Blogorrhea Junior

Attack of the Paper Folders

This is way too good to pass up: paper arts, geekiness, and fandom all in one! In other words, some brilliant Star Wars origami by Phillip West. Although I've never tried it, I'm a huge fan of origami and I'm endlessly amazed by the cleverness of people who do it. One of my favorite bits of business in Blade Runner was Edward James Olmos's character's little origami leavings. They were both clever and ominous at the same time.  And talk about ominous, here is the Emperor with his blue lightning, and some of his original work too, which is equally science-fictiony:

Who needs action figures when you can make your own?

(Via Playgirlz.)

Steampunk Geekery

I'm letting my geek flag fly again, though some of this has to do only peripherally with books.  Rag and Bone Blog has once again come up with one of the coolest things evah. This time it's a steampunk book clasp that I would duplicate in a heartbeat if I knew how to solder. Check out the video. What I like about this is is that it's not only so majorly geeky but it keeps your pen handy too.

I have kind of a weakness for steampunk gadgets, though I adore high tech, too. I love the look of early Industrial Revolution gadgets, something that probably goes back to my earliest awareness of design in objects: my grandfather's Machine Age stapler, which looked like this. You can buy these a number of places now that retro is in, but for years they were unloved, despite their inherent sleekness. I love the button on top, especially.

One of my all-time favorite pieces of steampunk comes courtesy of Author and Futurist William Gibson, from his blog.  It's a steampunk laptop that I covet in my heart. It's a Japanese construct, and you can find it here (with description in Japanese too, sadly; any translators out there?). And then there's this lovely keyboard mod, too, over on Steampunk Workshop:

There's something of an aesthetic (and philosophical) backlash against the too-slick and the often downright ugly in high tech (especially computers, which I've ranted about before). There's also, as evidenced by the burgeoning DIY movement, an interest in the homemade, which steampunk speaks to as well. But steampunk, at its best, is often elegant, using materials like brass and bakelite and marble, rather than our ubiquitous plastic. When I started making real money, I took a vow of plastic abstinence. There would be no more plastic in my house, e.g., no more plastic milk crates, storage containers, furniture. Wood or glass or metal or nothing. Despite its relative indestructability, it doesn't age well, unless it's something like bakelite, and it's hard as hell to clean, after a while, and it's not biodegradable.  Plastic is bad. Leather, however, is also good, especially when its wrapped around something that looks like a book but actually isn't, like this steampunk optical scanner. 

Whatever the appeal is, it's showing up everywhere. It's one of the things I love about the Foglios' Girl Genius comic: it's a totally steampunk aesthetic.  Just look at the clanks. That's really what steampunk is all about: handmade science; the Victorian Age without the doilies. Steampunk is kinda factory life before OSHA, too. Letterpress printing on a Vandercook can be pretty steampunk. It's not for sissies.

Not Dead Yet

Nope, just without DSL since Saturday morning when Earthlink and I had a misunderstanding about an order. I've been trying to put in a landline again, to facilitate my editorial business, and it turns out that the Capital of the World is not equally well-wired everywhere.  I live in a 1930s building that's only recently had its electric wiring updated. Somehow, they neglected to upgrade the phone wiring at the same time, so I still have a single line that can be split for separate phone numbers or dial-up, but not for DSL and phone.  Oy.

So I've discovered I"m going to have to spring for a cable modem (poor me!), which is only complicated because Earthlink doesn't have an agreement with my cable provider, and—you don't really want to read the rest of this saga, do you? I mean, the upshot is that everything will stay pretty much the same until August, when I'll have a cable modem and a landline. Through the genius of Earthlink, I'll still be able to keep all my addresses and web space, even though my ISP will probably be Optimum, so nothing will change there either. But it's been four or five days of doing the headless chicken dance, and then four days without DSL, when I dashed to Starbucks to check my mail on the laptop.

As I said before, Oy.

Anyway, I'm back up now, finally. So if you haven't heard from in a bit, this is why. Stay tuned for more substantive posts when I'm done wading through the swamp of backlogged mail.

