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It's not the telephone, it's flagpole-sitting.
A lot of conventions have panels about who can write SF, or who can write hard SF, what the qualifications are. And I always want to say that the people who do write hard SF should read more social histories, because it would get in their way more in ways that it should get in their way, and then we wouldn't have those embarrassing stories that are all concept and the concept is outdated before the story is published.
When I wasn't looking, because I don't tend to look at the front inside page, because it's all gossip, the Strib started running a celebrity tweet of the day. A celebrity tweet. Of the day. People. This is not cutting edge. This is not what the wave of the future looks like, a celebrity tweet of the day. This is not adjusting your thriller plots so that people's cell phone batteries have been accounted for. It's the bit in the history of the turn of the millennium where the historian has this baffled tone where she's describing how the old media tried to latch onto this new phenomenon that was perfectly good for writing haiku about backup catchers for those who cared but really stupid for reprinting a randomly selected singer's not particularly trenchant observations about his lunch from the previous day.
This is exactly like my ability to tell you that you will look just fine in that shirt in pictures fifteen years from now, but those trousers, eeeesh, not so much, I think. You can have that ability, too. I believe in you. It's not hard. I was not bitten by a radioactive historian.
When I wasn't looking, because I don't tend to look at the front inside page, because it's all gossip, the Strib started running a celebrity tweet of the day. A celebrity tweet. Of the day. People. This is not cutting edge. This is not what the wave of the future looks like, a celebrity tweet of the day. This is not adjusting your thriller plots so that people's cell phone batteries have been accounted for. It's the bit in the history of the turn of the millennium where the historian has this baffled tone where she's describing how the old media tried to latch onto this new phenomenon that was perfectly good for writing haiku about backup catchers for those who cared but really stupid for reprinting a randomly selected singer's not particularly trenchant observations about his lunch from the previous day.
This is exactly like my ability to tell you that you will look just fine in that shirt in pictures fifteen years from now, but those trousers, eeeesh, not so much, I think. You can have that ability, too. I believe in you. It's not hard. I was not bitten by a radioactive historian.
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Maybe that's just a radioactive art historian, though.
Even splattering "MULTIPLE SOURCING" would help. One of my pet peeves is when I read a work of fiction with historical setting and think, "I can tell which four books you read...and which six you should have read in addition." Even when the four they read were good.
Also, the more history I read, the more I think it's like physics: there are all sorts of things it's easy to describe to the layperson and completely impossible to get to, and all sorts of wackadoo things we are or were a hairsbreadth from having.
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