Just The Caffeine Talking

Ozblogging: Tik-Tok of Oz, Part 4

And now we meet the great arch-villain of the Oz books once again: Ruggedo the Nome King — alias Roquat, as he was originally known. I don't know why L. Frank Baum changed the Nome King's name; the in-story explanation is that Roquat forgo his original name upon drinking the memory-erasing Water of Oblivion in The Emerald City of Oz, and so had to come up with a new one. Personally, I prefer Roquat, if only because Ruggedo isn't particularly rugged, and the new name isn't a good match.

Like any good supervillain, Ruggedo can detect the approach of enemies from afar, and has defenses ready. He first tries to halt the combined Oz/Oklahoma/Oogaboo incursion by activating the Rubber Country, which he hopes will bounce them away. But our heroes get through with only a little physical comedy. A little Googling indicates that the technology to make a proto-trampoline called a "bouncing bed" was already part of theatrical stagecraft at the time Baum wrote Tik-Tok of Oz, so I guess he wrote this section with that in mind.

The Rubber Country having failed, Ruggedo employs his ultimate weapon: the Hollow Tube. The Tube is nothing less than a tunnel which passes right through the center of the Earth! As Polychrome explains as the entire party falls down the Tube, it was built by a wizard to allow him to travel more conveniently, but the first time he used it, he shot out the other end and collided with a star.

Thankfully, the heroes emerge with much less residual velocity, and tumble safely to the ground on the other side of the world. What's interesting is that Baum's physics is pretty correct here: if something were to fall through the center of a solid sphere, it would accelerate on the way down (though the force of acceleration would steadily decrease to zero) and then decelerate on the upward leg, emerging with a net velocity close to zero.

Of course, air resistance would utterly negate this, limiting the tube-travellers' speed to the point at which drag counteracts acceleration, so they'd never reach the other side but instead oscillate back and forth several times before coming to rest in zero gravity at the center of the planet.

Perhaps the same magic which keeps the mass of the Earth from collapsing the Hollow Tube (and which protects travellers from the 5400° Centigrade temperature at the center of the planet) also negates air resistance, as it only takes the party an hour to reach the opposite side of the planet. That's pretty close to correct, which makes me wonder if Mr. Baum consulted someone to do the math for him — possibly at the nearby Throop Institute, better known today as Cal Tech.

On the far side of the world they meet a Peculiar Person (with Baumian Capitals), who wears a crown and a scarlet robe decorated with a dragon's head emblem. His limbs are different colors — yellow, green, blue, and pink — and his feet are jet black. The Person leads them to a huge palace called the Private Residence. Just as the Army of Oogaboo has twenty officers and one private, this country is populated entirely by kings and queens, which means the ruler is he sole Private Citizen.

It helps that the Private Citizen is Tititi Hoochoo, the Great Jinjin, which means he's roughly as powerful as Galactus. When the Great Jinjin learns that it was Ruggedo who was responsible for sending the travellers against their will through the forbidden Hollow Tube, he resolves to punish the Nome King, and then vanishes.

His visitors, still a bit intimidated, are given the hospitality of the land. Betsy Bobbin and Polychrome are guests of the Queen of Light, who lives in a crystal palace and is attended by six lovely maidens, each representing a different form of light: Sunlight, Moonlight, Starlight, Daylight, Firelight, and Electra. Each one's costume is, of course, described in minute detail by Mr. Baum. (Presumably they could be played on stage by some of the same chorines who wore the Rose costumes earlier.)

The Queen of Light explains that this country is another Fairyland, and the maidens aren't just costumed attendants but actual fairy personifications of light. Polychrome seems to be at least vaguely familiar with them, being fellow fairies and all, but Betsy is full of questions until bedtime.

After the travellers fall into the Tube, Tik-Tok of Oz finally starts to get good. Baum's no longer recycling old material, and when he lets his imagination go wild about fairies he can really deliver the goods. Tititi-Hoochoo is properly intimidating, and the maidens of Light are a wonderful bit of new mythology. Before undertaking this Ozblogging exercise, I hadn't read Tik-Tok of Oz since some time in the 1970s, and had no memory of the earlier chapters. In fact, I was beginning to wonder if I had ever read it before. But the land beyond the Tube was familiar territory. That's the part I remember after forty years.

Next time: the Instrument of Vengeance!

