I still believe Dumas fits "speculative historian" better. If you have read The Vicomte de Bragelonne, then you know what I mean.
Jules Verne was my favorite sci-fi writer when I was a kid. I don't believe there has ever been anyone quite like him. Orwell may come close, because tens of inventions he names in 1984 came to be by 1984. But Verne actually went through the trouble of providing plausible technical explanations for how those inventions could be possible, not so with Orwell.
Good science fiction, however, is never about the science or inventions. Rather it is about speculating about the way society may change given some technological advancement. I can't remember the author or the name of the book, but many years ago (25-years?) I read a book that included a passage about the very first teleportation passenger (ala star trek). He later came to inherit a large sum of money, only to have his inheritance challenged in court by the would be beneficiaries. They claimed that the original character was destroyed during the beaming up process and a replica took his place.
Interestingly enough, we may not be too far away from such a technology. Experiments with quantum entanglement may create a viable machine for such a thing within my life time (I suspect Michael and Nadine will miss it). See below for a recent article on the subject:
Testing Einstein's 'Spooky Action at a Distance'
smooth wombat writes "Travelling to a time in the past is, as far as we know, not possible. However, Einstein postulated a faster-than-light effect known as 'spooky action at a distance'. The problem is, how do you test for such an effect? That test may now be here cosmiclog.msnbc.msn.com If all goes well, hopefully by September 15th, John Cramer will have experimented with a beam of laser light which has been split in two to test Einstein's idea. While he is only testing the quantum entanglement portion, changing one light beam and having the same change made in the other beam, his experiment might show that a change made in one beam shows up in the other beam before he actually makes the change." |
