A contemporary novel heavily featuring computers, the Internet, communications satellites and mobile phones would have been sf if published earlier in our lifetimes. I am thinking of Stieg Larsson's
Millennium Trilogy and some novels by John Grisham but there must be many other examples. The same would apply to a novel that featured the International Space Station or current orbital flights. James Blish's
Fallen Star was a contemporary novel. A character claims to be a Martian and I took him to be telling the truth but Blish said that he was a psychotic and could have had some other kind of psychosis that did not involve thinking that he was an alien. Then the novel has an epilogue set in the near future when crewed spaceships are about to leave Earth orbit to go to Mars so that one section is sf.
I think that this means that the fiction/science fiction interface is an interesting place to explore and Poul Anderson would have been good at this as at everything else.
If we have First Contact in our lifetimes, then references to that in fiction will not be sf. In one sense, we are living in the future now.
4 comments:
Kaor, Paul!
I'm so utterly dissatisfied with the current International Space Station! It should have been replaced long ago with a far larger structure using centrifugally rotating rings to generate artificial gravity in them.
Ad astra! Sean
"replaced long ago with a far larger structure using centrifugally rotating rings to generate artificial gravity"
My understanding is that a major reason for *not* doing that already is that experimenting with the effects of micro-gravity is a major reason for having a space station.
OTOH how hard would it be to put a rotating station near a non-rotating station & shuttle between them as desired?
Also, until recently launch costs were extremely high. There are already plans to use SpaceX Starship, with its 200-ton launch capacity and low costs, for several commercial and privately financed space stations.
Kaor, Jim and Mr. Stirling!
Jim: Exactly! Keep the current, antiquated space station and build a much better and larger space station of the kind I've been longing for over far too many years.
Mr. Stirling: Now that makes me happy!!! I hope those plans becomes actualities very soon.
Ad astra! Sean
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