Looking Back Through the Looking Glass of A to Z

So... let's just get this whole reflections thing out of the way so that next week I can start getting everything back to normal for real. Or as real as anything is around here. After my a to z series, I'm beginning to wonder what real really is.

Okay, not really... that's mostly the fault of my kids.

But what did I think of the whole A to Z thing? That's a good question that I don't have a good answer for. So, before I get to the part where I start trying to evade that question, let's deal with the stuff I do know.

The first thing I know is, wow! I had no clue that fiction, specifically science fiction, introduced so many ideas to the world. I mean, I knew that science fiction was responsible for some stuff. I figure we all knew that. But I had no idea it introduced SO MANY THINGS. You think I talked about a lot? You should see the list of things I didn't talk about! What amazed me most was how many of them, especially the stuff about space travel, tied directly back to the fiction with people saying, "I was inspired by this." That's pretty amazing, if you ask me. And I'm really glad my wife made this suggestion, because it was all very interesting and good research.

[At some point, I may talk about more of these things, so I'm gonna keep my lists and my links to myself for the moment. Maybe, I'll post some in the future. (before anyone asks)]

The second thing I know is that there are a bunch of books I want to read now. I've already ordered Snow Crash and also have plans to pick up some Vinge novels within the next couple of weeks (crossing my fingers that they still have them when I go to get them (because, yes, I already called)). Doing this series made me want to reread a bunch of stuff, too, like War of the Worlds, but I know I probably won't actually do that even though I want to. My reading list (of things I haven't read) is just too long, and I don't think I'll be able to work a bunch of rereading in (even if I am rereading Jekyll and Hyde).

Those are the things I know. But it's also raised a question.

Doing all of this has, in many ways, caused me to question literature. Not in a "what is literature?" kind of way, but in a "what's the point of most literature?" kind of way. After seeing the impact of so much of science fiction, it makes me wonder about the worthwhileness of whole genres of "literature." If reading doesn't prompt us to do something, what's the point? It doesn't have to be science fiction. Dickens didn't write science fiction, but his novels were often social commentary that prompted people to respond (like with Oliver Twist). Honestly, this has been a question I've struggled with since, well, since high school, even back when I was reading Piers Anthony (and most of his books don't do anything). And I get entertainment. I like being entertained. But isn't providing something more than just mere entertainment something we should be striving for? Of course, writing books that say something is a lot harder than just writing books. Writing books that say something well... well, that's pretty rare.

Anyway...

The A to Z challenge itself... was it worth it? I don't think I have an answer to that question. Looking at the numbers, just the numbers, I'd have to say "no." I mean that in that I put a whole lot more work into it than I got back from it. It didn't raise my daily traffic by any considerable amount. I did gain followers, but it certainly wasn't a huge number. No great increase in comments. In fact, that number dropped, but I'm sure it was because people got burned out by the end of the month. At any rate, I think it will take a couple or few months to actually see what the real impact of participating was. At the moment, I'm saying it was tiring, it made me cranky, and it made my wife cranky at me. And, see, I had, like, 9 posts completed before April started, but I only finished my "Z" post two days before it was due. And I worked on these almost every single day (I think I took a total of 3 days off from working on blog posts the whole month (which is why my wife was cranky at me)).

Here's what I observed:

People who wrote short "nothing" posts picked up more followers and got more comments. On one level, I get this. People want to zip through the blogs and check them out, because there are just a lot of them. However, in relation to people that I already followed, those that took this approach, I really just didn't read their blogs the whole month of April. Why? Because they didn't post about anything. Whatever it was that I like about their blog was just gone, so I didn't even bother. In that sense, it all feels like false advertising to me. The people that pulled the most new people in were the ones that "lied" about who they are by throwing up frivolous posts. And I just don't know how I feel about that overall. I think it makes me sad.

In the same way, I didn't find very many new blogs I felt were worth following. The few I did choose to follow were blogs that said something. Had significant posts that took some time to read. Some of these blogs picked up so few new followers as to be insignificant. And that makes me sad. It makes me feel like most people don't want to take the time to read something that will make them think. Actually, I know this is true, because most people don't read. And, here, among people that (supposedly) do read, they're only really attracted to the short, flashy posts with pictures of kittens.

But here's the thing, of the blogs that I skipped over because their A to Z posts were short, frivolous things (like A is for Apple (because I really came across that one (more than once))), how many of them actually have blogs worth following but were "lying" during the A to Z month because the short posts attract more flies? I'll never know.

And that... that's actually why I wrote long posts in the vein of what I normally do. I wanted the people that stopped by my blog to see what I'm actually about and make a decision based on me, not a "used car salesman" persona that I threw on during A to Z month to drive traffic in. Having said that, I did do one post that was "lighter" than  the rest. It had more pictures than any other post I did and less of me talking. It felt natural to me to demonstrate that one through pictures because of the subject matter: exo-suits. They're just cool. And that post, the one I viewed as kind of a throwaway post, got twice as many page views as the next most viewed A to Z post. And I don't know how I feel about that, because, if I were to pick my top 3 posts of A to Z, or my top 5, or, even, my top 10, that one would not be in it.