Doin' It For Ourselves

Damn, now I've got two fangrrrls baiting me. Bad enough BN Buffy Fan Jennifer taunts me about my fanfic habit, but now I've got Alyson, author of the forthcoming Will the Vampire People Please Leave the Lobby?, taunting me on the phone the other night, and I haven't even met her face to face yet. (I just know we're gonna be friends.) And what a taunt too. "Hi!" I says when Jen puts me on the phone with her while they were having dinner together in LA. "Lee, there's this site you have to go to called Fanlib.com," she says without preamble, as though it were the most urgent thing in the world.

Only because it is. I mean, from a certain point of view, as Obi-Wan would say. And that's because these geniuses (with $3M of venture capital, no less), as Alyson pointed out with appropriate outrage, have started an open archive for fanfic in which they reserve the right to profit from your ideas, edit your fic (see Part II) and for the privilege, you must indemnify them against any copyright infringement lawsuits (ditto). As I said in an earlier post about the new Spiderman action figure, WTF?! I'm not sure whether to laugh in their faces or fart in their general direction. Maybe both, in that order.

One of the (many) things that makes this interesting to me is that it follows serendipitously on the heels of several discussions of fanboys' loathing of fanfic over on Feminist SF-The Blog! (a blog, btw, that any woman interested in SF, feminism, comics, and some damn fine pop culture analysis should read on a regular basis). Oddly Fanlib.com's founders are all male and don't seem to have any prior experience with fanfic, which is a largely female endeavor. There had been an ongoing discussion (here, here, and here) about male privilege and female fanfic (specifically slash), i.e., the insistence of many fanboys that only they have the right to define what is a "legitimate" response to their favorite media, and to define the rules of the community. (The old, "you're not doing that right" ploy, designed to denigrate women's approaches and ways of thinking.)

The root of my mixed reaction to Fanlib.com's unmitigated gall (sneer? rage? sneer? rage? Hmm, which first?) lies in their condescending tone and the underlying theme of exploitation that runs through their business model. (Not that exploitation is anything new in business models.) They've completely missed the point of fanfic centered around a community of female writers and readers. Sure we like our strokes from our own fans, but we mostly like reading each other's really good fics, helping other writers improve, writing our own, and talking about our characters with each other: why they do what they do, what they haven't done something we think they should have, where their canonical writers were inconsistent, which way we think the story arc should bend. More importantly, the discussion is from our point of view, which is often distinctly different from the fanboys'. It's fascinating to see how much this infuriates some of them. As Lucy Gillam points out over on the Fanfic Symposium,

The vast, vast, vast majority of institutions, spaces, and subcultures privilege male interests, but because male is the default in this culture, such interests are very often considered ungendered. As a result, we only really notice when something privileges female interests. . . . The second result of the invisibility of male privilege is that a lack of male privilege is taken as active oppression, as male-bashing or bias towards women. It is not enough that the mere presence of something which actively aims at women and women's interests is taken as oppressing men; simply not catering to men's interests is perceived as oppression.

Like fanfic. The grrlz have made a space for themselves, defined by themselves, run as they like, and the boyz would like to step in and not just play, but actually take over.

Fanlib.com is a blatant attempt to redefine the community and its purpose in their own image, and to co-opt the work of a largely female community. Telesilla, who used to post in my fandom (where are you? Sniff!) deconstructs the dastardliness here with a particular thoroughness. When called on their ulterior motives, they've reacted with a whiny defensiveness by spamming female fans' LJs. Truwest, who also posts pretty frequently in my fandom, sums up the problem with the concept pretty neatly, here. The beauty of her post is that she's also a techie and plays both the geek girl and "overemotional male" card to hilarious reverse-sexism effect. and Yonmei, over at Feminsit SF--The Blog! really lets them have it for their sudden epiphany about fanfic.

What really frosts my cupcake is that the guys of Fanlib.com are trying to make a quick buck on the backs of women who do this for love. We've always understood that there's no money to be made in this endeavor; we're in it for the fun and the comraderie. I sometimes think some of us are in it for the love of subverting male culture, too, but that's another story. Put in bald terms, Fanlib.com is an invitation to voluntary servitude. Yes, you can back out any time you like, but why would you let someone else do as they will with your work for profit that does not accrue to you, when the only advantage they offer is something you can already get elsewhere with no strings attached? Sam Johnson said that only a blockhead writes for any reason but money, which exemplifies the attitude of Fanlib.com's creators. But at least Johnson was talking about money paid to the writer, not to the "publisher."

