The Speculative Fiction Thread formerly Fantasy Thread

[Raphael]

Videophones were technologically possible since, I guess, shortly after the invention of television, but only became a thing when other technologies had gotten to a point where videocalling technology could be added as a minor extra feature.

[Travis B.]

France had something called the Minitel -- you can look up for the details, but basically it was a modem plus a computer terminal; nothing to fancy, but these things were in almost every home in the 80s. They were used quite a bit -- the real money maker was chat sex.
I gather the US had something similar going on with BBSs.
It was cutting-edge tech but didn't take off like the Internet did, basically because communications were expensive.

The major factor is economics. You could imagine a Victorian internet running on difference engines... but it would have been quite expensive. As opposed to the comparatively cheap PCs and Internet in the 90s, and of course these days computing power and bandwidth are essentially free.

For a Victorian Internet you'd have to figure out how they would have brought down the costs.

The big limitation with mechanical computers is processing speed - they actually did build a difference engine, well more than a century after it was designed, but it was damn slow by modern standards - think one operation per second. That is just too slow for doing what we do with modern computers, even with the earliest ones (which had clocks measured in kilohertz). However, the successful completion of a difference engine (which I presume would have led to the actual building of the analytical engine) could have spurred a search for faster ways of doing computation than what happened in our timeline, and thus led to digital electronic computation earlier than what happened for in our reality.

[linguistcat]

Foxcatdog: I'd say most video games have some elements of fantasy though admittedly I avoid sports video games, racing games and first person shooters almost entirely. But fantasy (and indeed, scifi and science fantasy) is pretty broad when it comes to games to the point that it might be easier to list games with no fantasy elements in them.

[zompist]

Oh, don't get me wrong, instagram has more functionality than this here board as well, I'm not fanboying php boards, merely saying that you could run one on levers, wires and so on, and that the resulting system would be categorically different from a newspaper.

I guess this seems obvious to you, so you're not actually giving reasons, but... what are your reasons?

By contrast, I'd maintain that a newspaper is just a slow (by our standards) Internet. It's a firehose of information, dependent on cutting-edge technology, democratizing information and yet creating new tycoons, interactive. Yes, interactive: people wrote letters to the editor in droves, and newspaper features were designed to encourage this.

True, phpBB is faster, but compare different levels of technology:

* The Talmud: scholars dispersed in space and time work over a text... over the course of five centuries.
* The Royal Society (1660): scholars all over Europe and the Americas could collaborate, with months between responses.
* The Victorian newspaper: published daily or twice daily, connected by telegraph and telephone to the whole world.
* The Torconian epitome of modern uniqueness, the phpBB bulletin board: you can get a response within hours.

Where is the most important dividing line? I think before the Victorians, not after it. (Though I wouldn't underestimate the breakthrough of the Royal Society... having a central clearinghouse for science was a game-changer.)

I'd also emphasize once again that the telegraph, the ticker tape, the Paris pneumatic system (1866) were as fast as the Internet-- at the human scale, at least. (No microsecond financial manipulations.) We think of the Victorians as staid and a little boring. Actual Victorians felt like technology was advancing at a breakneck pace.

Of course, a network of babbage machines in 1882 would not, in fact, be used to run a bulletin board about some nerdy interest or other,

My whole point is that before Flintstoning, you should look at what the Victorians actually did... which is almost exactly what you keep thinking they didn't do because it never occurred to them to use their global information network to, y'know, exchange information.

Could a nerdy interest like conlanging be spread with Victorian technology? Yes, that's exactly what Victorians did. From Wikipedia: "By 1889, there were an estimated 283 clubs, 25 periodicals in or about Volapük, and 316 textbooks in 25 languages; at that time the language claimed nearly a million adherents." Conferences were held; the third of these was conducted entirely in Volapük.

helping out with the accounting. I don't know how you'd make a spreadsheet on a babbage tho.

You're right that the Victorians didn't invent the mechanical calculator. That's because Pascal did, in 1642.

how do you figure that newspapers are *less* centralized than social media, btw? at least with social media, you can publish stuff without being employed by the newspaper owner. then again, there were a lot more newspapers back in the day than there are social media sites now.