 

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Ozblogging: Tik-Tok of Oz, Part 3

Chapter Seven begins with a nice bit of Baum's own particular fairy mythology. The Rain King gets too much water in his basin and it spills over, causing rain on Earth. Then the Rainbow arrives, and the Rainbow's Daughters dance on the bow, daring each other to touch the ground. And — as happens so very often — Polychrome, the most adventurous of the Rainbow's Daughters, lingers too long on the ground and gets left behind when the Rainbow leaves again. (Again, it's easy to imagine this as a musical number on stage.)

Polychrome is lamenting her carelessness when Betsy, Hank, Ozga the Rose Princess, and the Shaggy Man come along. There's a little comic wordplay, and the Shaggy Man wins over the disconsolate Polychrome with his Love Magnet. (I've already mentioned elsewhere that the Love Magnet turns every scene involving the Shaggy Man into a mass of sleazy innuendo.) Neither Shaggy nor Polychrome remember their previous meeting in The Road to Oz, which may be due to Mr. Baum trying not to remind his readers how much material he's recycling here. She agrees to accompany them to search for the entrance to the kingdom of Ruggedo the Nome King.

The five of them wander about for a while before stumbling across an abandoned well. Hank spies something at the bottom of the well and does the classic Lassie maneuver until the others come over to look, and then the Shaggy Man hauls out Tik-Tok, the clockwork man!

Shaggy actually remembers Tik-Tok, and Betsy follows the directions printed on the clockwork man's back to wind up his speech, thought, and action workings. Once he's wound, Tik-Tok relates (in his in-im-it-able sty-le) that Ozma located Shaggy's brother by means of the Magic Picture and sent Tik-Tok to help Shaggy find him, but the Nome King found Tik-Tok first and pitched him down the well.

Despite having been sent to help Shaggy locate the Nome King's realm, Tik-Tok doesn't know where the entrance is, and the six of them are standing around trying to decide what to do when they are interrupted by the sound of marching feet.

The Oogaboo Expeditionary Force has arrived! Private Files plants a flag and announces that this territory has been conquered by Oogaboo. Queen Ann orders him to conquer the Shaggy Man et al, but Files is too much of a gentleman to take arms against Betsy, Ozga, and Polychrome. Hank the mule and the Love Magnet are too much for the Army of Oogaboo, and the Shaggy Man talks them into helping conquer the Nome King — who is, he points out, extremely rich and thus will furnish lots of plunder.

Since World War I hadn't actually gotten rolling when Mr. Baum wrote this book, I wonder if the Oogabooan campaign of world conquest isn't a little dig at the scramble for colonies among the Great Powers of Europe (plus America and Japan). Strangers showing up, planting a flag, and informing the locals that they had just been added to somebody's Empire was a feature of life in Africa, the South Pacific, and parts of Asia in the late 19th century.

The United States had recently joined the club by taking the Philippines and Puerto Rico away from Spain, and had joined in the multinational mission to Peking to put down the Boxer Rebellion. President Theodore Roosevelt had sent a fleet of American battleships on a round-the-world cruise not unlike the march of Queen Ann's Army.

Because of her sole Private's mutiny, Queen Ann's Army is unable to fight, but Tik-Tok volunteers to take the job. The question of finding the Nome King's cavern is solved when ex-Private Files suggests that the Rose Princess Ozga ask some of the nearby flowers. Being a flower herself, she can talk to them. She does, and a stand of daisies point the way.

Let me now point out that our story currently has eight major protagonists (Queen Ann, ex-Pfc Files, Betsy, Hank, the Shaggy Man, ex-Princess Ozga, and Tik-Tok) along with twenty supporting characters (the officers of Ann's Army). That's a huge cast for a stage play and a rather unwieldy one for a short novel. Why is ex-Princess Ozga in this story at all? Polychrome could do all the "lovely fairy maiden" jobs (and has a much more colorful personality; Ozga's a bit of a wallflower).

Thinking about it, this is a feature of many Oz books, and I'm not sure why Mr. Baum felt it necessary to cram so many speaking parts into his later stories. Was it just padding? If six or eight people have to introduce themselves every time they encounter some new wacky wayside tribe or band of randomly hostile freaks, that's good for an extra page or two per chapter. Or was he being governed by his dreams of making the books into shows? But I can't really think why he would want to crowd his stage — each extra character meant an actor who'd want a paycheck. Perhaps he was playing to his strengths: Baum was good at creating interesting characters, and maybe he found that easier than plotting.

