I have always loved Charlotte's Web. Something about that cute little piggy and the spider who saves his bacon just warms my heart. I was musing about it to myself this morning and it occurred to me that if E.B. White had decided to write Charlotte’s Web present day, Wilbur might have ended up with a Facebook page. Or maybe in 1948 E.B. White conceived the idea of social networking through spiderwebs, as opposed to the WORLD WIDE WEB. Not only did she write one of the best children’s stories of all time, but she was a science fiction genius! Okay, I'm stretching, but it's not unprecedented.
In 1865 Jules Vern wrote From the Earth to the Moon and essentially described with nearly flawless accuracy the 1969 Lunar landing, sans clever taglines, right down to the rockets. He did this because he was a genius, (duh!) and because he applied what he knew about math, science, and explosives in 1865 to his writing and speculating process.
And now they finally found the diamond planet that the evil queen tried to steal in Rainbow Brite back in 1985. Genius!
I have always liked science fiction as a genre, despite it's ability to terrify the crap out of me. In 1942, Arthur C. Clarke (2oo1: A Space Odyssey) published his three "laws" regarding his observations about science thus far:
1) When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.
2) The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible.
3) Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
4) Aliens and Super-advanced smart computers are scary. (Okay, this is mine. It's based on years of reading science fiction like Space Odyssey and H.G. Well's War of the Worlds and watching Predator one too many times)
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