A new perspective on Science Fiction ...

[Rath Darkblade]

... from none other than Raymond Chandler, the famous mystery author of in the 30s, 40s, and 50s. This one from a letter he wrote:

Letter to H. N. Swason,
14 March 1953.

Did you ever read what they call Science Fiction? It's a scream. It's written like this: "I checked out with K19 on Adabaran III, and stepped out through the crummaliote hatch on my 22 Model Sirius, Hardtop. I cocked the timejector in secondary and waded through the bright blue manda grass. My breath froze into pink pretzels. I flicked on the heat bars and the Bryllis ran swiftly on five legs using their other two to send out crylon vibrations. The pressure was almost unbearable, but I caught the range on my wrist computer through the transparent cysicites. I press the trigger. The thin violet glow was icecold against the rust-colored mountains. The Bryllis shrank to half an inch long and I worked fast stepping on them with the poltex. But it wasn't enough. The sudden brightness swung me around and the Fourth Moon had already risen. I had exactly four seconds to hot up the disintegrator and Google had told me it wasn't enough. He was right."

They pay brisk money for this crap?

(from "The Ryamond Chandler Papers" by T Hiney and F. MacShane, 2000, p. 188).

I'm just wondering two things:

1. Is science fiction still this bad?
and
2. They had Google in 1953?

Anyway. Just thought I'd share.

[DeadPoolX]

1. Is science fiction still this bad?

Depends on the author, the subject, the story, characters, etc.

2. They had Google in 1953?

You ARE joking, right? Please tell me you're joking. You know people can upload/write whatever they want online, including documents from any era that came before the Internet and Google.

[Rath Darkblade]

Well yes, of course sci-fi can be this bad. I agree it depends on the author - some authors produce some marvelous sci-fi. I have sci-fi books by Douglas Adams, Isaac Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke, Robert Heinlein - all giants of sci-fi.

As for Google in 1953 - of course I'm joking. But the above quote comes from a published book that reproduced Raymond Chandler's letter from 1953. So I'm wondering who used the word "Google" as a character name, and in what context. That's all.

Having said that, the "sci-fi" quote above made me giggle, because I agree with Chandler: it's not sci-fi, it's a piece of crap!

[BBP]

They say 90% of everything is crap, but for scifi I have the idea that it may be higher.

[DeadPoolX]

Well yes, of course sci-fi can be this bad. I agree it depends on the author - some authors produce some marvelous sci-fi. I have sci-fi books by Douglas Adams, Isaac Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke, Robert Heinlein - all giants of sci-fi.

Yeah... like BBP wrote, 90% of everything is crap. It's true. Society just remembers the good stuff. For instance, if we look at music or movies from previous decades, we have all of this really good stuff to choose to from, but if you were around back then, you'd have been overwhelmed with crap that (fortunately) isn't remembered today.

As for Google in 1953 - of course I'm joking. But the above quote comes from a published book that reproduced Raymond Chandler's letter from 1953. So I'm wondering who used the word "Google" as a character name, and in what context. That's all.

Eh... sorry. I think I've been on Facebook too long. I pretty much expect everyone to be an idiot (and in most cases FB proves me right).

As far as using Google in the quote, either someone got creative and added it in (for whatever reason) or Chandler came up with it as an example of a sci-fi nonsense name and years later, the company that would become Google liked the sound of it.

[Tawmis]

I decided to look to see if Google perhaps took influence from that... And found this in the super truth worthy Wikipedia.

Page and Brin originally nicknamed the new search engine "BackRub", because the system checked backlinks to estimate the importance of a site. Hassan as well as Alan Steremberg were cited by Page and Brin as being critical to the development of Google. Rajeev Motwani and Terry Winograd later co-authored with Page and Brin the first paper about the project, describing PageRank and the initial prototype of the Google search engine, published in 1998. Héctor García-Molina and Jeff Ullman were also cited as contributors to the project. PageRank was influenced by a similar page-ranking and site-scoring algorithm earlier used for RankDex, developed by Robin Li in 1996, with Larry Page's PageRank patent including a citation to Li's earlier RankDex patent; Li later went on to create the Chinese search engine Baidu.

Eventually, they changed the name to Google; the name of the search engine originated from a misspelling of the word "googol", the number 1 followed by 100 zeros, which was picked to signify that the search engine was intended to provide large quantities of information.

Kind of a bummer actually that a couple of nerds didn't grab it from an obscure (?) "sci-fi" reference.

But the original quote definitely uses the name "Google" - this isn't someone "editing" and adding that in modern days.

[Rath Darkblade]

Yes, I found the same quote in The Verge, Letters of Note and Syfy.com.

I'm not sure if someone actually penned that sci-fi novel, or if Ray just made it up for his own amusement. Probably the latter. Still, it would have been hilarious if Google was named after this.