Next time: Nomes!

 

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Ozblogging: Tik-Tok of Oz, Part 2

In Chapter Four the scene shifts to a ship caught in a terrible storm. Betsy Bobbin is introduced and falls overboard in one sentence, followed by a thin, sad-faced mule named Hank. Then the ship explodes and sinks (well, it is 1914 . . . ). Betsy and Hank climb onto some floating wreckage. Betsy falls asleep, and when she wakes up the storm has cleared and he makeshift raft is approaching a coastline covered in flowers.

If you read Ozma of Oz, this section may strike you as kind of . . . familiar. In that book, Dorothy is swept overboard from a ship bound for Australia (which does not explode), and floats to safety in a chicken coop, accompanied by the incomparable hen Billina. Turn Dorothy into Betsy and Billina into Hank, and rush through the whole thing as if you're trying to save typewriter ribbons, and you've pretty much got this chapter.

And if you know anything about the stage and early film versions of the Oz stories, you know how often small animals were replaced by larger ones, as hiring some aspiring comic actor like Hal Roach to wear an animal costume was a lot cheaper than getting trained dogs or live donkeys to behave on stage or on camera. So Billina had to become Hank, and since Dorothy has already become a Princess of Oz, she's not going to be cruising around on exploding ships, with or without a mule. Enter Betsy Bobbin.

It would be easy to say that Betsy is just a "re-skinned" Dorothy — she's a little girl from Oklahoma with a devoted animal friend and a tendency to get into dangerous situations in magical lands. But Betsy, while certainly courageous, lacks Dorothy's aura of unstoppability. It's difficult to imagine her tossing a bucket of water at a Wicked Witch, or telling off Princess Langwidere when threatened with decapitation.

Betsy and Hank wash ashore in a pretty countryside, but there is no one around. There is, however, an imposing greenhouse, and the two castaways take a look inside, hoping to find a gardener. Instead they find a bunch of giant Roses (note the Baumian Capital Letters) with the faces of pretty girls. The Roses inform Betsy that she and Hank have arrived in the Rose Kingdom (duh) — and that non-Roses are not allowed in that land.

Now since the Roses are plants growing in pots inside a greenhouse, and don't seem to have hands, you'd think that Betsy and Hank aren't in much peril. But you'd be wrong: enter the Royal Gardener (capitalized). He's a funny little man dressed in rose-colored costume with ribbons in his hair, who repeats the warning that Betsy and Hank must leave — when he isn't having hysterics and falling over at the sound of Hank's bray.

The confrontation with this entirely un-terrifying threat is interrupted by the shattering of the glass roof of the greenhouse as a man falls from the sky. It's not just any man, though, it's the Shaggy Man, with his Love Magnet. Unlike most people who smash through a glass roof (in either direction) the Shaggy Man is quite calm and unhurt. The Royal Gardener immediately demands that the Shaggy Man also leave the Rose Kingdom on pain of death, but Hank kicks the little man outside long enough for the Shaggy Man to inform Betsy of some key points:

1.) The wonderful Land of Oz she has read about in Baum's books is real,

2.) The Shaggy Man is a pal of Ozma et al (evidently Betsy only read the earlier books in the series), and

3.) He's looking for his brother, who disappeared in a mine in Colorado.

The Shaggy Man is convinced that his brother was captured by the Nome King, and has come to the Rose Kingdom looking for a way to find the Metal Monarch. The Gardener insists they must leave, and even the Love Magnet can't dissuade him from his duty, but he does admit that at the moment there isn't actually a Ruler of the Rose Kingdom, because none of the royal Roses in the Royal Garden are ripe yet.

. . . Except that Betsy comes across a Princess who looks ripe, and picks her. But the Roses of the Rose Kingdom insist on a King rather than a Princess, and poor Ozga (the Rose Princess) is obliged to accompany Betsy, Hank, and the Shaggy Man into exile.

It's hard not to notice how "stagy" this whole sequence is. The Roses could be played by chorus girls in costume, the Royal Gardener scenes are full of comic slapstick, and most of the action is conveniently indoors. As usual, Baum even helpfully gives costume details for the speaking parts. Most of Baum's ventures into stage and cinema were financial disasters, and it's kind of a shame to see him constraining his fantasy stories to fit a medium he never really got the hang of.

