Indistinguishable from magic
As an adolescent, I loved to read the science fiction magazine Analog. One of my favorite Analog stories was “Hindsight” by Harry Turtledove. (I still have my copy of this “special spoof issue,” dated mid-December 1984, in my garage.)
In “Hindsight,” a 1950s pulp sci-fi writer is startled to discover that an unknown author has published a story that remarkably resembles one he had in the planning stages. He and his editor investigate, eventually discovering a woman who reveals she’s a sci-fi writer from the future who has returned to the 1950s—all the way from 1983!—to try to change the world through science fiction.
I love this story for so many reasons. I love the idea—one that even the most cynical sci-fi writers share, whether they’ll admit it or not—that science fiction really does have the power to change the world. And I love how the woman from the future has repurposed historical events (“Houston, We Have a Problem,” and “Tet Offensive”) as pulp sci-fi stories. (We are all living in someone else’s sci-fi world.)
But my favorite thing about the story is a scene in which the writer from the future ushers the two men into her back room, where she keeps her future technology. There’s a 1980s-era word processor and a dot-matrix printer, charmingly outmoded from the vantage point of 2013 but stunning to the men in the story. And in the corner, a top-loading VCR attached to a small color TV set. She plays Star Wars for the writer, and he’s flabbergasted—not just by the color picture, but by a recognizable-yet-aged Alec Guinness as Obi-Wan Kenobi.
To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
http://www.macworld.com/article/2023755/indistinguishable-from-magic.html