Do they think we're stupid? Apparently, yes. They usually do. And there will always be some newbies who fall for their scam the way new writers fall for the Poetry.com schtick. The difference this time, happily, is that we do not need them. Fanfic may make us poor, but it is not a sweatshop.

Lo, I hear the voices of millions of women whose work, whether created out of love or necessity, has been sold with little or no profit to them throughout history, crying out to me. "For Pete's sake! Not again!" they cry, with a collective historical eye-roll. And I say unto the Boyz of Fanlib.com, in the words of Our Lady Aretha and Sister Annie (with a nod to Brother Dave),

Sisters are doin' it for themselves.
Standin' on their own two feet.
And ringin' on their own bells.
Sisters are doin' it for themselves.

So take your fanfic archive and stuff it, boyz. We run our own websites, servers, and archives; swap our stories on CD-ROMs, print them up in 4-color zines, post them on forums and mailing lists we've set up and organized ourselves. We are an undetectable underground. And we've been doing this for years, decades, without you. We're not in it for the money, but we're sure not gonna let you get rich off of us. We're playin' by our own rules.

*Again, all praise to the nameless TPM fan who made the background of my icon.

Free Will!

Really cool article in the Times on the question of physics and free will. I read ages ago about the experiment showing that some other part of our brain motivates our actions long (relatively, that is) before we perceive ourselves as having made the decision to perform them. This apparently completely undermines the concept of free will in some people's minds. I find this really peculiar and the reasoning kind of flawed, mostly because it assumes that conscious thought is the only way we experience the world. But if it's our subconscious mind (or some other facet) that's really doing the driving, we're looking to the wrong source for free will. Despite the Cartesian dictum "I think, therefore I am," humans are more than just their conscious thought, as anyone who's experienced a "peak" or "flow" event can attest. And our perceptions of events, as any cop will tell you, can be largely untrustworthy.

Conscious thought doesn't even govern most of the things we do in life and if it did, we wouldn't last long. Imagine being consciously responsible for every single breath you took, or for keeping your own heart beating 24/7—and those are just the most obvious physical processes our bodies perform. Thankfully, our autonomic nervous system takes care of that. Even the apparently simple act of walking gets overly complicated and difficult if we think about it too much, like that old parable about the centipede. And anyone who's become proficient at a sport or another task of coordination (say, typing or playing an instrument) knows that the more you consciously think about what you're doing, the poorer your performance is. In these cases, we talk about "muscle memory," as though the nerves throughout our body were an extension of the brain.

So if our "unconscious" mind (and the difference—if there is one—between mind and brain here is really the core question) is actually driving, as it appears to be, we need to start asking how it perceives the world, literally (as in how does it receive and process sensory impulses from the exterior environment, the not-self), and on a different level, what mechanisms or processes does it use to interpret what it senses? This is where the big mystery is right now. It's also where the literalness of science falls down on the job.

Nobody knows what consciousness is, or what generates it, or phrased more neutrally, where it comes from. It seems to just be/not be. There's evidence of its various levels and facets on encephalograms and PET scans, but what it actually is remains obscure, mysterious, and just plain weird. If you've read a little Oliver Sacks, you know what I mean. I suspect that this is one of those questions for which there are no quantifiable answers, where the data are all subjective. It's a puzzle I'm not sure humans will ever be able to solve because we cannot transcend it, i.e., we cannot shift our viewpoint of it sufficiently to see the whole of it in context because we are always inside it.

I could be wrong, though. V.S. Ramachandran, a neuroscientist and Director of the Center for Brain and Cognition, University of California, San Diego, thinks, in a nutshell, that consciousness "arises from the activity of specific sets of interlinked brain circuits." Ramachandran describes the functions of mirror neurons which fire to both accomplish an action and also when an identical action is merely witnessed. We seem to create our own VR sims in our brains of other people's actions, as though they were our own. I wonder if this is the origin of those impulses to act that seem to precede our conscious thought, and what, if anything that has to do with quantum entanglement. The problem now is for us to find the red pill that will reveal the underpinnings of consciousness.