It's also hard not to notice that Mr. Baum is really blatantly recycling material here. The whole Rose Kingdom sequence is taken almost verbatim from the Mangaboo section of Dorothy and the Wizard in Oz. You've got a kingdom of plant people, a political crisis due to a lack of ripe rulers, and the brash outsiders defying the rules to pick a vegetable Princess. There's also the crash-landing of a familiar character which interrupts a tense moment.

Self-plagiarism aside, we can assume that the sentient plants of the Rose Kingdom are related to the Mangaboos — either a closely-related subspecies or a strain cultivated by generations of (non-Rose) Royal Gardeners. Interestingly, it appears that only the Royal Roses are fully humanoid and capable of movement; the other Roses grow in pots. This makes me wonder if the Royal Roses are sort of like the "royalty" of ants and wasps: the mobile, reproduction-capable members of the hive. Perhaps Royal Roses can travel about to cross-pollinate with other Rose colonies.

Anyway, Our Heroes cross over the drawbridge leading out of the Rose Kingdom, now intent on locating the Shaggy Man's brother.

Next time: Even More Characters!

 

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Ozblogging: Tik-Tok of Oz, Part 1

It has been nearly four years since my last Ozblogging effort, but since Oz is a timeless fairyland we can pick up where we left off as if nothing had happened.

Tik-Tok of Oz (first published in 1914) has a rather complicated history: it's an Oz book based on a stage show written by L. Frank Baum, The Tik-Tok Man of Oz, which in turn was based loosely on the book Ozma of Oz. But over the course of two adaptations Baum made so many changes and threw in so many new story elements that Tik-Tok of Oz has only the faintest resemblance to its grandparent Ozma.

The chapter titles are charmingly alliterative, running from "Ann's Army" through "Tik-Tok Tackles a Tough Task" and "The Jinjin's Just Judgement" all the way to "The Land of Love." It is dedicated to Louis F. Gottschalk, who composed the music for the stage show The Tik Tok Man of Oz, and later was one of Baum's partners in the Oz Film Manufacturing Company. He wrote musical scores for several silent Oz movies made by the Oz company. Louis Ferdinand Gottschalk should not be confused with his more famous uncle Louis Moreau Gottschalk, the New Orleans-born composer who died in 1869.

Our story opens in the tiny mountain valley of Oogaboo, an isolated and quasi-autonomous province of the greater Land of Oz. Oogaboo is ruled by the ambitious and dissatisfied Queen Ann Soforth. She is ambitious because her kingdom has only 89 inhabitants, and is dissatisfied because she has to sweep the floor herself while her younger sister lazes in the hammock out in the yard.

So, in a grimly prophetic move (did I mention the book was published in 1914?) Queen Ann Soforth decides to go forth on a campaign of conquest and plunder. She intends to start by conquering Oz, then the rest of the world, and possibly the Moon as well, if she can figure out how to get there.

Of course, if you're going to conquer the world, you need an army. Ann recruits most of the male population of Oogaboo to be in her expeditionary force. She has to let most of them be generals and colonels in order to persuade them to join, but the equally ambitious and warlike Jo Files agrees to be the sole private in the Army of Oogaboo, so that he can win glory by doing all the fighting.

The imbalance in size between Oz and Oogaboo is offset by Oogaboo's superior military organization: both armies are top-heavy, but Ann actually has a private in her army, while Ozma's own military has none at all. Nattily turned-out in a green unform with gold braid and a purple plume, Queen Ann accompanies her army as it marches forth on a bid for interplanetary domination.

Queen Ann Soforth is of course making one of the classic blunders of grand strategy: convincing herself that the quality of her troops can overcome their numerical disadvantage. This happens over and over throughout history: some leader decides that bushido spirit or Nordic blood or the dialectical forces of history will allow a small army to beat a bigger one. It does sometimes happen, but it seldom lasts. Charles XII of Sweden's army routinely beat much bigger Russian forces during the Great Northern War of 1700. He beat the Russians and Saxons so soundly that eventually he ran out of Swedes and had to go home again.

Of course, even the biggest battalions are pretty much irrelevant given that Oz is defended by the might of Glinda the Good. In this novel her seat of power has inexplicably moved north of the Emerald City, but since the Good Witch of the North has dropped out of Baum's novels since the birthday party in Road to Oz, maybe Glinda has taken over her territory as well.