You mostly answered this yourself: there were thousands of newspapers, not just five Big Social Media sites. Or again, look at those 25 periodicals devoted to Volapük. (I don't know how much printing presses cost— that would interesting to know! But it wasn't an obstacle for even very niche interests or languages.)

therefore, they can't have had a computer to which you remotely feed the instruction "show me the list of threads" which could answer "bip bip bibiiibip" or whatever. this leibnitz-like "what was done in 1873 was the best or only possible employment of 1873 technology" seems to me quite odd.

No, my point is that to decide what the Victorians could have done in 1873, the first step is to look at what they did in 1873.

And that "but they didn't have phpBB" isn't the barnstomper you seem to think it is. Maybe use World of Warcraft as your example instead? Now that really is a major advance on the Phenakistoscope.

technology is not the only determinant of technology, and even if it was, if you stipulate a technology which the victorians didn't in fact have (but, at least in principle, could have), wouldn't that change the way they would have used the rest of their tech?

Sure, just as if Pablo Picapiedra could make a computer from dinosaurs and stone, that would change his world.

Again, mechanical calculation was used in the Victorian era— and before, cf. the Jacquard loom. Wikipedia on the Difference Engine is quite interesting.... not least for the technical and financial constraints. E.g. the Brits gave Babbage £17000, which (according to an inflation calculator website) would be like half a million today— and he wasn't able to complete it.

It's certainly not unimaginable that with (say) double that investment, Babbage could have finished his machine. Then he'd have a five-ton desk calculator which couldn't run phpBB, much less World of Warcraft.

I understand the appeal of romanticism and fantasy... I like steampunk works, with airships darkening the skies and literal tons and tons of electronic calculators. But it's too generous to call it alternative history, since it's so uninterested in the actual history.

[Raphael]

In my twenties, for a while, I was really obsessed with the works of George Orwell, especially his non-fiction writings. I mention that here, in this thread, at this point, because in the Complete Works that I borrowed from the university library back then, volume by volume, the editors had, at various points, included some angry letters that Orwell had gotten in response to this or that piece. And that, in turn, sometimes made me think "Hey, this feels like reading a 1940s blog comment section..."

[Moose-tache]

You know what? While we’re on the subject of steampunk and alternate histories, I would like to point out that the hydrogen dirigible got done dirty. Hydrogen is easy to make in nearly limitless supply, using decentralized equipment. It’s 67 times cheaper than helium, which is essentially a fossil fuel, mined in limited quantities from deposits of radioactive decay products. And hydrogen gives 8% more lift as well. You probably think “Durp durp, but didunt hydrogen dirigibles expload?” No. A couple of them caught fire, one on camera. But the main reason dirigibles were lost (excluding the ones that were blown up by the RAF in World War I) was getting caught in high winds. And guess what? That happened to helium dirigibles as well. The Akron, an American helium dirigible, went down with all hands in a storm, just like the hydrogen dirigibles. Over time, helium dirigibles have become less susceptible to blowing away, which means hydrogen dirigibles would be, too. Justice for hydrogen. Build (clap) more (clap) flammable (clap) airships!

[foxcatdog]

You know what? While we’re on the subject of steampunk and alternate histories, I would like to point out that the hydrogen dirigible got done dirty. Hydrogen is easy to make in nearly limitless supply, using decentralized equipment. It’s 67 times cheaper than helium, which is essentially a fossil fuel, mined in limited quantities from deposits of radioactive decay products. And hydrogen gives 8% more lift as well. You probably think “Durp durp, but didunt hydrogen dirigibles expload?” No. A couple of them caught fire, one on camera. But the main reason dirigibles were lost (excluding the ones that were blown up by the RAF in World War I) was getting caught in high winds. And guess what? That happened to helium dirigibles as well. The Akron, an American helium dirigible, went down with all hands in a storm, just like the hydrogen dirigibles. Over time, helium dirigibles have become less susceptible to blowing away, which means hydrogen dirigibles would be, too. Justice for hydrogen. Build (clap) more (clap) flammable (clap) airships!

Dirgibles are however kinda slow so i doubt they would see the kind of usage an airplaine has. Air crusing perhaps but i don't know about the logistics compared to sea cruising.