I'm hoping we all don't wake up in a nutrient bath in a coffin-farm, which seems infinitely worse to me than my conscious mind not directing my own actions. As long as it's something in my brain, I'm good with that.

Pimping: Book Stuff

AIEEEEE!  Only one day left! And I've been such a slacker. Not entirely true: The book is coming together slowly but surely, and the new book press is really fabulous. It makes the nicest, flattest covers! But I really could use a work table that didn't make me hunch over it. At my height, or lack thereof, it's hard to find a table that isn't either too tall when I sit or too short when I stand. The one I've got now, which is my former kitchen table, is just the right size to spread out on, but a little too low, and awkward to sit at. I'm thinking of putting some casters on the bottom,which would raise it up enough for me to stand at, which is how I prefer to work, at least when I'm making things.

But enough of my whining. What I really wanted to do today was to pimp some blogs and links and books and other stuff, in between the printing and cutting and gluing and pressing. First up:

• She's Such a Geek is out and so is their blog. I posted the call for entries here earlier, hoping to contribute myself, but as is too often the case, I couldn't get my act together in time. There are at least two contributors whose blogs I already follow (Kristin Abkemeier and Suzanne Franks), and I though haven't read the book yet, I'm plugging it because it's such a great idea, and because there are links on the site to some very cool women geeks. Go visit. Buy the book! Support your favorite grrrrlgeek!
• My favorite grrrlgeek, Jennifer Ouellette, just announced her engagement to the very sweet uber geek, Sean Carroll of CalTech, who sits at Feynman's desk every day, that is, when he's not off lecturing on geeky cosmological things. Jen's latest book, The Physics of the Buffyverse, is now available for preorder at Amazon, and is coming out in just about a month. I'll be plugging it ceaselessly for the next couple of months, so get used to it now. I did the first rough edit on it, and it's a wonderful, fun book, and I'm not even much of a Buffy fan. It'd be a great present for other girl geeks in your lives, whether Buffy fans or science geeks, or both.
• Carnivals! My new favorite is the Carnival of Feminist Science Fiction and Fantasy Fans. Number 7 is up here. There's also Feminist SF--The Blog!, which is soliciting participants, if you're interested. Then there's the Circus of the Spineless, which has a tattoo theme this time around (and no, it's not about wimps; it's about invertebrates.) I'm particularly taken with the octopus, jellyfish, and squid tats. And of course, Tangled Bank, which has a special Thanksgiving issue: Giving Thanks for Science.
• And I don't know why I like The Affected Provincial's Almanack so much but I do. It's rather charming.

Don't Be Evil

Whether they're making a pre-emptive strike or that stupid bill I wrote about earlier has actually passed, the stupidity has started, and a certain search engine company is leading the way. New Scientist reports (under the headline "FWSEing") that they've been forced to coin a new term for "searching the web with the search engine Google™": "Lawyers for a famous web search engine (FWSE) beginning with G have been sending out letters to remind publications that we must not use their trademarked name as a verb, lest we 'dilute' it and turn it into an ordinary English word that nobody can sue over." Frankly, it's too bloody late for that. The word was just added to the Oxford English Dictionary as a verb, as in "let me just google that," and meaning to search "for information using the Google search engine, which was named in 1998." Only now it's going to have to be, "let me just Google™ that." Makes me wanna go use Dogpile. It's what Google™'s lawyers are full of, anyway. For a company whose business philosophy is supposedly "Don't be evil," they're sliding down the slippery slope to the Dark Side nicely. Bad enough they're caving to the Chinese government over censorship. Now this.

This latest move, though, is just plain stupid. I said this earlier, but once people stop seeing your name in print in casual usage, they stop thinking of your company as being the go-to source for whatever you're famous for. This is part of what's known as "branding," in marketing jargon (though in this case, I think it might be more appropriate as a hot iron stuck on somebody's butt), and it's the goal of every marketer: to have your company's (or your client's) name associated ubiquitously with what they do best. And this is precisely the position of Google™, which has been the Mother of All Search Engines for quite a while now. How does using Google™ as a verb, dilute the brand? Even if it's not actually the search engine being used when the average person looks something up, it's the search engine they're thinking about, just by using the name. And if Lycos, or Yahoo or MSN don't return the results they want the first time out, where will they turn?  That's right: Google™, the one they've been thinking about all along as a verb.