I suppose it's just going to come down to a question of quantity vs quality. I chose to not go for quantity. I did that on purpose and, even, stated my decision to go the route I was going to one of the hosts. Unfortunately, quality is more difficult to measure, to >heh< quantify, so it may take me a while to figure out if the time I spent on A to Z was worth it in the grand scheme of things. I do think I picked up, at least, a few quality people, and, for that, I'm grateful. Beyond that, we'll just have to see how it goes.

[EDIT: As a follow up to my series and as an addition (specifically) to my Cyborg post, I just saw an article yesterday about the very first bionic eyes being implanted and returning (limited) sight to some people suffering from a degenerative genetic condition that causes blindness. This is pretty big news!]

The A to Z of Fiction to Reality: Moon Landing

Flight has long been a great dream of mankind. From Greek mythology to Leonardo da Vinci to the Wright Brothers, but it may have been Jules Verne that first dreamed us onto the moon. One of Verne's earliest works was From the Earth to the Moon (1865), and what he described within those pages was amazingly accurate considering the amount of data available to him. Of course, he did do plenty of research and calculations to make his story as accurate as possible. He even made space weightless, which we, um, didn't really know at the time.

Let's make something abundantly clear, here, flight did not yet exist when Verne wrote his story. The Wright brothers were only just beginning their experiments at Kitty Hawk when H. G. Wells released The First Men in the Moon in 1901, and that was 35 years after Verne! Wells also included weightlessness in space. Just to give some continuity, Wells was a huge influence on C. S. Lewis and his later Space Trilogy which involves trips to Mars and Venus.

But let's go back...

Verne's book came out in 1865. Konstantin Tsiolkovsky was born in 1857 and grew up reading Verne's work. And was inspired by it. He came to believe that space was the future of mankind and that lead him into rocketry research. He became the first of the three founding fathers of rocketry and astronautics and developed his first theories of space flight in reaction to the figures that Verne used in his novel. He even worked out the formula to figure out escape velocity. Although, he showed that Verne's figures were wrong, he acknowledged Verne's influence on his work. As the cause for his work.

The second founding father of modern rocketry is Robert Goddard. He grew up reading H. G. Wells and, between The First Men in the Moon and War of the Worlds and a trip up a cherry tree, became fixated on building rockets to Mars. Much of Goddard's work was instrumental in the development of spaceflight. As in, without Goddard, spaceflight may not have existed.

The third of these founding fathers was born in Germany in 1894. Hermann Oberth, also, grew up reading Jules Verne. In fact, he read Verne, especially From the Earth to the Moon to the point of memorization. He built his first model rocket at age 14.

All three of these men were discounted as crazy or pursuing fantasies. Everyone knew that space flight wasn't possible and that going to other planets, even the moon, was ludicrous. In fact, Goddard's work wasn't even recognized until after his death. He spent years being ridiculed by the press until he became a virtual recluse. Only Oberth received any recognition within his lifetime as he was actually still alive and contributing to research during the space race. The space race which began almost 100 years after Verne first published From the Earth to the Moon.

Now, I want to make something else abundantly clear: the entire reason we, as a race, have gone out into space at all is because three men were inspired to make something they read into a reality. If Jules Verne (because, honestly, Wells inspiration for his story was, in all likelihood, also, Verne) had never written his story about going to the moon, who can say if that would have ever happened? Or, at the very least, happened when it did. Maybe someone else would have come along later and written the same kind of story, maybe it would even have been Wells, but so much of the work that made everything else possible was done by Tsiolkovsky that we might still be completely planet-bound.

And just to make all of this even more clear, here are some inventions that have come out of NASA, and NASA wouldn't exist if we hadn't been trying to go to the moon:
1. translucent polycrystalline alumina -- Yeah, I know. What? That's the stuff from which they make invisible braces for teeth.
2. scratch resistant lenses for glasses
3. memory foam -- this stuff has all kinds of uses, but let's just say that it helps a lot of people sleep better at night

4. ear thermometers
5. shoe insoles -- especially athletic shoes... modeled after the boots Armstrong wore when he walked on the Moon (see, when he walked on the Moon (because Verne wrote about it))
6. your ability to communicate wirelessly -- Yes, that's thanks to NASA. So, um, not only would we not be in space, but you wouldn't have all those nifty cell phones and iDoohickies.

To grind the point home even more, here are some of the specific things that Verne included in his book that turned out to be accurate:
1. weightlessness
2. retro-rockets (those things that fire in opposition to the direction a space craft is going in order to slow it down)
3. a launch facility (and the place Verne chose is only a few miles from Cape Canaveral
4. splashdown (returning to Earth by landing in the ocean)

I think this post shows, perhaps, more than any of the others I've made so far just how much of an effect that writers can have. It shows the importance of literature. It shows the importance of... imagination. Verne had a huge imagination, and I hate to imagine what things would be like today if he hadn't spun the stories he did.