[Moose-tache]

Oh, I'm sorry, are you mad about spending more time on the dirigible? That's a feature, not a bug!

But seriously, dirigibles use less fuel than airplanes for the same distance, and can go places where boats can't, like the sky. It's like taking an ocean liner that can go anywhere.

Dirigibles lost out to planes because planes are more useful for bombing London. But since in our steampunk alternate timeline we don't care about dropping Prussian bombs on a bunch of TERFs, we can keep the dirigible gravy train going as long as we want.

[Torco]

Take a Connecticut Yankee but without the engineering background that the character in Twain’s book had.

It'd probably worky better for things that are just a brute fact we know but they didn't: stuff like "plastics are chemicals made out of oil... I think in my world they use heat" would probably not help a lot: the biggest impact would probably be, as per stipulation, the impact his ideas would have as prescriptions. "radioactivity is very dangerous but also very powerful. i think we used lead to shield us from... r a d i a t i o n, whatever that was" could have been an useful tidbit for researchers. evolution, germ theory, where mineral deposits are, the importance of tanks or machineguns, "oh, cavalry? how quaint! in my time it's obsolete", if you really believe it comes from a futureman, is liable to "speed up" military thinking, and the same for home refrigeration etcetera: they'd be things industry would pursue strongly, simply because futureman said they're better.

@bradrn you're probably right: the industrial revolution as we knew it was rather dependent on cheap steel and, I agree, the coal industry: but still, you can make useful artisanal steam engines, such as water pumps, if you understand the principles. stirlings are particularly simple: granted, heavy and expensive to build, but labour-saving nontheless! the ancients were decent craftsmen, but I don't suppose that in ancient rome the people researching steam engines, few as they were, did much hard manual labour such that they'd have been motivated to use machines to make it easier.

Like... ultimately, I don't disagree that for the most part things happen when they happen because it was their moment: the fact that so many things are invented simultaneously attests to this, but I think there's a fair bit of play to that machine: in our own timeline, seems to me, some things could have gone slower too! if not for the fall of constantinople, europeans wouldn't have advanced as much as they did in navigation. and constantinople falling isn't the result of a fully deterministic process but rather a concrete event which, in principle, could have not happened when it did but, say, 200 years later. and, without that, perhaps eurasian trade would have proceeded through the regular channels (land), strengthening the economies of middle eastern regions. and if it can go slower here, it can probably go faster there, and the real timeline followed some path where those possibilities average out into the actual rate of technological advance that ocurred.

I understand the appeal of romanticism and fantasy... I like steampunk works, with airships darkening the skies and literal tons and tons of electronic calculators. But it's too generous to call it alternative history, since it's so uninterested in the actual history.

I mean, fair enough: I'm making a modester point, though, that possibly some steampunky things were possible, not that the whole thing is. colour me totally skeptic on clockwork-and-steam battlemechs.

I guess this seems obvious to you, so you're not actually giving reasons, but... what are your reasons?

Well I'm not a very competent programmer, I could be wrong, but a rudimentary bulletin board is not a super complex program, no? a function for storing a string plus the id of whatever other post post a post is in response to, a routine to go through all the posts in reverse order of date, select the ones which are in response to the queried post <or the root, if none> and then some protocol to send those to the user as bibip biiii bip bip bips. perhaps all inside a main loop that waits for either "get posts in response to x" or "post" instructions. implementing cryptographically secure logins might possibly have to come later. add in some user shortcuts for "get responses to post y" when y is the latest root post a user has posted, so that whenever they press the red button they get a "your post has been answered" signal, and boom.

Come to think of it, at what speed that is going to run is probably your clincher here, and rightly so. but if the babbage machine is turing complete, it *can* in principle run something like that, is what I figure.

I'd also emphasize once again that the telegraph, the ticker tape, the Paris pneumatic system (1866) were as fast as the Internet-- at the human scale, at least. (No microsecond financial manipulations.) We think of the Victorians as staid and a little boring. Actual Victorians felt like technology was advancing at a breakneck pace.

[zizek voice] and they were totally right! yes, I am here even more radical! in fact I think that's part of the aesthetic appeal of steampunk, and the reason why rennaisance-punk is comparatively less popular: it was a time of extremely fast technological and societal change, I'd even say much faster than today, even.