Now that Google™ is getting into other areas than search engines (there are at least 7 pages of separate Google™ products that crop up when one Google™s Google™), I can understand why they wouldn't want their brand diluted. Xerox got itself associated with copy machines, when in fact they make many other technological marvels that I can't think of offhand, except their commercial color printers. But if I can't associate them with anything beyond those two products, that's their marketing department's fault. But it's not such a bad thing to be associated with the invention of something cool, like a photocopier, or even just the ultimate refinement of a handy service, like a search engine, if it's among the best. If the public doesn't know what else you do, make your marketing department or ad agency work harder. That's what you're paying them the big bucks for.

Besides, trying to legislate the use of words is too much like trying to legislate what people eat and drink Remember how successful Prohibition was? Even if it's illegal in print, it's not going to stop the schmoe on the street from googling himself, even if he's not Google™ing himself.

In honor of Google™'s stupidity, I propose a new usage for their trademark. If we're already using it as a verb, why not make a derisive one. Just go google yourself, Google™!

Rudimentary Knowledge

You Passed 8th Grade Science

Congratulations, you got 8/8 correct!

Could You Pass 8th Grade Science?

Well, thank God for that! If only I'd done that well on the SATs!

Found a cool-ish new blog via Tangled Bank called Science Creative Quarterly, which is not a quarterly, but is creative and scientific. They've got a project going to collect haiku that "reflect on an organism" as an eventual exercise in phylogeny. I love this idea. I love the idea of using poetry to teach science, and science to teach poetry. And with poetry at an all time high in popularity right now, it makes a great vehicle for getting people interested in science. Can you imagine science poetry slams? Geek ecstasy! However, the quality of what's been submitted so far provokes me to say they would have been better off with limericks than haiku (except the physicists have already done that). Some person (no doubt an undergraduate) calling himself Henry James (might even be his real name, who knows?) submitted this:

E.COLI IN MY BUTT
I learnt this today
there’s e.coli in my butt
also in my gutt

I mean, really. How execrable (pun intended) is that? By contrast, here's two beauties from Basho (remember these are translated, so the syllable count isn't necessarily correct:

First winter rain—
even the monkey
seems to want a raincoat.

A cicada shell;
it sang itself
utterly away.

Even the Haiku Generator did better after a couple of whirls:

priest captures gently
drums grope, gusting horsefly licks
disheveled apes pass

And at least one of the physicists (Robert D. Cowan) came up with a limerick better than that E. coli thing:

There once was a fly on the wall
I wonder why didn't it fall
Because its feet stuck
Or was it just luck
Or does gravity miss things so small?

I used to write a lot of science-inflected (no, not inflicted!) poems, when I was in grad school and all the biology stuff was still pretty fresh in my mind. I loved the metaphors one could spin from the characteristics of critters and basic principles, and how interconnected it all seemed.  Here's one of the ones I still like:

Swimming: Ontogeny Recapitulates Phylogeny

Ontogeny: the stages of development through which an embryo passes
Phylogeny: the evolution and development of a species or phylum
Alveoli: small air sacs in the lungs.

Vision of a dancer,
he skims through water blue
as tundra snow,
drifted with leaves
and mayfly corpses empty and papery
as abandoned wasp nests,
over white silica and quartz bottom
like a manta or skate.

O that we had not forever lost our gills,
that we had learned to inhabit water too,
breath through our skins, amphibious.
perhaps we would not yearn
so much for space then,
sprinkled with stars like diatoms,
where gravity bubbles around bits of rock
but really draws upon nothing
beyond their circumferences.
An expanse of blue, deeper,
tempts us there also,
to where there is no air,
where we may drift like lost kites
or wreckage,
swayed by currents or
the twitch of a fingertip.

But we become air breathers
in one blue slithering gasp,
confirmed groundlings
with earth's salts in our blood.
Before this,
we were truly aqueous,
tethered like a space walker,
our alveoli filled
with the suspended detritus of growth,
shed cells like plankton:
the flotsam and jetsam of ontogeny.