Glinda, of course, has magical intelligence-gathering systems in place which tell her everything going on anywhere in the world, so she's on top of the Oogaboo situation from the beginning. She uses her space-warping magic to bend the road out of Oogaboo away from the rest of Oz, depositing Queen Ann and her Expeditionary Force in some desolate land beyond the Deadly Desert which guards the kingdom. Glinda is so helpful she doesn't even bother to inform Ozma, the lovely Girl Ruler and her nominal sovereign. In modern parlance, Glinda is a rogue agency.

The Expeditionary Force does manage to acquit itself well in battle against a vaguely dragon-like creature called a Rak, which surrounds itself with a dark cloud of salt-and-pepper scented breath. Private Files blasts it out of the sky with his musket, and the Army of Oogaboo heartlessly ignores the Rak's polite requests to stay around until it recovers and can eat them properly. Cheered by their victory, the Oogabooans make camp.

I don't know if the Rak is Baum's take on the gigantic Roc of middle-eastern folklore, a bird so vast it hunts elephants to feed to its chicks. This one is big enough to lie atop the entire officer corps of Oogaboo, but isn't heavy enough to crush them. It is very polite, though.

Next time: Deja Vu!

 

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Where's My Flying Journalist?

This is slightly more serious-and-thoughtful than my usual posts, but it's something that has been bothering me more and more of late.

It has become a rather tired joke, since 2000 came and went, to ask "Where's my flying car?" Or, more generally, to wonder why this or that gee-whiz prediction about Life In The Twenty-First Century from 1972 or whenever didn't come true. The answer is almost always "because the person who made that prediction didn't know about this reason," or possibly "because you shouldn't base your ideas of the future on something a cover artist for OMNI dreamed up back in 1986, especially since that was stock art anyway."

But I do have a personal "flying car" and it's very puzzling to me why it isn't flying around: where's my wide-ranging and in-depth news reporting?

If you are old enough to recall, that was one of the big advantages that cable television was going to bring us, in the days when people were still getting used to the idea of having more than four channels to watch. The enormous number of cable channels would mean that news reporting wouldn't be squeezed into a two-hour window between Jeopardy! and T.J. Hooker. There might be whole channels devoted to nothing but news! With a full 24 hours of news programming, they wouldn't be limited to brief, superficial coverage; they'd be able to do in-depth reporting, rivaling print journalism. And with so much time to fill the news wouldn't be limited to covering Washington, New York, Hollywood, and this week's disaster scene; they'd be able to report on developing stories in other parts of the country, and keep viewers informed about the whole world!

And then, a bit more than a decade later, that was also one of the big advantages that The Internet was going to bring us. News stories would have links leading to background information or related news, so reporting would be factual and provide plenty of context.

None of that happened. Instead, the perennial complaint nowadays is how vapid, superficial, emotive, and sloppy news reporting has become, in all media.

My question is why? Where's my Information Age?

It's easy to be cynical and say "well, audiences are stupid and they want stupid reporting." But if that's true, why are news audiences shrinking and aging? Why are newspapers becoming little more than a status symbol for billionaires, like yachts and baseball teams? If people wanted sloppy, superficial reporting, you'd think they'd be tuning in by the tens of millions, and they're not. (As I've said before, blaming the audience's stupidity usually says more about the stupidity in front of the camera.)

As to the sloppiness, there's the oft-trotted-out reason that "It's so competitive: there's enormous pressure to be first with a story." But I don't think that's true. Who chooses a news station to watch based on how quickly they report things? If I like the reporting on WWL-TV in New Orleans, I'm not going to click over to WVUE to see if they're covering something that WWL hasn't gotten to yet.

In fact, I can recall that during the first Gulf War back in 1991, my wife and I found we were much better informed by waiting for newspaper reports than by watching the live reports on TV of reporters standing on a dark rooftop in Riyadh saying "We think something is happening — there's planes flying around, we think," accompanied by shaky, blurry images of something unidentifiable. Quicker isn't better and I suspect being first matters much more to the egos of journalists and network execs than it does to the public.

I've also heard the excuse that "Well, it's too expensive for CNN to keep reporters all over the country and in foreign lands. They can't afford it!" That is true, but it's also irrelevant: there are at least a couple of hundred local news shows in the United States, and it would not cost much to repeat some of their stories on a national news network. The same is true for foreign news reporting. CNN or MSNBC could fill their spare hours with local reports about interesting events. This would also give local news outfits an incentive to do better work, since a well-done story could get picked up nationally — much as print reporters in the old days could hope an article got picked up by the wire services.