(I don't know how much printing presses cost— that would interesting to know! But it wasn't an obstacle for even very niche interests or languages.)

Well, they range wildly i think. mimeographs were relatively cheap, i.e. the kind of thing a few union workers could pool cash to obtain. and even before that there was serigraphy, a proud low-tech printing tradition my local anarchist vegans do well to keep alive (?)

But seriously, dirigibles use less fuel than airplanes for the same distance, and can go places where boats can't, like the sky. It's like taking an ocean liner that can go anywhere.

A very small ocean liner, though. can you have blimps with significant (dozens of tons) payloads? then again, I suspect the oil industry's hand in the demise of the bag boys.

[zompist]

Well I'm not a very competent programmer, I could be wrong, but a rudimentary bulletin board is not a super complex program, no? a function for storing a string plus the id of whatever other post post a post is in response to, a routine to go through all the posts in reverse order of date, select the ones which are in response to the queried post <or the root, if none> and then some protocol to send those to the user as bibip biiii bip bip bips. perhaps all inside a main loop that waits for either "get posts in response to x" or "post" instructions. implementing cryptographically secure logins might possibly have to come later. add in some user shortcuts for "get responses to post y" when y is the latest root post a user has posted, so that whenever they press the red button they get a "your post has been answered" signal, and boom.

I don't think this is impossible, just unnecessary. As I've said, Victorian technology was up for rapid communication, for conveying large texts, for interactive media, for niche nerdery. Note the Volapük info I provided: that would be an impressive showing for a conlang today. I mean, I love the Klingonists, but their recent conferences had a max physical attendance of 42. The Volapükists actually did better. (And the Esperantists did even better.) Asking to duplicate phpBB is like arranging dirigibles in the shape of an airplane: more Flintstoning, not solving a problem people had.

But if you wanted to do it, I think you'd have two problems.

One, memory. The difference engine had none, so far as I know. Recall that a number was literally stored in a line of gears: storing 69,000 posts, as this board does, would be absolutely absurd. If you advance to 1890 tech, you could use Hollerith cards, though storing and retrieving tens of thousands of cards in real time would still be an enormous task.

Two, display. As I've said, the relevant technologies were far beyond the Victorian era. I think the best you could do is print out the data on paper.

[Travis B.]

One, memory. The difference engine had none, so far as I know. Recall that a number was literally stored in a line of gears: storing 69,000 posts, as this board does, would be absolutely absurd. If you advance to 1890 tech, you could use Hollerith cards, though storing and retrieving tens of thousands of cards in real time would still be an enormous task.

Just one little point - Babbage had already envisioned the use of punched cards for his analytical engine, as inspired by the Jacquard loom.

[Torco]

I think the memory thing is probably a bigger problem than the display one. seven segment displays, big flip dot displays, or bip bips could do the trick. but yeah, perforated cardboard would make bad databases. select * from posts if date < 90, we'll have your results tomorrow after a lot of crank, clink, clonk.

[zompist]

I think the memory thing is probably a bigger problem than the display one. seven segment displays, big flip dot displays, or bip bips could do the trick. but yeah, perforated cardboard would make bad databases. select * from posts if date < 90, we'll have your results tomorrow after a lot of crank, clink, clonk.

Sorry to keep throwing cold water, but I think you're underestimating the display problem. Sure, you can display a few bytes' worth of data in a small space— that's what a pocket watch is. Displaying 40 lines of 80-character text on a desktop, not so easy.

A present-day analogy might be A Boy and His Atom, a animated film made by manipulating individual atoms. A neat accomplishment, but note "It took four researchers two weeks of 18-hour days to produce the film". So, in theory you could run phpBB with carbon monoxide molecules on a copper substrate, but it ain't practical.

Compare: "Miss Butterknife, please fetch me the Torco file." A few minutes, if Miss Butterknife is organized.

[Travis B.]

One thing to remember is that a display composed of just six-bit characters on a 40x24 character screen requires 5760 bits, or 720 eight-bit bytes. This may not seem like much, but on an early computer that was a lot of space. (And on computers that used core or delay lines or Williams tubes, that space was very expensive.) There is a reason why early computers used the likes of teletypes or punch cards or paper tape as communication media - there is no need to maintain a framebuffer that way.

