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Comment by andy99 | Hacker News Reader

Also in Neuromancer when Wintermute wants to talk to Case and is ringing all the pay phones. I’ve read that book a dozen times and never thought twice about it. It was recently pointed out to me how incongruous it is to be in the future with AI and cyberspace and orbital colonies but there are still pay phones.

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I think at the time of writing payphones where still so common that it was hard to imagine a world without them. The payphones are also quite fundamental to hacking culture due to the roots in "phone phreaking" which is used in the story. So perhaps it was included due to association with those elements as it will give the reader some context of at that time the current day in this futuristic world and ground them in the fictional universe.

This is actually something I was thinking about lately: How science fiction (and future-predictors) mostly only extrapolates from our current ways of doing things.

Like those Victorian era drawings of people in posh dresses walking across lakes by having hot-air balloons tied to their bodies..

Even sci-fi games involving space ships and aliens have people using floppy disks, printouts, and faxes.. in years long after those things went out of common use.

Before the iPhone very little sci-fi predicted something like smartphones being so prevalent throughout global society. Today even some of the poorest people in the poorest countries have some form of personal mobile phone.

And even now, the best we can imagine is that people will still be using phones and laptops in 2060.

E.E. "Doc" Smith's Lensmen series, a sweeping, galaxy-scale space opera (arguably the type-example of the genre), first published in 1937 had some memorable examples of this - punch card computers and one diesel-powered space ship. But along with such anachronisms (and more SF tropes than I can readily list), Smith also described video calls, stealth vehicles, and may have invented the Combat Information Center.

https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5621/sciefictstud.38.3.0558

There are tons of examples of course, but one that jumps to mind is Oath of Fealty by Jerry Pournelle where one of the plot points is an implant that gives the chosen few access to an encyclopedic database. Of course, today, a smartphone with cell access provides that (or at least a more chaotic version of same) to more or less everyone. You could also reasonably argue that the encyclopedia in Asimov's Foundation trilogy makes somewhat similar assumptions.

I do think some sort of AR interface is somewhere in the future but it's almost certainly a long way off for mainstream adoption.

>Oath of Fealty by Jerry Pournelle

and Larry Niven!

Forgot Larry Niven was a co-author of that one. They tended to be a good pair on novel-length works. Niven's novels tended to end up as travelogues and Pournelle's ended up as military SF.

Conversely though, there is plenty of older sci-fi that assumes by the 2000s we'd all be zooming around in flying cars rather than in cars that are basically the same sort of thing they had in the fifties.

Oh yes! That is the exact same extrapolation: Just a better, more-exaggerated version of how we already do things!!

Faster horses!

Funny I was watching this dude talk about this exact concept just the other night: https://youtu.be/C6D_WuLWVrQ

It was written in the early 80s on a mechanical typewriter, and released only a very few months after the first Apple Macintosh. Modems were insanely expensive back then and not many people had them.

So much of the things in the book that we think of as familiar didn't even really exist when Johnny Mnemonic was written in 1981, again on a mechanical typewriter.

The fact that it was written on a mechanical typewriter isn't very relevant as even today some writers prefer writing on those, in that time they where obviously still quite common (and more accessible compared to computers).

Modems where expensive but so was a computer, however perhaps people where able to experience the technologies through their workplace or schools investments.

The ideas of Networking/big networks & cracking/hacking/phreaking where not strange in this time. Actually it was probably in the right place to write fiction about. Since most people where not familiar with the terms but had perhaps heard them on the news, advertisements or similar media. Allowing them to reason/dream about networks and the potential of connectivity while the interfaces and had not quite solidified into examples you could easily point at.

For reference the movie Tron came out in 1982. And CBBS was around since late 1970s. And not to forget people in the 1980s where quite comfortable with the phone network. Pagers and early mobile devices (phones/laptops) became available, there was a certain hype/energy about what the "connected" future might hold. A few years later saw the explosion of the BBS scene and technologies like Fidonet where developed and accessible for the computer enthusiast at home.

The point being that while "things in the book that we think of as familiar didn't even really exist" they didn't exist in the capacity we see today. The seeds of the technologies was there even in everyday media channels and it is not strange that a science fiction writer would extrapolate from that.

Sci-fi books are full of reverse anachronisms like that. Worlds with space travel, but no computers.

Asimov has some good stories where people no longer know how to read and write and multiply because everything is done on computers and all interactions with computers and are done by voice.

"The Feeling of Power" IIRC.

Also so The Machine can give you the encoded social security number of someone who is either going to commit a crime or become the victim of one so pre-conspiracy Jim Caviezel can come and save your life or blow your kneecaps out.

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