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O Brave New (Virtual) World
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20168 |
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Section : |
BOOK WORLD
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| Issue
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1 / 1992 |
2,739 Words |
| Author
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Ben Bova
Ben Bova has authored nearly eighty realistic books about the
future. His two latest novels are The Trikon Deception
(coauthored with astronaut Bill Pogue) and Mars. He is
president emeritus of the National Space Society and
president of the Science Fiction Writers of America. He
resides in Naples, Florida. |
VIRTUAL REALITY
Howard Rheingold
New York: Summit Books, 1991
415 pp., $22.95
It's the hot new topic in high tech. There have been articles about it in magazines ranging from Time and Newsweek to Smithsonian and Omni. Television shows have been done about it. Now there's a new book devoted to the subject of virtual reality.
For me, reading Howard Rheingold's Virtual Reality was like watching one of my children leave home and go off into the world. I have been writing about VR for thirty years. Of course, my writings on the subject have been fiction. Now the facts are catching up with me.
In 1962 I wrote a short story titled "The Next Logical Step." It was published in Analog Science Fiction magazine for the excellent reason that it was a science fiction tale, a story about new technology and its effect on the human race. No "straight magazine would touch it; after all, it was thirty years ahead of the real world. It dealt with an arcane machine developed by the Department of Defense to help military planners visualize the wars they were preparing to fight.
"This is the most modern, most complex and delicate computer in the world," one of the characters tells another.
It was built to simulate actual war situations. We fight wars in this computer . . . wars with isles and bombs and gas. Real wars complete down to the tiniest detail. The computer tells us what will happen to every missile, every city, every man . . . who dies, how many planes are lost, how many trucks will fail to start on a cold morning, whether a battle is won or lost . . .
So far, the story was hardly science fiction. The Pentagon had war-gaming computers in the early 1960s, though none of their programs were as detailed as my fictional machine's.
"Yes, but this machine is different," my narrator continues.
We've added a variation of the electro-encephalograph . . . a recording device that reads the electrical patterns of your brain. Like an electrocardiograph. But you see, we've given the EEG a reverse twist. Instead of using a
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