And now, when we hold our breath
and dive
for pearls, sponges, coral,
lost rings on tile bottoms,
grasp our treasures and bring them to the surface,
inhale,
we continue recapitulating
our search for thinner atmospheres.

Poets, help out the folks at Science Creative Quarterly, please! Let's show them science and literature can coexist not just peacefully but in good taste.

Got My Art Geek On

Spent most of the day at work thinking about website design and content, so what do I do when I get home? Start redesigning my blog and website. The latter is going to take a while, since it's much more involved, but the blog will give you some idea of what it will look like eventually. Now I've got (or will soon have) a nice consistent look across my business card, website, blog and business stationery, thanks to the cool spiral that Gridkid Marcia designed for me. I also got in and weeded out my typelists, got my blogs listed at Technorati, and I'm in the process of moving my photos over to Flickr. If you're wondering where the banners for all my other stuff went, they're all on the About page, where they can look as messy as they want.

I always think when I start doing something like this that it's a procrastination technique along the lines of indexing my Chaucer text (yes, I actually did that. Not a comprehensive index, just one for words I couldn't figure out. Yes, I was reading it in Middle English.) But there's something really seductive about the combination of geeky technical work (coding) and producing the art the coding refers to. Working on the web has its own art sensibility and aesthetics, which I'm picking up more and more of (though I am a looooooong way off from really "getting" it, I'll be the first to admit; I can recognize it, but can't imagine it independently). And now that I'm going to be learning Photoshop for real, thanks to a $900 class that I won from Noble Desktop, hopefully my banners and buttons and stuff will start looking a little cooler. I figure once I get one of the Adobe programs under my belt, I'll have a better grasp of both Illustrator and InDesign. Or at least that's the theory, according to a guy I used to work with, Charlie Marcano, an advertising artist/cowboy. I'm not sure there was anything Charlie couldn't do with Photoshop or Illustrator or Painter.

The nice things about working in graphics programs for me, at least, is that I can have fun with type and I can also feel like I'm doing something with that impetus that used to make me draw pencil portraits when I was in high school. So much of doing art is wound up in the ability to see, and then take what you see and coordinate it with your hands, at least in painting and drawing. I've lost some of that now, through lack of practice, and this is an easier way for me to slither around my poor figure drawing skills. On the other hand, I was always amazed by Charlie's skill at drawing with a mouse when I can't do it that well anymore with pencil or pen. So it's not so much that using Photoshop or Illustrator or another graphics program makes the art easier, as that it gives you another medium to work in. And what comes out of it is still only as good as the artist working in it. But at least it doesn't require a big studio full of smelly art supplies.

That said, I bought myself a little pad of watercolor paper the other day along with some watercolor pencils to play with. I haven't gotten the courage to crack them open yet. So many projects, so little time.

Driving Mr. Science

I've had something of a hiatus from reading hard science in the last several years, lulled into thinking I was getting enough of it in Wired and the mainstream media. Reading Jen's books (I helped edit her forthcoming one) has provided a rude awakening. I'm not anywhere near as up on breaking science news as I used to be. To remedy that, I'm letting my Wired subscription lapse and picking up one to New Scientist instead.

I've always been interested in science, thanks to my early reading in science fiction. I'm not sure I'd have thought science was so cool if I hadn't been reading SF from an early age. Fiction, and SF in particular, made the future exciting, fascinating, full of both positive possibilities and terrifying apocalyptic visions. It made tech beyond TVs—rocket packs, credit chips, computers, rockets, satellites, telescopes and the burgeoning field of electronics—attractively cool too. It was one reason I pursued biology and chemistry studies all the way through college, taught science writing as a grad student, and one of the attractions (I thought) of working for the American Institute of Physics (nerd heaven!). One of the interesting things I've noticed since I first began reading Isaac Asimov, Arthur C. Clark, Robert Heinlein, Larry Niven, C.J. Cherryh et al is that the more I read about hard science, the more convinced I've become that SF is one of the major drivers of innovative science and technology, or at least an important part of the feedback loop.