Now there may be problems with this, but the point is, I'm not a news network executive. I'm a science fiction writer with a blog. If I can come up with this idea, why can't they? That sort of programming could provide the bulk of CNN's air time, and the savings in not having to produce original shows to fill the emptiness would help the profit margin.

And as to online journalism, reporters are still writing "stories" which are "published" on news sites. That's like using TV cameras to broadcast images of each page of the daily newspaper, and calling that a TV news report. Every online news report should include, at a minimum, links to all relevant original source material, links to biographies and home pages of all individuals in the story, links to related stories, and links to other relevant facts.

So if I'm reading a news story about something Donald Trump said during a visit to a steel mill in Youngstown, I should get links to a profile of Trump, the full text of his speech, the home page of that steel company, stories about the steel business, stories about Youngstown, and perhaps an archive of other Presidential speeches about the steel business. That's not hard: I just did it myself (except for the speech, because it's hypothetical).

We can't even blame this on reporters not understanding these Internet thingies. Most journalists now are children of the 1980s, if not younger. They have grown up in an on-line world. I hear the excuse that reporters have to "generate a lot of content" — well, a huge infodump of background material and links sure looks like content to me. Much more useful than a vox pop quote from someone who couldn't run faster than a reporter.

So: where's my Information Age? Why hasn't some clever venture capitalist tried to put something like this together?

 

One amazing feature of the Information Age is that you can buy my ebooks!

Future Creep

I recently spent an informative day sitting around a big table discussing medical robotics with a bunch of people who knew a lot more about medical robotics than I did. Since we were talking about modern cutting-edge technology or next-ten-years developments, the technical experts were all very clear that the "robots" in question will be highly sophisticated tools being used by human surgeons.

The robots may be able to reach places a human can't, or work at scales too tiny for a surgeon's hands, or do other things to expand human capabilities in the operating room. But they aren't robots, at least not in the R2-D2/Robbie the Robot/The Terminator sense. Nobody tells a medical robot "Do a heart transplant!" and certainly not "Cure that sick person!"

So why do we call them robots?

While there's no precise legal definition of "robot," I think most people understand that a "real" robot differs from a tool, even a very sophisticated tool, in the area of autonomy. Factory robots do their jobs without some bored technician controlling them with a joystick (in point of fact they work so fast I don't think anyone could control them without slowing them down to near-uselessness). And even they barely qualify as autonomous.

The popular, "folk" concept of a robot is a "mechanical man." Not necessarily humanoid in shape, but human-like in having at least some degree of volition. They may be slavishly obedient, but they don't need to be operated. A car is not a robot, not even one with fancy collision-avoidance systems and cruise control. But a self-driving car like the ones Google is trying to develop . . . that's more like a "real" robot. You don't steer it, you don't even give it directions; you just tell it where you want to go and let it solve the problem of getting you there, exactly as you would do with a human chauffeur. If the processor was in a humanoid body operating the car's existing controls with metal hands and feet, we would call it a "robot driver."

So, again: why do we keep inflating the term robot to describe things which don't actually match our idea of what robots are? Why this urge to call a surgical manipulator tool a "medical robot?" Or the urge to call a military remote-piloted vehicle a "war robot?"

I think it's because we want there to be robots. We, as a civilization, fell in love with the idea of robots a century ago and have been trying to wish them into existence ever since. (There was a "mechanical man" named Electro at the 1938 World's Fair.) We may use them in fiction as emblems of scientific hubris or technology out of control, but in the real world we love our robots.

One sees the same kind of "future creep" in other areas. I've commented elsewhere about how every tactical defensive system gets dubbed a "force field" by the media. And how every roadable aircraft becomes a "flying car."

We want the future. In particular we want the optimistic, no-limits, four-color future of a Frank R. Paul cover painting for Science Wonder Stories. We want to fly to Mars, or beyond the Solar System entirely. We want a friendly robot pal to ride along in the rumble seat — and an infallible robot doctor to patch us up if anything goes wrong.

It's frustrating how long the future is taking to arrive. Where's my Moon base?

I can't claim that science fiction has conquered the world, however flattering it may be to my fellow science fictioneers. It's more accurate to say that science fiction illustrators, and concept artists, and model makers, and costume designers and prop makers and matte-painting artists and set designers have conquered the world. In dozens of films, TV shows, magazine covers, and comic books, they showed us the future and we said "We'll take it!" and we've been trying to remake the world ever since.

 

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