[And not that this is exactly related, but imagination is something that I've long believed is vitally important to kids and to society. This post, in particular, has just made me realize it even more. However, my belief in the importance of imagination is why it plays such a huge role in my book, The House on the Corner.]

The A to Z of Fiction to Reality: Lasers

It's quite possible that I should have put this post under "E" for "energy weapons," but, see, I really love the idea of the exo-suit, so I couldn't leave that out, and it's lasers that most people associate with energy weapons, so I figured I may as well stick with it. This one is going to be a bit more convoluted than the others, though, so try to keep up. This way, please...

Let's first step back to 1898. Martians were invading the Earth. Well, at least, they were in H. G. Wells' The War of the Worlds. The Martian's tripods were equipped with heat rays that they used to destroy, well, everything. This is the most significant early example of the raygun. It may not have been the first (I don't actually know, but I couldn't find anything earlier), but anything that was earlier has been mostly forgotten.

Rayguns in fiction became increasingly popular through the early 20th century. In fact, they sort of became standard fare in pulp science fiction including Buck Rogers, Flash Gordon, and others. They also became pretty standard in comic books.

1930s edition Buck Rogers raygun

Then, Einstein happened...

Well, let's re-examine that. In 1917, Einstein put forth the Quantum Theory of Radiation which established the theoretic foundation for irradiating light waves. It's this theory that would later lead to lasers. But, in the meantime, rayguns flourished in fiction.

And, now, we're to the part where, maybe, this entry should have been placed under the letter R. Prior to World War II, there was research going on to develop rayguns (in the United States, at any rate, and, possibly, in Germany (actually, probably, everywhere, but I don't have that information)). That research coupled with some of Tesla's ideas (also from 1917) lead to the development of radar.

But we still didn't have any rayguns.

Finally, in the '50s, the first significant breakthroughs in laser technology began to happen, and, in 1959, Gordon Gould published the term L.A.S.E.R. (Light Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Radiation). The first operating laser followed in 1960. Science fiction went crazy, dropping rayguns for laser guns. But only for a moment...

One interesting factoid about that:

The original Star Trek had two pilot episodes. I bet some of you even knew that. The first pilot episode, "The Cage," was produced in 1964 (and remained unreleased until 1988) and included lasers. The first pilot didn't convince the studio that the concept would work, but they were still intrigued by the idea, so they made the odd request for a second pilot, "Where No Man Has Gone Before." The interesting bit? It had already become apparent by the time of the 1966 production of the new pilot that lasers were not going to be practical as guns or weapons, so they changed the name of the devices in Star Trek to "phasers."

But the military really wanted laser weapons, and science fiction continued to be full of laser type weapons even if they didn't call them lasers. Star Wars got blasters, Doctor Who had stasers and all sorts of other things, and Starblazers got a wave motion gun just to name a few. And the military... well, they made this big laser and mounted it on the top of an airplane and sent it up to shoot down drones or something. But it was a cloudy day, and the clouds totally dissipated the lasers, and the project was mostly dropped (and, no, I can't tell you where I got that information (yes, if I did, I would have to kill you)).

This, of course, did not stop Reagan from creating the Star Wars program in the '80s. That almost did work; they just couldn't get enough range out of the lasers for them to actually be effective. But it did lead to one of my favorite movies of all time

Real Genius!

So... here we are in 2012, and we still don't have laser guns or flying cars. Or laser guns on flying cars. I do expect the flying cars soon, but it looks like the closest we're going to have to laser guns for a while is laser sighting. Sure, you can put someone's eye out with it if they agree not to look away, and we can cut things with really big lasers, but they're not really portable at that level and need huge amounts of energy.

But let's go back to rayguns... actually, let's go back to that very first one: H.G. Wells' heat ray. The military rolled out the first example of the non-lethal Active Denial System in 2010.

What we have here is, basically, the realized form of Wells' heat ray. It works by directing microwave energy at the victim causing the skin to attain a burning sensation. Most test subjects reach their pain threshold within 3 seconds, and no one has gone beyond 5 seconds. At the moment, it's being used as a non-lethal weapon, but there's nothing to keep it from being used in more lethal ways if the government wanted the development to go in those directions. The one mounted on the humvee above is for crowd control, but they are working on portable devices.

There you have your fiction to reality, just not with lasers. But lasers still power the imagination, and militaries around the world are still working on laser-based weapons. There have been claims of ground-based lasers that are capable of taking down aircraft, but they require enormous power sources. Interestingly enough, other uses of lasers have stayed pretty confined to science, not science fiction; however, if we ever do make it out into space, I would expect the weaponized use of lasers to reach science fiction proportions almost immediately since there are no atmospheric conditions to deal with.