[Moose-tache]

What the internet does for me is basically advanced conversation.

I can go into the next room and ask my wife "Why won't my phone turn on" or "when was the first battleship built," but she might not have the answer. I could go to the neighbors' house, but then I have to shower, and they're dumber than my wife anyway. The internet lets me index and recall every previous time someone has asked or answered these questions, whether it's on Wikipedia or Reddit or somewhere I've never heard of. I don't need academic precision; it's just ordinary inter-personal exchange of information.

I think if you told the Victorians that the internet is a big expensive piece of infrastructure that revolutionizes people's ability to chat, they wouldn't want anything to do with it. You could lie and tell them it's educational, but if you're gonna lie you can do way better. Tell them that cotton, coffee, indigo, tea, and sugar cane are all poisonous and become history's greatest hero.

[Torco]

hmmm... true. and It'd be quite a waste for our electronic missus butterknife to be spending perfectly good ink to read today's memes on Her Majesty's Royal Nine Gagges, or wearing down the various tiny levers you'd need for a dot flip display. perhaps some eraseable printing medium? like an etch-a-sketch the teletype is printing onto... could the victorians have etch-a-sketches?

...it's just ordinary inter-personal exchange of information.

mmmmm i don't know. sure, we do use it for socializing, but it's the ability to just *access* info quickly and efficiently that I think makes the internet so powerful. A library of data, some of it even machine-readable, automatically actionable through if statements and the like, and possible to collate, but mostly stored in such a way that doesn't require a missus butterknife. Sure, we had libraries, but what can a librarian manage, 10 requests per minute? 20 if she's really commited? any old atari manage many thousands of times that. the institut francaise in my old neighbourhood had a mediatheque, and i could go and check out a comic or something from it for free, but it seemed impolite to bother madame beurrecuteau when the same comic could be retrieved for me for a couple joules of effort by my pc. but yeah, that doesn't just require a workin turing machine, but one that's conveniently fast, and that probably comes with electronics.

[foxcatdog]

Here's an idea. Humans are creatures of FIRE. Their signature magic users use magic based around fire (throw in a bit of healing magic in their based on healing fires) and also depending on the specialisation possibly light or lightning. The heart of every human settlement is the foundry which produces a near eternal flame used to forge metal tools as well as in later ages firearms (which are effective against spirits like Princess Mononoke) and without these foundrys humans become distinctly less human so to be exiled amongst humans often results in radical transformation unless the exile maintains his/her own fires. Contrast this with beastfolk who can enter animal forms and worship life magic and vitality.

[rotting bones]

Science fiction can be used to show how clear thinking leads to surprising consequences all by itself. Scientology-adjacent editors messed up a lot of classic science fiction, but many of the good writers were famously left-liberal: Asimov, Clarke, Iain M. Banks, Greg Egan... Andy Weir seems to be libertarian, but in the "right-leaning liberal" kind of way, not along the Heinlein-Hubbard axis.

[Raphael]

Sort of Sci-Fi, or, if you will, fantasy-related:

One thing I generally don't get about some plot lines in various works set in the Star Wars Universe is the idea that anger can always lead you to the Dark Side, even if the thing you're angry about is something that was done by the supporters of the Dark Side.

"Supporters of the Dark Side have murdered everyone I loved and cared about, and I'm really really angry about that, so now I'm going to join the Dark Side myself!"??

Sorry, I'm not following the logic there.

[zompist]

One thing I generally don't get about some plot lines in various works set in the Star Wars Universe is the idea that anger can always lead you to the Dark Side, even if the thing you're angry about is something that was done by the supporters of the Dark Side.

"Supporters of the Dark Side have murdered everyone I loved and cared about, and I'm really really angry about that, so now I'm going to join the Dark Side myself!"??

I think it's regurgitated Christianity, or maybe Buddhism, whatever pot pourri of half-understood beliefs George Lucas had in his head. In many belief systems the emotions are highly suspect, and you're supposed to be motivated by love or compassion, not revenge.

Of course, if it wasn't for revenge, 90% of action movies would fall apart.