science fiction or science

Science Fiction or Science?

The Aremac Project is getting closer to being science non-fiction:

http://www.newsweek.com/id/91688

Moral? When you write science-fiction, be sure to place your setting

far enough into the future, or science will catch up with you.

I think mind-reading to the level in The Aremac Project is still at

least a decade off, but you never know.

I don't generally recommend ambiguity as a writing technique, but in

this case I'm glad I gave no specific dates in the novel.

Labels: publishing, science-fiction, setting

posted by Gerald M. Weinberg @ 10:45 AM 3 comments links to this

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3 Comments:

At Wed Jan 16, 05:20:00 PM PST, Anonymous Myth said...

The name 'Aremac' sounds interesting.

While the day is still far off, when the exact content of a

person's mind can be read.. I think we now have the capability

of reading the emotional state of a mind.

At Wed Jan 16, 06:15:00 PM PST, Blogger Gerald M. Weinberg said...

Myth, I agree--up to a point. There are millions of emotions,

but we don't have names for the vast majority. It's like

colors. We can distinguish many millions of colors (at least

women can--we men are a bit deficient in that regard), but can

name only a few hundred, at most.

But things are moving faster and faster in the mind-reading

business. My interest is in what impact it will have on

society--and this is what I pursue in Aremac and the sequels.

At Tue Feb 05, 07:37:00 PM PST, Anonymous Dan Starr said...

The story got me thinking about the meaning of the term "mind

reading," because that's what the FMRI system is doing:

reading, as in recognizing a pattern and relating it to an

agreed-upon definition of a concept. It's more like reading

words on a page than it's like actual telepathy (which I think

comes from Latin roots meaning "feeling at distance," though I

haven't checked it). And there's a big difference: two people

can read the same series of words and arrive at much different

mental images; this is why police artists have such a tough

job. So, while the FMRI may be able to distinguish the brain

light-up patterns for "hammer," 'hitting," and "igloo," the

actual image of a hammer hitting an igloo may be much different

for the person thinking and the person reading the FMRI.

We are still a long way from an Aremac.

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