12-04-2017, 07:09 AM
It gets even stranger if you start reading stories by Heinlein and others from the 'Golden Age' of SF or thereabouts.
A common scene in many stories is the use of slide rules - to do calculations to get numbers that are then fed into a computer.
Heinlein's book Have Space Suit, Will Travel spends a lot of time talking about how hard it is to manage a space suit when you can't really see your feet or the ground right around them. The main character spends a lot of time thinking about how he wants to design suits with chin windows. This can seem very strange given that modern space suits (or even those used during the Moon landing and such) have big bubbles on the front that look like they should give a very wide view. Until you realize that when the story was written, space suits hadn't been developed yet and (from the picture on the cover of my copy) the space suit looked a lot like a deep sea diving suit with a little rectangular window...
Science, as they say, marches on.
Todd
A common scene in many stories is the use of slide rules - to do calculations to get numbers that are then fed into a computer.
Heinlein's book Have Space Suit, Will Travel spends a lot of time talking about how hard it is to manage a space suit when you can't really see your feet or the ground right around them. The main character spends a lot of time thinking about how he wants to design suits with chin windows. This can seem very strange given that modern space suits (or even those used during the Moon landing and such) have big bubbles on the front that look like they should give a very wide view. Until you realize that when the story was written, space suits hadn't been developed yet and (from the picture on the cover of my copy) the space suit looked a lot like a deep sea diving suit with a little rectangular window...
Science, as they say, marches on.
Todd