts of writing, but he only took classes that interested him, so he never finished an actual degree.

Dune - along with Heinlein's Stranger in a Strange Land, published a few years before it - helped turn sci-fi into a literary genre. Before that, all you really needed for a successful sci-fi story was a good technological idea; it didn't matter if you wrote a good story alongside it.

I always think it's interesting to see what an author thought of film adaptations of their greatest works, so I'm pleased to share that Herbert was overall pretty happy with the movie Dune (1984). There was also a TV series adaptation in 2000 but that was 14 years after Herbert's death, so I don't know what he might have thought of it. Since his death, Herbert's son Brian has added a few more books to the series using Herbert's old notes.

Review me Twice - Raptor Red by Robert T. Baker

Alex always seems to pick interesting books for us, and I was excited to see what she was going to for sci-fi month.  I had never even heard of this book (though, apparently it's kind of a big deal.)  I don't read a lot of dinosaur literature because, frankly, there's just not a lot out there.  I've read Jurassic Park and The Lost World and that's pretty much where it ends.

Raptor Red is a different beast entirely.  It's very much one of those non-fiction novel type books.  The book itself is based in fact.  Bakker has done a ton of research on these animals and the book is probably a pretty accurate portrayal of what life was like for a Utahraptor.  But we can't ever actually know for sure.  It's all a big educated guess, so it sets it very firmly in the fiction section of the library.

The book was well executed and interesting to read.  I feel like I learned a lot about dinosaurs without feeling like I LEARNED, laboriously, about dinosaurs.  But, as interesting and fun as it was.... it was still a book about dinosaurs, that were meant to BE dinos, not humanized characters.  So I found myself growing kind of bored at times because I couldn't really connect with the characters.  There are parts that I should have been sad and I just kind of wasn't.

I'm glad I picked it up, but I won't ever read it again.

Everything Cassy said, exactly. I can't really identify with a dinosaur (or any character, even) whose entire purpose is surviving and mating. So while everything was interesting and informative and definitely unique - I've never read another book like this - I didn't feel very invested in the protagonist. Although, I did feel more invested than I would have been in the hands of a less skilled writer, so that's something.

I love when fiction like this is heavily anchored in fact, but there's one very easy trap to fall into. I first noticed it in the Earth's Children series by Jean M. Auel... the author seems to want to make sure they put every bit of their research to good use in the writing. So even if it doesn't really matter exactly what that plant she stepped on is good for, we're going to hear about it. Possibly for a paragraph, or a page. Bakker's execution of this seems more natural, so it's not nearly as much of a problem. For example, one chapter begins with saying the raptor doesn't want to bed down in moist earth, and no raptors do, because they evolved in a dry climate and too much moisture encourages fungal growth which is bad for them. Interesting, related to the plot in the sense that this is the reason she doesn't want to sleep in the mud, and possibly a little more info than we strictly needed, but then we move on to bigger and better things. I think the difference is probably that dinos were Bakker's first thing, then writing, whereas Auel started with writing and then started the research on primitive humans. Either way, it's not a deterrent for this book; I just thought it was interesting to note.