Retrograde

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doc
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Re: Retrograde

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TaoPhoenix wrote:It's nice to see that novels qualify for the Retrograde scope. I restate my feeling that as our net society gets ever faster and faster, we're losing our understanding of older materials at an alarming rate. Already stuff from even the 1980's counts as "passe", let alone 1956.

Yet we might need to study the stories from the 1950's that focused on smaller inventions, because we might get a chance to "preprocess" the cultural issues.
Pretty sure that Retrograde's scope will encompass whatever strikes Daniel Smith's fancy. :)

We have definitely been going through a scientific Renaissance the last 100 years or so. It's hard to know how long that pace can be kept up, but every time someone predicts that it's going to slow again we find we're making another leap forward. Consider, if you will, that the commercial* Internet has only existed since around 1995, and in 17 short years has become ubiquitous and essential in daily life.

Could we have predicted that? We did! Easy and casual access to world-wide computer networks of information were a staple of early futurist SF. The details and mechanics were not necessarily on the mark, but the details aren't really the point. The Internet as we know it today looks almost completely unlike the Internet that existed when the Aphelion project was launched. What will it look like in another 15 years? Who can say, but I'm looking forward to seeing it.

*I make a necessary distinction between the pre-commercial Internet and the commercial (modern) Internet. 1995 is approximately when the transition between the two reached a tipping point, and people outside of specialised technology and academic fields really started to notice it.
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