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Speleothing posted:Was it Asimov who wrote the story about the time-viewing machine? There are a number of stories about time viewers or chronoscopes but you might be thinking of Asimov's "The Dead Past," in which the government tries to suppress the manufacture of such devices because although they only show the past, even the events of one second ago are the past, meaning privacy would be eliminated.
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May 17, 2020 16:38
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habituallyred posted:...Van Vogt was the 3rd big name in the golden age of science fiction? I know Voyage of the Space Beagle had a lasting influence. But a lot of his work is real bad. He tried to incorporate psychology and anthropology into his stories at a time when that was unusual, though it’s arguable how well it worked: in the story that supposedly influenced the movie Alien, they figure out the alien will try to reproduce by reasoning that it’s basically a peasant farmer who will want to have a child to carry on its name. Okay. And didn’t he also write about women having to take drugs to make them less womany because otherwise they couldn’t work on a spaceship?
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Jul 24, 2020 18:02
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Nitrousoxide posted:I'd think it would have come up before, maybe not in sci-fi (since sci-fi was relatively new when I Robot came out) but had been a trope in dealing with trickster demons or gods in stories, where you trip them up on their puzzles or riddles. I found this on TVTropes: quote:The 3rd century BC Chinese book Han Feizi has a story about a man who boasts that his spears are so sharp no shield can stop them, and that his shields are so tough that no spear can pierce them. The man to whom he's making the sales pitch asks "So what happens when your spear strikes your shield?", to which the seller has no answer. This story is the origin for the Chinese word for "paradox/contradiction", which is literally written as "spear-shield".
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Dec 12, 2021 22:14
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