Elements of Science Fiction
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Elements of Science Fiction While writing Historical Notes for the past 80 months, I have also been writing science fiction novels and am now facing several new contracts, and three unwritten novels due within the next few months. So I must finally hang up my hat as author of Historical Note. Fittingly, my last Note presents an overview of exotic hypothetical materials proposed by classic scientific writers, extrapolated from the best scientific knowledge of their day. From the days of the garish pulp magazines in the 1930s and 1940s, and even before, science fiction has a reasonably good track record of predicting new technologies. Some of these successes are well-known, such as the submarine, airplane, spaceflight, television, air warfare, computers, satellites and satellite communications, cloning, and robots. Many classic science fiction stories proposed exotic new materials that were put to fascinating uses. Some of these "science fictional" materials have become reality today, such as plexiglass and high-temperature superconductors, not to mention numerous variations of "plasteel," "glasstic," and "transparisteel" substances. But some of the proposed materials are still waiting to be invented. In 1901 H.G. Wells proposed an antigravity substance called "cavorite" in his novel, The First Men in the Moon (in The Complete Science Fiction Treasury of H.G.
Wells, Avenel Books, 1934). The narrator of the story writes, "Here is a substance...no home, no factory, no fortress, no ship can dare to be without—more universally applicable even than a patent medicine! There isn't a solitary aspect, not one of its ten thousand possible uses, that will not make us rich" (p. 401). But how does it work? The narrator explains that cavorite was "a substance that should be "opaque...to all forms of radiant energy.' "Radiant energy,' [the inventor] made me to understand, was anything like light or heat or those Roentgen rays there was so much talk about a year or so ago, or the electric waves of Marconi, or gravitation.... "Now almost all substances are opaque to some form or other of radiant energy. Glass, for example, is transparent to light, but much less so to heat, so that it is useful as a fire screen....Now all known substances are 'transparent' to gravitation. You can use screens of various sorts to cut off the light or heat or electrical influence of the sun...you can screen things by 68
sheets of metal from Marconi's rays, but nothing will cut off the gravitational attraction of the sun or the gravitational attraction of the earth. Yet why there should be nothing is hard to say" (p. 399). The inventor, explains the narrator, developed a way to manufacture "a complicated alloy of metals and something new—a new element I fancy—called, I believe, helium, which was sent to him from London in sealed stone jars. Doubt has been thrown upon this detail, but I am almost certain it was helium he had sent him in sealed stone jars. It was certainly something very gaseous and thin. If only I had taken notes..." (p. 399). After some
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