I was thinking about this the other day as I used my debit card to pay for groceries. This has become such a commonplace activity now that most of us don't think about it. But sometime in the 70s, I remember reading a novel (it might have been by Philip K. Dick) in which the protagonist used something very similar—a "chip" or plastic chit "charged" with a certain amount of money, through which his movements were traced. (Come to think of it, this sounds a bit like the 1956 short story "The Minority Report," doesn't it?) Credit and debit cards are so common now that we forget they were just becoming popular with the middle class in the late 70s and cheap reliable magnetic reader technology coupled with computer networks didn't make them nearly ubiquitous (and give them their instant traceability) until much later. But I was reading about their common use in a decade when the latest thing in recording media was the 8-track cartridge and computers still used punch cards.

Of course, this proposition can become a nightmarish chicken-or-egg problem, since many SF authors either are scientists or engineers themselves or read extensively in these fields themselves to generate ideas. Good hard SF (where the story is built around the science and its consequences) requires research to make the settings and tech plausible if not actually factual. But there are some clear examples. One of the most obvious is virtual reality, which may not have existed for years in any form, if at all, had William Gibson not dreamed it up out of whole cloth in his breakthrough novel Neuromancer in 1984 (which seems a somehow appropriate year). The cyberspace/cyberpunk culture he brought to life in his novels spawned a geekboy fanclub amongst the nascent hacker culture that took his ideas and ran to their labs with them. Gibson has proven to be, if nothing else, a dramatic predictor and terminology spawner. Some of the more astonishing developments include neural implants, most of which are still under development but which may in the near future allow the restoration of sight, mobility, hearing (these are already available), or if Gibson's vision pans out here too, wireless interaction with your computer sans keyboard or mouse.

Update: And here's an example I can't help adding, though it's more a nomenclature influence than an actual tech driver. You can now teleport laser beams, just like Mr. Scott, according to New Scientist. It may not be just like Star Trek's teleporter, but this might be the beginning of a refutation of The Physics of Star Trek, which said teleportation would never happen. (See Clarke's Law #1, below.)

The most recent example of fiction driving tech is the still-experimental space elevator, first posited by engineer and SF author Arthur C. Clarke in The Fountains of Paradise in 1979. Clarke is one of the biggest drivers of space technology, in fact. As his entry in Wikipedia says, "In the 1940s he forecast that man would reach the moon by the year 2000, an idea experts dismissed as rubbish. When Neil Armstrong landed in 1969, the United States said Clarke "provided the essential intellectual drive that led us to the moon."

Providing the intellectual drive is not quite the same as dreaming up the tech on your own, but it's an indication of how influential writers of visionary SF can be. Clarke has been particularly so, if for nothing else but his three laws:

1. When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.
2. The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible.
3. Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

One of the corollaries to Number 1 (I think it might be Heinlein's) is that the best way to invent something new is to find out what the experts say is impossible and then do it. This is one of the things science fiction does. Of course, it's easier to do on a page than in a lab, or at least you might think so. But even extrapolation from the state of current technology can be a bitch, and it takes someone truly visionary to imagine not only a brand new technology, or development in technology, but how it would fit into the world. What uses would we find for this new technology? How would the technology or devices affect society? Would it change human thinking or social structures in significant ways? For instance, just look at what the development of personal listening devices from Walkmen to iPods has done to music distribution and copyright theory.

These are not questions scientists routinely ask themselves, and not always because they don't think of them; sometimes they're not allowed to. The inventors of lasers probably didn't anticipate their use in gunsights, just as the inventors of GPS, closed circuit television, credit cards, and mobile phones probably weren't thinking (much) about the potential for Big Brother-style observation in their inventions. But these are exactly the kinds of questions writers and other artists ask themselves all the time. Science and technology are human pursuits that don't exist in the social vacuum scientists sometimes pretend they do, in their talk of "pure" research. As the pharmaceutical companies in general and Genentech in particular have demonstrated, research is almost always supported by a profit motive of some kind. Sometimes that's the main motive, and damn the social consequences. Those social consequences are what science fiction is good at pointing out. Maybe if we could get the research funders to read a little of it, it might drive their consciences the way it often drives their profit margins.

Update: And along comes Metafilter with a link to a site called Technovelgy.com, wherein modern inventions are paired up with their fictional precursors. And you thought I was just blowing this out of my butt, didn't you?