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Ben Bova's Starcrossed - predicted the 3-D TV fad

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23skidoo

Admiral
Admiral
I just read a very interesting novel by Ben Bova called Starcrossed. The book is in part based upon Bova's real-life experiences a science consultant for the infamous Starlost TV series of the 1970s, which started out as this grandiose showcase for new special effects technology and ended up being a bargain basement Toronto TV studio production. Its creator, Harlan Ellison, refused to have his name on it, etc. Bova was contractually obligated to be credited as science consultant, even though virtually all of his consultation was ignored.

Anyone familiar with this bit of backstory, or who are fans of Ellison, will get a kick out of reading this story, which recasts Ellison as "Ron Gabriel", a womanizing firecracker with a tendency to physically attack people who piss him off.

But what I found remarkable was the book, which was published in 1984, might as well have been written this year with regards to its background story -- the advent of "three-dee" television. Some of Bova's comments are almost exactly the same as some of the pro- and con- comments we've been hearing about 3-D TV in recent months. Right down to the "it makes you physically ill" argument.

Bova takes things a step further by making his version of 3-D TV more like, say, the holographic chess seen in the first Star Wars movie, or for those wanting a more obscure reference, the 360-degree 3-D TV programs featured in the early-90s miniseries Wild Palms. But it doesn't take too much effort to scale things back a bit to what we have today.

Bova seems to have a knack for this. In 1989 he published a novel called Cyberbooks and it predicted many elements of today's e-books (including some of the "to hell with print, everything digital" attitude).

Alex
 
Sorry to burst your bubble, but that's not really surprising, since 3D movies have been around since the 1950s, and for a long time people have been assuming that 3D television wouldn't be far behind. You can find all sorts of old science fiction stories about people watching "tridee" video or the like in future settings; in fact, it's one of the major "Hey, this is the future!" cliches, along with flying cars and food pills. It's just taken a lot longer for it to actually begin happening than people expected, because of technological limitations and because the 3D fad kind of fizzled out. (Kinda like nuclear fusion. People have been saying it was less than forty years away for at least sixty years, but the technology and the societal incentive to develop it haven't kept up with the predictions.) So positing 3D television in a 1984 book is nothing impressive, since it was already a decades-old SF trope by that point.

More generally, science fiction has always been making speculations that turn out to be surprisingly close to eventual reality, because it's based on logical extrapolations from existing trends. It's really a very potent tool for anticipating future possibilities, so much so that it's a shame society doesn't take it more seriously.

Although I suspect that Bova would be all too happy to take credit for "predicting" something like this. I recall reading an essay by him that was all about how great he and other SF writers were at "predicting" the future. But as an SF writer myself (though nowhere near his prominence or success), I find that pretentious. We don't predict, we extrapolate and conjecture. We explore possibilities, ideally ones that are grounded in facts and logic and thus fall within the realm of realistic possibility, and that means sometimes our conjectures bear a strong resemblance to what actually does happen. But it's not prediction, since if nothing else we usually get the chronology wrong.
 
No offense, but how old are you that you might imagine that 3D television was first dreamed up in the mid-80s?

Adding to what Christopher said, even watching the original TOS as a kid, I always thought they had 3D viewscreens similar to the ones we know they have in modern Trek. A couple of shots of characters talking on both the small and main viewscreen left me with the distinct impression there was supposed to be some defined parallax and depth to what they were looking at. Typically seeing the character on-screen from a slight angle while they were obviously "turned" towards the cast member looking at the screen. It might not even have been intentional at the time as it certainly was in TNG.
 
