Nov212008
We only have a week to develop time travel!
Filed under General by david brooks at 9:24 pm
I listen to audio books/lectures a lot these days, since my commute lengthened last year. The most recent batch grabbed from the library included some sci-fi stories. Yesterday I was listening to “The Tall Grass” by Stephen Utley, which involves time travel back to the Devonian Period. Imagine my astonishment when the narrator mentioned that they would soon be returning to their real time … of Dec. 2, 2008! That’s barely a week away - what a coincidence!
The funny thing is that the story was written in 1989. You think Utley, an experienced writer, would know to project time travel more than 20 years into his future. Rack it up with “2001″ and a bazillion other science fiction tales that overestimated the speed of certain technological development. (My favorite example: Heinlein’s wonderful “The Door Into Summer” with its super-skilled, all-purpose household cleaning robots, is set in 1987; 21 years after that, the best we can do is a Roomba.)
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