2nd April 2010, 5:10 PM
It's true HG Wells described space travel and "energy weapons", but he can hardly be said to have "forseen" any of it. He could never have actually done it, and the details are very important. What HG Wells established was simply that people wanted to explore, and as we find out more about things, we find out about more places we aren't but would like to stick a flag. Energy weapons for him were just beams. Those universal "beams" of the old silver age of comics where you just "found the right frequency" and you could CONTROL PEOPLE'S MINDS. He hardly predicted lasers. It's easy to form fit modern inventions onto past stories and say "they predicted it", but it's the same sort of loose force fit that Nostradamus prophecies "work" by. No one's looking at Journey to the Center of the Earth as a prediction, because as it turns out the underground is full of liquid fire, not ancient subterranean mole men and dinosaurs.
At the same time, I can certainly appreciate it on the level of people who just loved to imagine what COULD lie at the edges of that era's knowledge, and then inventing a narritive to capture other's imagination, and say "but just think, what is REALLY down there? wouldn't you love to find out?". There may not be any deep cave systems or mole men, but the reality is still very compelling, an explanation of what causes the very ground to shake, volcanos to burst, and a compelling history of how the very land masses of the planet have shifted. We now know the moon is made of Earth, from some ancient collision.
At the same time, I can certainly appreciate it on the level of people who just loved to imagine what COULD lie at the edges of that era's knowledge, and then inventing a narritive to capture other's imagination, and say "but just think, what is REALLY down there? wouldn't you love to find out?". There may not be any deep cave systems or mole men, but the reality is still very compelling, an explanation of what causes the very ground to shake, volcanos to burst, and a compelling history of how the very land masses of the planet have shifted. We now know the moon is made of Earth, from some ancient collision.
"On two occasions, I have been asked [by members of Parliament], 'Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?' I am not able to rightly apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question." ~ Charles Babbage (1791-1871)