I found this site to be an interesting read. It's essentially a glossary of a crap-ton of sci-fi terms and concepts with citations for when they were most likely first introduced by story and author. Seems pretty accurate/reasonable as far as I can tell. Along the same lines as what you're talking about, though I don't think it addresses 3D TV. Check it out, skidoo.

http://www.jessesword.com/sf/list
 
^The OED SF citations site does have several entries for various terms for 3D film/video. On p. 13, there's "threedee," "threedy," and "three vee," and on p. 14, there are "tri-D," "tridee," "trideo," "tri-di," "tri-dim," "tri-v," "trivee," "tri-vid," and "trivvy." All of them but "threedy" date from the 1950s-60s -- around the same period that 3-D movies were a fad for the first time. (And that's not counting "holo," "holocam," and "holovision" on p. 5, which came along in the late '60s to 1970. The term "hologram" was coined in the late '40s, but apparently didn't become popularized in fiction for another couple of decades.)
 
I understood the "stereo tank" in Stranger in a Strange Land to be a 3-D viewer, but even in the 1959-1961 timeframe, I doubt Heinlein was all that original with it.

Apropos of nothing, the worst portrayal of a 3-D viewer I think I've ever seen was in Spielberg's Minority Report. I can't imagine anyone actually using such a choppy piece of junk that you can only look at from one angle lest you see horrors man was not meant to witness.
 
Yeah, I'm a fan of Ben Bova, but even I admit that his "claims" are bogus. Mostly a fan of his earlier work, compared to his recent stuff. Fact is, 3D-TV is pretty generic. It's too broad a stroke to be able to claim it. We have to remember that back in the 80's, 3D was all the rage. It was everywhere from 3D glasses to 3D "holograms", so of course it seeped into consciousness, including novels, so I would very much doubt that he was the only one to have thought about it. In fact, it was probably first conceived in the 60's. Fads always seep into literature; it's how it reflects the time it was written in. Also, Bova's a guy who claimed to have predicted sex in space/Zero-G. Again, just too broad.

A better example of a good prediction or projection would be Neal Stephenson with his Metaverse in Snow Crash, and the modern day term of "Avatars". He extrapolated the ancient meaning of Avatar, as a symbol or manifestation, and applied it to modern day to mean an electronic representation or persona of the person connected to it, and the Metaverse, a 3D world in which this Avatar would be able to roam freely in. Today, there are 3D worlds exactly like this like ActiveWorlds and IMVU, and Second Life, and they all give nods to him for coming up with this. This was in the 90s when the internet just started becoming available to everyone. By no means the first to write about Virtual Reality, but one of the first to really flesh it out in technological terms that actually helped people develop it for real.

So, Christopher's right. It's a fad, and fads come in waves. Like he said, 3D was popular in the 60's. And it was popular in the 80's, and then popular again now. It will fade away again a few years from now to resurface again, I can pretty much guarantee.

Myasishchev said:
Apropos of nothing, the worst portrayal of a 3-D viewer I think I've ever seen was in Spielberg's Minority Report. I can't imagine anyone actually using such a choppy piece of junk that you can only look at from one angle lest you see horrors man was not meant to witness.
Click to expand...

Hah, you know, I remember reading recently about the technology being developed for real; that the designers who came up with that interface for the movie were trying to design it in a way that would be realistically feasible in real life. Now, years later they're actually developing it for real use. Yeah, it baffles me.

http://www.geek.com/articles/chips/...r-interface-makes-a-real-life-debut-20100217/
 
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^Myasishchev wasn't referring to the control interfaces, but to the "home movie" 3D images that we saw Tom Cruise using, with a flatscreen image of his son being somehow projected forward into the air in front of the screen.

I actually thought that was a fairly credible depiction of the kind of limited 3D we might get in the near future, if you assume there's some kind of flat layer of mist being sprayed a few feet in front of the screen and getting the images projected onto it or something. Not too different from the kind of fakey "3D" imagers around today that just project 2D images on a spray of mist above them. The details of the system as shown in the movie are still somewhat fanciful, but the sheer awkwardness of it, as a half-assed attempt to approximate 3D by a variation on 2D projection, was very true-to-life.
 
O.K., who doesn't remember Ralph Kramden/Jackie Gleason say, I'm waiting for 3-d t.v., on the Honymooners?
 
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