LEE HALLISON

When will the future be here?

I stood at the gas station today, pumping gas through a tube into my vehicle and realized that the gas tanks haven’t changed much in years and years. Yes, you can pay differently, but the system of pumping is just the same.

In fact, the propulsion is the same – fossil-fueled. When will the future be here?

I have been waiting since I was little – 40 or more years already! We dreamed up such a different future back then.

Yes, sure – things have changed at a breakneck pace. Smartphones, Google, world culture meshing – gone are the days of Encyclopedias and typewriters. Gone are the days when world travelers were few and far between.

But.

We still are hobbled by so many things. Where is easy space travel? Where is silent commuting on safe, guided tracks? Where are iris checkers or thumb-print machines so you don’t have to carry credit/debit cards?

An interesting article in the NYTimes about plagiarism charges against historical fiction authors includes a letter from Thomas Pynchon.

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/07/books/07pync.html?_r=1&ref=arts

Basically, he says that historical fiction writers try to be accurate, so much of their source material could be woven into the fiction. Quite a few authors stepped up to defend the accused author, Ian McEwan, from plagiarism charges. As I get more and more interested in historical fiction, it seems this could be an issue as the internet now makes it so easy to find other people’s memoirs, historical documents, etc etc.

Sometimes you cannot contact the author, or say, for instance you are reading old war letters – how do you track down the writer to ask permission? Or does the copyright belong to the person who posted them on their website? What if they plagiarized? Or if it was their great-grandfather’s letters?

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/07/books/07pync.html?_r=1&ref=arts